RUSH: I have a question. What happens — and I’m very serious about this, folks. You know, I don’t just sit here and absorb. I’m constantly thinking — I react, situational awareness, all of that — and I have a question for you. What happens when there is no epidemic of coronavirus in the United States? What happens then? Well, they’ll have to invent a new crisis.
But, I mean, no, everybody thinks it’s gonna be an epidemic and pandemic. Everybody has got that baked in, do they not? People think that’s gonna happen. I got a caller up here, Mary Kay. In fact, let’s go get her right now. She’s in Annandale, Virginia. This is a good point. Mary Kay, welcome to the program. Great to have you. What is your point about rationality and fear and all that?
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you for chatting with me, and we keep you in prayer. You know, I doubt the success of your approach in comparing the chance of dying due to the coronavirus here in the U.S. versus the flu.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I tried the same sort of thing with people who are afraid of flying.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: Based on work I researched for a published article on international airline safety, we found that you had a chance of about 15 million to one of dying in an airplane crash on a First World flag carrier.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Then I asked the person, “When did you last win the Powerball?” You know, and of course they haven’t. I said, “Well, that’s about as likely as it would be for you to die in this plane crash on a First World carrier,” and it doesn’t matter. (laughs) It really doesn’t matter. The image of dying in a plane crash is such a horrific and newsworthy thing.
RUSH: That’s it! That is exactly it. That is the horrific thought. If you are on that one-in-15 million flight, you don’t want to be on it. It doesn’t matter. The stats go out the window. I get your point. By the way, I am not trying to persuade anybody with the comparison between the flu and the coronavirus. I am just giving stats, and I’m letting people conclude on their own. I think it’s interesting, I think it’s fascinating that we’ve already had 10,000 people die of the flu.
We’ve already had 180,000 this flu season in the hospital. But because it happens every year and you expect it to happen — you get a flu shot, you don’t expect to die from it — so, fine. It’s part of life. You’ll run the risk. I mean, you’ll live your life and do what you can to not get it, but if you get it, well, people get it. But this? “Why, this is new, and this is from China, and it’s wiping people out, and it’s really, really bad out there!”
The media has hyped this up to the point where it is a gruesome and fearful thing. Oh-ho-ho, it’s horrible. And so, you know, I understand — believe me — better than most, and I really appreciate your point on discussing rational things with people who are experiencing irrationality. It’s a lost cause. And, by the way, not everybody’s irrational about everything. You could be irrational on the statistics of airplanes that go down versus the chances that yours is gonna go.
You could be irrational about that and be one of the most rational people in the rest of your life that you’ll ever run into. It’s just people’s fears are uniquely personal and individual. I would say the more conformist a person is, the more likely they are to become susceptible to mass hysteria. Now, I, for example, am not a conformist. In fact, I’m the exact opposite. When I see conventional wisdom forming about something, my instinct is to go the other way, not believe it, and to believe something else.
Believe me, that has served me well over the years. I can’t… Conventional wisdom comes from where? The media. You know, everybody knows how dishonest the media is, and they still believe ’em. Everybody knows how biased the media is. They still believe ’em. Everybody knows what a bunch of leftist wackos the media is. They still believe ’em. How many times have you read, “Coffee causes cancer,” and you believed it?
Until the story is, “Guess what? We were wrong. Coffee doesn’t cause cancer. Oat bran does.” So you stopped eating oat bran muffins and started sitting on them instead of eating them and then they tell you, “Oh, it’s not oat bran. It’s baking oat bran that causes cancer.” So you stop baking it and you eat it raw, and then they tell you that eating Big Macs is destroying the planet. So you stop eating Big Macs.
You go out and eat Chick-fil-A, whatever you should have been eating. Then they tell you that those chickens are being raised in cages and you can’t support that, so you stop eating Chick-fil-A. You go back to McDonald’s and Burger King because the planet hasn’t been destroyed. The media creates all of this, and people dutifully fall right in line, and there are people out there who count on that. They count on people, enough of them, falling right in line.
So I want to present to you an alternative theorem about this, and it’s just an alternative theory, folks. It’s born of my not being a conformist. What if…? What if in the United States, the coronavirus has actually been around for quite a while? What if it’s been around since December? What if the coronavirus has actually been around for weeks, especially on the Left Coast? I mean, if the coronavirus started in December with the ChiComs, the odds are that some people from China coming to the U.S. in December or January didn’t know they were infected and had it.
It may be a safe assumption… You might not want to bet on it, but it may be a safe assumption that the coronavirus has been on the West Coast for a while and that quite a few Americans got it, quite a few Americans had symptoms. But guess what? They chalked it up to the cold. They chalked it up to a flu. It’s just something where you wait ’til you get over and you move on with your life. How many of those things happen in your own life to you?
How many of you, whenever your temperature is 99, go to the hospital, versus you wait until it goes down to normal? I am a person that the doctor is the last thing I do. I wait ’til whatever I get gets better, and I get over it, and I move on. If it’s a cold, if it’s the flu, if it’s whatever, I wait ’til I get over it because that’s the history. You get over it. Everybody does. Well, what if the coronavirus has been percolating out there on the Left Coast and people got it and got over it thinking it was the flu or common cold?
I mean, you can talk to people. I have. I talk to people live in California who said that the places where they work — their schools, a number of places — are filled as always with Chinese tourists, Chinese parents coming to visit Chinese students. There have been… You know damn well there have been people from China coming back visiting Silicon Valley firms like Apple and Google. I mean, they travel back and forth. I’m talking about since December when it was first announced as having been discovered by the ChiComs in Wuhan in China.
