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Rush Limbaugh died a few days ago. But his words and accomplishments live on.

In searching for obituary tributes to Limbaugh, I came across this transcript from his show, relevant to the Covid-19 / Wuhan Flu pandemic, broadcast right about the week the nationwide shutdown began.

https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/03/12/remember-the-swine-flu-panic-of-2009-no-you-dont/

Remember the Swine Flu Panic of 2009?
No, You Don’t
March 12, 2020

Quote
RUSH: I’m always interested in people’s reaction to this program. I think I have a lot of empathy, and I think one of the reasons why the relationship you and I have is good is ’cause I know how you hear this show. That, I think, is a key ingredient. It’s called empathy. I know how you hear it.

So, when I check emails and get questions from people, usually I’m not surprised, and I’m not surprised that I got beaucoup number of questions: “Rush, you don’t sound panicked over any of this. The last two days, you don’t sound panicked, and yet everybody’s panicked. I’m panicked,” people say in their email. “I’m scared to death. I mean, I’ve looked, the stock market was pulling up to 30,000. Now it’s down to 21,000. The Democrat Party, every move they’re making is designed to grow government, make government bigger, and you don’t seem alarmed.”

Folks, panic is… I don’t know. I’m not panicked. I am ticked off like you cannot believe, and I am really having a conversation with myself about how far to go in explaining why I’m mad, ’cause I’m mad about the politics of this. For example, let me give you some statistics. How many of you even remember the swine flu 2009, 2010? I don’t remember it. I mean, I remember we had it. But I don’t remember any panic about it. I don’t remember a thing about the swine flu.

I went back and looked at the stats and I was stunned. Are you ready for this? The swine flu outbreak in this country in 2009 and 2010, 60 million Americans were infected. Do you remember that? Sixty million were infected. Dr. Siegel, one of the Fox doctors was on TV explaining this last night. He was not my primary source for it, but he ended up confirming it. Sixty million people were infected.


Do you know how many people were hospitalized in 2009-2010 with the swine flu? Three hundred thousand were hospitalized. So 60 million people infected, 300,000 hospitalized. And nobody even remembers it. And why? Well, because we had a different president. We had a Democrat president by the name of Barack Obama, and the news then was how wonderfully well Obama was handling it, how expertly well Obama was dealing with it.

There wasn’t any media panic. The Republican Party did not politicize it at all. They made not one single effort that anybody can find or remember to try to make political hay out of it. It was treated as a health issue from top to bottom. Sixty million Americans infected, 300,000 hospitalized. I don’t know what the death toll was. The numbers with the coronavirus are not even close. They are barely a fraction of a percentage compared to the swine flu.

And then we also had Ebola. And I do remember a little bit more about Ebola, and once again, the Drive-By Media was praising the skills and the composure and the brilliance of Barack Obama in dealing with it. And I remember being kind of ticked off about that because there wasn’t anything anybody can do about Ebola. Ebola is like any of these other viruses. There’s nothing we can do to contain them.

See, the reason I’m not panicked is I don’t have enough emotion left for panic ’cause I’m too mad. I’m too ticked off at this. We’re watching the U.S. economy be wrecked here. There’s some people enjoying it. And it makes me mad. There’s some people’s lives here that are being seriously damaged over this. And you know what’s gonna happen? It’s gonna end. We are going to overcome it. It’s going to fizzle out like all of these do.



How did we ever survive 60 million infected with the swine flu? But we did to the point that hardly anybody remembers it. And that’s just 10 years ago, 300,000 hospitalized. So we overcame it. We overcame Ebola. This is gonna end, it’s gonna pass. And I’ll tell you what else is gonna happen. Because of the actions President Trump has taken, like this travel ban from Europe, that has really put the Democrats in a dicey position.

There’s some real positives if you want to find ’em here, and I, of course, have, and I’ll share them with you in a minute. The point is we’re gonna rebound from this, and when we do, you had better get ready and hold on tight, because this market’s gonna rebound. The people who are selling right now and getting out of it are panicking, and they don’t want to be selling. Everybody’s doing this from a very defensive posture and point of view.

And it’s adding… Like we get news that Tom Hanks and his wife have coronavirus. “Oh, no, it’s all going (mewling)! It’s over. Oh, my…” And then his kid — his kid, Chet — goes on TV, tries to calm everybody. “They’re fine. They’re in Australia. They’re fine. They’re not suffering at all. Everything’s fine!” It doesn’t matter. They’ve got it.

Anyway, this is gonna end, and this market is gonna rebound like you can’t believe because the people who have been selling off want to get back in it. And we are taking economic procedures right now that are going to serve to further reignite the economy when all this passes. And when we get back into the growth trajectory, some of the proposals the president’s making regarding payroll taxes, Small Business Administration loans, even a tax holiday?

