There’s no shortage of great fact-checking around President Trump’s claim that, when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, “Nobody’s ever seen anything like this,” “There’s never been anything like this in history,” and “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion.”
False, false, and false, in so many ways.
But have Trump’s statements yet been proved false via comic book?
To remedy this potential gap in the fact check record, or to just give yourself a new way of taking in solid information about pandemics, check out “No Ordinary Flu,” a comic book PSA produced by King County’s public health department back in 2008.
Illustrated by Stranger contributor David Lasky, this short, publicly funded book made clear more than a decade ago that people have seen things like this pandemic before, and it warned:
Lasky’s book also offers suggestions (still useful to this day) about how to protect yourself and your community, and, when read in the current moment, it’s full of eerie resonance.
One particular warning Trump might have benefited from hearing comes in the following panel. “We are all descendants of survivors of the 1918 pandemic,” the panel says. That includes Trump, whose grandfather died in the 1918 pandemic. Trump’s father was 12 years old at the time.
Read the whole thing here.
