The mid July 1943 takeover by the US government of the distribution of penicillin, to give most of it to the military, resulted in intense sudden public interest (aka moral panic) in a hitherto little known and even lesser valued medicine.
No one then - or now - bothered to note that the American public, post July 1943, was actually receiving far more, not less, actual penicillin after the government takeover.
That because receiving 'only 20%' of an ever increasing something is always preferable to receiving 100% of virtually nothing.
But we should have seen it coming --- because after the commercial introduction of nylon stockings in May 1940, sudden war rumours that the government was 'taking all of it for parachutes' decisively feed a public panic to get as many of the expensive nylon stockings as they could before they were totally off the market.
Which did happen eventually, but not till two years later.
But media and academics - then and now - delighted in 'Printing the Legend' ---- rather than give us the true facts....
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