On this day in 1971, news anchor Jonathan Matthias of the Los Angeles CBS-TV affiliate KNXT became the latest to get infected with the airborne plague now known as "the China virus " which had been devastating the US ever since it mutated from a bioweapon used three months earlier in the Chinese-Soviet border war.

While the plague didn't kill Matthias, it did seriously impair his mental health and he eventually had to be taken off the air. Deranged, he would eventually become the leader of an anti-science cult whose followers camped in the ruins of Los Angeles after the China virus wiped out most of the earth's human population.