Now, the point is — and I’m just treating you to a hypothetical theory of mine, and you are free to reject it — that up until the 1st of February, you had people flying in daily from China and swarming places in California that they swarm — I mean, visiting. There are a lot of people that go back and forth between the United States and China, the Left Coast. So what if it is possible that the coronavirus number 19 has already made some entrance in the United States but maybe presents more like a normal flu, less virulent than, say, the swine flu?
Do you remember that Obama had a big, fun time with the swine flu in 2009? Does anybody remember — Snerdley, do you remember Jerry Ford in 1976, do you remember the swine flu panic back then? You don’t. I bet most of you don’t. In 1976 some of you may not have even been born yet. Some of you may not have been thoughts in your father’s evil, deviant, sexual mind. Some of you might have been born, but you are young. (interruption) Well, everybody knows men are always thinking rotten thoughts about sex and so forth. You would have been a thought, but not yet an actual fertilized sperm. And then some of you would have been born but too young to — let me help you out.
Jerry Ford was president in 1976, already in trouble over pardoning Richard Nixon. Inflation was at like 2%. It was thought out of control. He had these buttons “WIN,” Whip Inflation Now. People were making fun of Jerry Ford because of a bunch of things, and then out of nowhere there was a panic over the fact that there might be a big swine flu coming from China to do damage in the United States. And Jerry Ford worried that this could be 1918 all over again.
I remember this, but a lot of you won’t. But don’t doubt me. Jerry Ford ordered massive swine flu vaccinations. He demanded that companies produce them. He demanded that the military over whom he had control take them. If you were a student at Stanford, anywhere on the Left Coast, you had to line up and take the vaccine for the swine flu.
And there were people getting sick from the vaccine. They rushed this into production. They hurried like you can’t believe because Jerry Ford, he needed something, Whip Inflation Now wasn’t working, pardoning Nixon wasn’t working, inflation was out of control, and Jerry Ford was being laughed at every day on Saturday Night Live for falling down the steps of Air Force One. He had to do something. Swine flu was a chance to be taken seriously. And they created a panic. Look it up if you’re doubting any. Google it. They created a panic and a fiasco because some soldiers really did get very ill from the swine flu.
It was called H1N1. And they kept talking about, “This might be the return of the Spanish flu,” which is what happened in 1918. And Jerry Ford ended up coming off in the liberal media as a dunce because the vaccination that people were forced to take made people sicker than the swine flu itself. And then people wondered, you know, why Jerry Ford lost in 1976. The swine flu, they created a panic, thought it was real. But the vaccine made people sicker than the actual swine flu.
So my question is what happens if you got everybody expecting an epidemic of this now, what happens when it doesn’t happen, when you don’t see it? And, by the way, now in China, here’s a headline from Forbes. Are you ready for this? “China’s Coronavirus Recoveries Surpass New Infections, But Europe’s Outbreak Worrisome.”
See? Even when the news is good out of China, it’s got to be bad somewhere else. The swine flu caused one death, it hospitalized 13. The vaccine was worse than the swine flu, 1976. I got people Googling it now. See, and you didn’t even remember it. That’s another reason why you are fortunate to have me as your host. This stuff — nothing is new. This has all happened. We’ve been there.
That’s why I am not a conformist, and it’s why I am initially suspicious when the media gets on these things. And I have hyped also, when I’ve told you about this, I have shared with you the recovery numbers which nobody in the media is telling you. Let me get those up here again.
Total confirmed as of 1:03 this afternoon, 89,254, 45,000 people have recovered. They never tell you that. The total number of deaths, 3,083. In the U.S. the number of deaths is two. Where is this epidemic? “But see, Rush, you’re losing here. People are scared to death, and if you want to relate, you gotta act scared. That’s the way you relate to ’em. You gotta act scared. People are scared. You act scared and you own them.”
I can’t do it. Because, folks, I’m telling you, 31 years, don’t doubt me. So much of this has been politicized. I’ve proved it in the audio sound bites so far today. I’ve proved that Chuck Todd alone has proved the politicization of this as far as the media and the Democrats are concerned.
But what happens, meaning, if the coronavirus has been here long before anybody’s known it, if it’s been here since December, and people have gotten it and gotten over it and just thought they had the flu or just thought they had the cold before anybody even heard of the coronavirus 19, if that’s happened, it means there isn’t an epidemic of it, folks. It means people here have gotten it and gotten over it, and it’s not causing what they’re trying to tell you it could cause. And then if it doesn’t, if there is no epidemic, well, then what?
And Snerdley is right, then we gotta dial something else up. So what it will be: The United States dodged a bullet, but not because of Donald Trump. No. Because the media was on the case early. No. We survived this idiot President Donald Trump. In Europe it’s really bad. Why, look at what’s happening in Iran.
You know the ayatollah’s lead adviser got this thing and died from it? You hadn’t heard that? In Iran, that’d be the equivalent of one of Trump’s assistants getting it and dying. How does that happen? The pope may have it. Nobody’s admitting that. Pope’s coughing, canceling appearances and so forth.
And Anthony Fauci is saying what Pence said here Friday: No, nobody’s gagged me. Nobody’s preventing me from talking about this. The media’s even lying about that. The Centers for Disease Control is suggesting that it ain’t gonna be as bad as everybody thinks it’s gonna be. We’ll see. Time will tell.
Related Links