Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avrogan.

This day, October 14, 1976, the President of the United States is staring down a possible

epidemic and trying to balance health and political considerations, and on this day, in front

of a host of cameras he'd invited into the

Oval Office President Gerald Ford got vaccinated for the so-called swine flu.

Look the 1976 swine flu story has so many parallels to what we saw in 2020 and continue to see today.

For one, 1976 was an election year.

You have a sitting president trying to get reelected, but also manage this new health crisis.

You have questions about political expediency and health emergencies and rushed vaccine

authorizations and vaccine skepticism.

Generally speaking, let me sum it up here, much like 20-20's response, the 1976 response

can be slotted into the, it was a fiasco category, but it was a different kind of fiasco,

and it illustrates the many ways in which it is possible to turn a pandemic response into a fiasco.

What fun let's let's talk about it here to discuss as always are Nicole Hammer of Columbia and

Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello Jody. Hey there.

And our special guest for this episode is Dr. Jim Hamblin, the author of many many amazing articles about

the coronavirus and also some books if our bodies could talk and the new book is clean.

His current project is the newsletter The Body. It is free. You should go sign up and I will also disclose that Jim and I are good friends. But Jim, thank you for coming on the show. This is fun.

Thank you for having me. We'll see if it's fun.

I want to get into Ford and I want to get into sort of him getting the vaccine and the political

dimensions of that too, but like in general right this past year and a half has been one in which people look a lot to the past and previous pandemics.

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