Hong Kong Flu in 1968 Killed 100, 000 Americans. Where was the Mass Panic and Fear back then?

What is Different Today? Why did people not Panic and Cower in fear back in 1968 when the Hong Kong Flu killed 100,000 Americans and 1 million world wide?

The Hong Kong flu (also known as 1968 flu pandemic) was a flu pandemic whose outbreak in 1968 and 1969 killed an estimated one million people all over the world. It was caused by an H3N2 strain of the influenza A virus, descended from H2N2 through antigenic shift, a genetic process in which genes from multiple subtypes reassorted to form a new virus.

The first record of the outbreak in Hong Kong appeared on 13 July 1968. By the end of July 1968, extensive outbreaks were reported in Vietnam and Singapore. Despite the lethality of the 1957 Asian Flu in China, little improvement had been made regarding the handling of such epidemics. The Times newspaper was the first source to sound alarm regarding this new possible pandemic. There is a possibility that this outbreak actually began in mainland China before spreading to Hong Kong, but this is unconfirmed. Source

Big thanks to my Editor Cynthia Pawl for additions and editing

Well,  let me opine a bit before you read the article I came across.

I was 8 years old in 1968, and until I saw this article, I had forgotten all about the Hong Kong Flu as I am sure most of you have. OMG, now I am a racist for saying Hong Kong Flu! Hey Snowflakes…,  you can kiss my ass! Go cower in the sewer somewhere with the rest of your retarded ilk! OMG, he said retarded! Sorry to all retarded people for comparing these Snowflakes to you.  You are certainly much better than them!

So back to the question to why people in the 60’s did not panic and cower in fear!

One: Men were Men, and Women were Women back then. The Word of God was still important, patriotism was still important and the constitution was still held in high regard. 

Queers, Tranny’s, Child Molesters, Communists and the like, stayed in the closet where they need to be. Now that filthy ilk is spreading just like the Plagues that have scourged the planet for Millennium! The only way I see to stop this Plague, is another Sodom and Gomorrah type event! Hey LGBTQPXYZ crowd, Ever hear of Wormwood?  Maranatha LORD Maranatha!!

Two, at that time, the mainstream media still maintained complete control over the masses because was no counter alternative available.

Three The New World order was not yet ready to implement its plan! They did not have everything in place to empower them to enforce total dominance, complete control of ALL THINGS.  Which they do, or believe they do at this time.

Four, the education system was still in the early stages of indoctrinating our Children. Today this process is complete and our schools have become Communist/Socialist training camps where our children are totally at the mercy of the system.  The system is shaping not only their academic development, but the spiritual, and emotional development as well.  Our boys are being symbolically, and chemically castrated, demoralized and feminized, beginning in Preschool! (See: The Queering and Feminizing of Young Boys) And girls are becoming men hating Amazons.   Whites are targeted and demonized and blacks are idolized and their culture elevated and imitated.  Diversity is the word of the day and ALL our funding goes to cultures who used to be minorities but ARE NO LONGER, though they continue to be given minority status and benefits.  AMERICAN is not for AMERICANS anymore.  

Five,  The Phenomenon of Donald Trump  was not part of the scene.  Regardless of where you stand on Donald Trump, there has clearly been an upset in the system because of his Presidency.  The democrats are working all angles to create panic in order to shift control back in their direction.  No matter the origin of this “pandemic” it does create a very convenient excuse to enforce their draconian control and open the way for the New World Order.

Although back in the 60’s President Kennedy tried to buck the system, they quickly extinguished that flame. Since then, and more recently, more and more people have turned to sources other than the mainstream media for their information.  They are turning their backs on the Networks’ Fake News Outlets. Many have woken up and many more are waking and it is getting harder to dupe the masses using propaganda and false flags. Well, we do have the dyed in the wool Snowflakes (mentioned above), but then we know there will be many who will be cast into the Lake of Fire!

Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic

Jeffrey A. Tucker | American Institute for Economic Research – In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States. The flu spread from Hong Kong to the United States, arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide.

Lifespan in the US in those days was 70 whereas it is 78 today. Population was 200 million as compared with 328 million today. If it would be possible to extrapolate the death data based on population and demographics, we might be looking at a quarter million deaths today from this virus. So in terms of lethality, it was as deadly and scary as COVID-19 if not more so, though we shall have to wait to see. 

“In 1968,” says Nathaniel L. Moir in National Interest, “the H3N2 pandemic killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.”

And this happened in the lifetimes of every American over 52 years of age. 

I was 5 years old and have no memory of this at all. My mother vaguely remembers being careful and washing surfaces, and encouraging her mom and dad to be careful. Otherwise, it’s mostly forgotten today. Why is that? 

Nothing closed. Schools stayed open. All businesses did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants. John Fund has a friend who reports having attended a Grateful Dead concert. In fact, people have no memory or awareness that the famous Woodstock concert of August 1969 actually occurred during a deadly American flu pandemic that only peaked six months later. 

Stock markets didn’t crash. Congress passed no legislation. The Federal Reserve did nothing. Not a single governor acted to enforce social distancing, curve flattening (even though hundreds of thousands of people were hospitalized), or banning of crowds. No mothers were arrested for taking their kids to other homes. No surfers were arrested. No daycares were shut even though there were more infant deaths with this virus than the one we are experiencing now. There were no suicides, no unemployment, no drug overdoses. 

Media covered the pandemic but it never became a big issue. 

As Bojan Pancevski in the Wall Street Journal points out, “In 1968-70, news outlets devoted cursory attention to the virus while training their lenses on other events such as the moon landing and the Vietnam War, and the cultural upheaval of the civil-rights movements, student protests and the sexual revolution.”

The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses. 

It’s not as if we had governments unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history. But for some reason, there was no thought given to shutdowns. 

Which raises the question: why was this different? We will be trying to figure this one out for decades. 

Was the difference that we have mass media invading our lives with endless notifications blowing up in our pockets? Was there some change in philosophy such that we now think politics is responsible for all existing aspects of life? Was there a political element here in that the media blew this wildly out of proportion as revenge against Trump and his deplorables? Or did our excessive adoration of predictive modelling get out of control to the point that we let a physicist with ridiculous models frighten the world’s governments into violating the human rights of billions of people?

Maybe all of these were factors. Or maybe there is something darker and nefarious at work, as the conspiracy theorists would have it. 

Regardless, they all have some explaining to do. 

By way of personal recollection, my own mother and father were part of a generation that believed they had developed sophisticated views of viruses. They understood that less vulnerable people getting them not only strengthened immune systems but contributed to disease mitigation by reaching “herd immunity.” They had a whole protocol to make a child feel better about being sick. I got a “sick toy,” unlimited ice cream, Vicks rub on my chest, a humidifier in my room, and so on. 

They would constantly congratulate me on building immunity. They did their very best to be happy about my viruses, while doing their best to get me through them. 

If we used government lockdowns then like we use them now, Woodstock (which changed music forever and still resonates today) would never have occurred. How much prosperity, culture, tech, etc. are losing in this calamity?

What happened between then and now? Was there some kind of lost knowledge, as happened with scurvy, when we once had sophistication and then the knowledge was lost and had to be re-found? For COVID-19, we reverted to medieval-style understandings and policies, even in the 21st century. It’s all very strange. 

The contrast between 1968 and 2020 couldn’t be more striking. They were smart. We are idiots. Or at least our governments are. 

[Note an earlier version of this article featured a photo not from Woodstock 1969. This photo from the montage at the Atlantic.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently The Market Loves You. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his email.

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