The Education Exchange: How America Responded to the Pandemic of 1957-58: “Almost the Exact Opposite of What We See Today”

“In 1957-58, there were no economic lockdowns. There weren’t even school closures,” Niall Ferguson says. “There was a consensus that the right thing to do was to keep the show on the road.”

A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Niall Ferguson, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss the 1957-58 flu pandemic, how governments reacted to its outbreak and how it compares to the response to the Covid-19.

“We’ve created one of the deepest recessions in American history,” Ferguson says. He adds, “there are two pandemics going on at the moment. There’s the real one involving a real virus. And then there’s the pandemic online of disinformation and misinformation.”

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