You just wait until people have no more emotion left to be panicked and get tired of this and want to go a different direction. And that day is gonna happen. The day’s gonna come where people are gonna wake and say, “I’m tired of living this way. I’m fed up with being panicked every day. I’m fed up,” and then — because of the actions the president’s taken — we’re not gonna have that many brand-new infections.



By shutting off this travel from Europe… As I said, this has really put the Democrats in a bad position ’cause they love the European Union. They love it, and the very fact that travel from their beloved European Union has been shut down… But let… If they come out and oppose this, then they’re essentially coming out for open borders. This is actually… If you want to look at it politically, it’s a good move from that standpoint.

But I’m not panicking ’cause I’m too mad about this.

This is… I don’t know. (sigh) It’s… I know some of you are saying, “Rush, easy for you to say.” It isn’t easy for me to say, folks. Nobody’s immune from what’s happening here. I mean, you go back and you look at these swine flu numbers and you ask, “What was different? (chuckles) What was different was we had a Democrat in the White House and so the media didn’t want to be critical of the government.

The media wanted to be promoting him. They wanted to be positive. They wanted to promote the brilliance of Barack Obama, the brilliant management skills, the temperament, the crease in his slacks, the intelligence and all that. Now we’ve got just exact opposite.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Meanwhile, don’t forget, ’cause I’m sure everybody has, swine flu outbreak 2009, 2010, right here, United States of America, 60 million Americans infected. Do you remember any talk about running out of hospital beds? Were we gonna run out of IV saline solution? Were we gonna run out of masks? Sixty million Americans infected with the swine flu. Think pigs running everywhere if you have to, however you have to visualize this, 300,000 hospitalized.

We’re nowhere near 300,000 hospitalized with coronavirus. I mean, we’re not even close to it. In fact, worldwide we don’t even have 300,000 cases, worldwide, of the coronavirus. Three hundred thousand hospitalized in the United States alone. You don’t even remember it. You know why? Because Barack Obama was president, and he was God, and we couldn’t be critical. We had to build him up and promote him like nothing else we’ve ever seen before.


I had an illness for about 4 weeks in mid-late 2010, and it was the most painful flu I've ever had. And I never heard of Swine Flu / H1N1 until much later, that's how little media coverage it got..

Around the time of Rush's above broadcast, I was sick from March 11 to (if I recall) till April 20th of 2020, about 5 weeks. While I had a mild fever that initially peaked about 101 degrees and lasted at a lesser 99-100 most of that 5 weeks, it felt relatively mild, and it was only after I was sick for over 2 weeks that I began to think I might have had Covid-19. As I detailed earlier in the topic, I was unable at that time to get tested, and even months later.
When testing finally became more available, I finally contacted the Palm Beach County health department about 4 or 5 months after I got over it, just so that if I had antibodies I could donate blood to help others. But I was told at that point that by that stage my antibodies would have diminished to the point of being undetectable, so I would neither be able to verify I had the disease, or show antibodies to donate blood for others hospitalized.

The point being, I normally am a healthy person and get sick at most a week or 10 days. Both these cases were highly unusual in their length. So the comparison really resonates for me. And the point of how Democrats politicized Covid-19 as a weapon to attack Trump, whereas Republicans never made the slightest attempt to do the same in 2009-2010, because it was all about pumping up Obama as a great president, and doing the exact opposite to destroy Trump, no matter how exceptionally Trump handled the crisis.

Looking at the exceptional performance here in Florida of Gov. Ron Desantis, and seeing how that is maligned daily by the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post, you can see the exact same pattern. Where despite that Desantis did everything right, as sharply contrasted with Democrat governors in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan and California who have failed miserably, with punishing lockdowns and sending elderly Covid-19 patients to nursing homes to kill thousands. While Florida with a far larger elderly population has had far less over-65 deaths, these three large Florida newspapers can only say negative things about Gov. Ron Desantis, who is not given credit for doing anything right.

It follows in perfect parallel with how the media has treated President Trump.

And now clueless President Biden has recently considered shutting down travel to Florida for no logical reason, odd since Florida has dropped down to 30th (of 50 states) in hospitalizations, and 42nd (of 50 states) in deaths.
Logically, Biden would first shut down 29 other states before he'd consider doing that to Florida.

I think pretty obviously Biden (and the sinister Bolshevik hand-wringers who truly run his government, not him) want to cripple Florida economically, so it ceases to present such a shining contrast to the incompetent Democrat governors in the above listed states, who have destroyed their economies, are desperate for a bailout, and have driven out a mass exodus of tens of thousands of disgusted upper-class taxpayers to other states, especially migrating to Texas and Florida.