Its always hard to know who first said what in the Hannity-Trump feedback loop, but it’s clear that this lie is circulating between the two of them. Here’s the president earlier today:
“If you go back and look at the swine flu, and what happened with the swine flu,” Trump said, “you’ll see how many people died, and how actually nothing was done for such a long period of time, as people were dying all over the place. We’re doing it the opposite. We’re very much ahead of everything.”
Here’s Hannity:
For more perspective, we go back to 2009. That year, more than a thousand Americans had died in a six-month period from H1N1, better known as swine flu, that virus, and 20,000 Americans had contracted the pandemic before President Obama himself declared a national emergency. One of his health officials on day 11 did, in fact, say it was an emergency to release some funding. Got to tell the truth on all cases, but a thousand Americans at that point had died.
I’ve written about this before but it’s worth reiterating. This is a lie:
From a Reuters fact check, published two days ago:
A public health emergency for Swine Flu, also known as H1N1, was declared on April 26, 2009 by the Obama administration with no deaths in the U.S. (see here). While Obama personally declared H1N1 an emergency in October 2009, when over a thousand had died (see here), the “Secretary of Health and Human Services first declared a public health emergency” on April 26, 2009. Statements that say Obama and his administration waited until 1,000 had died before declaring an emergency often ignore this April 26, 2009 Government announcement (see it here). The claim that there were 1,000 deaths when a public health emergency was declared under Obama’s administration is therefore false.
The right-wing is now totally organized around defending Donald Trump and blaming others for his failures. I’m pretty sure that nobody who isn’t a fully brainwashed member of the Trump cult will buy that the H1N1 outbreak was worse than what we are experiencing. But the cult followers? Apparently, they’ll believe anything.
An obviously fallacious meme that purports to show a doctor downplaying coronavirus fears is spreading across the right-wing internet, convincing some Trump supporters that the coronavirus is just a hyped-up election year trick.
Despite being easy to disprove, the meme has won plenty of prominent adherents, including talk radio host Rush Limbaugh and mixed martial arts star Tito Ortiz.
In its most popular form, the meme claims to show a whiteboard photographed at an unnamed doctor’s office with the title “Posted at a Doctors office today.” The board lists a number of headline-grabbing diseases from the past two decades, including the novel coronavirus, SARS, Ebola, and swine flu, under the heading: “Every election year has a disease.”
Each disease is paired up on the left side of the board with a presidential or midterm election year, with the implication that coronavirus is being exaggerated to doom Donald Trump’s re-election chances.
“This is a viral-pneumonia being hyped as The Black Plague before an election,” the board reads on its right side, along with statistics about coronavirus purporting to show that the disease isn’t dangerous.
SARS was contained by 2003. COVID-19 happened in 2019. Aso, we have elections every two years so this is completely meaningless. But that isn’t the dumbest aspect of this ridiculous meme:
The claims made on the whiteboard fail to explain why Italy and China would lock down huge regions of their countries as part of some scheme to oust an American president. There are also elections at some level every year in the United States, meaning it wouldn’t be unusual if a disease emerged in a year that an election occurred. A PolitiFact fact-check that rated the meme as “false” also found that most of the diseases listed didn’t actually become major issues in the elections at the time, suggesting that the supposed decades-long “deep state” plot to sway every vote with fake diseases must not have been very successful. ..
The election-year meme has crossed over to talk radio, where Limbaugh, a mega-popular talk radio host host and recent Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, appeared to quote from it on his show Monday.
“You know, every election year has had a disease as part of it,” Limbaugh said. “Are you aware of this? No, you’re not, because you’re living in the moment and thinking about the future, which is responsible and reasonable. That’s what everybody does. You just can’t change the past anyway. In 2004, we were all told about SARS; in 2008, the Avian flu. Remember that? The bird flu! In 2010, it was the swine flu.”
Limbaugh continued to list the diseases, falsely tying them to particular election years.
“All of these things, now you remember them?” he added. “Every election year has one of these.”
They would rather die than admit their Dear Leader is the liar the rest of us know he is.