An I’m-so-cute-and-clever reporter recently asked the president if he deserved to be re-elected given the number of deaths from coronavirus, noting that the number is greater than American fatalities from the Vietnam war.
People can always find something as a point of comparison as if that automatically adds weight to what they are implying. No doubt this reporter thought stats from the Vietnam war added gravitas to her query.
In any case, her disrespectful and rude question didn’t deserve to be dignified with an answer. But Trump answered her anyway. Unfortunately, he didn’t use the opportunity to his advantage by giving her a little history lesson, as discussed at The Daily Wire:
…She may have been unaware that at the height of the Vietnam war, there was something that killed more Americans than the war did, and it was a similar virus — and no one questioned whether a president should be elected or not because of the virus, known as the Hong Kong Flu.
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In 1968-69, the Hong Kong flu ravaged the world; it wound up killing more than one million people worldwide, over 100,000 of them in the United States. No lockdowns were imposed and people still went to work, albeit lessening bus travel and implementing social distancing and more washing of their hands.
The Wall Street Journal explained. “The novel virus triggered a state of emergency in New York City; caused so many deaths in Berlin that corpses were stored in subway tunnels; overwhelmed London’s hospitals; and in some areas of France left half of the workforce bedridden.”
As John Fund notes in National Review, the Hong Kong Flu “was an especially infectious virus that had the ability to mutate and render existing vaccines ineffective … Hundreds of thousands were hospitalized in the U.S. as the disease hit all 50 states by Christmas 1968. Like COVID-19, it was fatal primarily to people older than 65 with preexisting conditions.”
The Encyclopedia Britannica pointed out the highly contagious nature of the disease: “Indeed, within two weeks of its emergence in July in Hong Kong, some 500,000 cases of illness had been reported … The 1968 flu pandemic caused illness of varying degrees of severity in different populations. For example, whereas illness was diffuse and affected only small numbers of people in Japan, it was widespread and deadly in the United States.”
