As President-elect Trump gets ready to assume office, certain public health activists are stirring up fears about a new potential pandemic – “bird flu.” This isn’t the same bird flu that has been known for years, but a fresh strain that affects livestock and has the potential to mutate into a much deadlier virus compared to COVID.
Speaking on the matter, infectious disease specialist Dr. Dean Blumberg warned, “The virus could mutate and become more easily transmissible between people. The more this virus spreads, especially alongside human strains, the higher the chances of it evolving to facilitate human-to-human transmission, possibly leading to another pandemic.”
COVID fascist Deborah Birx has been on the case for months, advocating that we test cattle for bird flu.
She’s now all over the potential pandemic.
In fact, Birx is trying to stoke panic.
Dr. BIRX expressed skepticism by saying there was a low risk of human-to-human transmission. Yet, wasn’t a similar reassurance given by the WHO and CDC regarding COVID? To navigate through this crisis, we need to leverage modern technology. Let’s not forget that it was the private sector that provided us with tests in a matter of weeks, significantly increasing testing capacity from 20,000 to 2 million tests.
So, if we got the private sector engaged in our response, they would help us get tests out to all of the dairy farms, all the poultry farms, where they could test both the chickens and the people exposed to the chickens. And then we would know how far spread this virus was.
Right now, we’re just looking for symptoms again. We should never be tracking viruses through symptoms. You don’t see a virus through a symptoms. You see the virus through the test. And we know from COVID, most of the spread was asymptomatic. If we had been testing in January, as many other countries were, we wouldn’t have had the spread that we had.
So, I’m hoping we learn from —
BROWN: But it sounds like it doesn’t —
(CROSSTALK)
BROWN: — it sounds like from what you’re laying out —
BIRX: Yes.
BROWN: — you don’t think this country has learned —
BIRX: We did not.
Birx isn’t the only member of the old gang itching for a reunion. Trump’s CDC director, Robert Redfield, has been preaching doom via bird flu for months. Here, he’s warning about a 50% fatality rate.
Today, abortion apologist and COVID panic-spreader Lena Wen was on Face the Nation.
DR. LEANA WEN: Yeah, there are two main things that they should be doing in the days that they have left. The first is to get testing out there. I feel like we should have learned our lesson from COVID that just because we aren’t testing, it doesn’t mean that the virus isn’t there. It just means that we aren’t looking for it. We should be having rapid tests, home tests, available to all farm workers, to their families, for the clinicians taking care of them, so that we aren’t waiting for public labs and CDC labs to tell us what’s bird flu or not. And the second very important thing is this is not like the beginning of COVID, where we were dealing with a new virus, we didn’t have a vaccine. There actually is a vaccine developed already against H5N1. The Biden administration has contracted with manufacturers to make almost 5 million doses of the vaccine. However, they have not asked the FDA to authorize the vaccine. There’s research done on it. They could get this authorized now, and also get the vaccine out so- and to farm workers and to vulnerable people. I think that’s the right approach, because we don’t know what the Trump administration is going to be doing around bird flu. If they have people coming in with anti-vaccine stances, could they hold up vaccine authorization? If they don’t want to know how much bird flu is out there, could they withhold testing? I mean, that’s a possibility, and I think the Biden administration in the remaining days should get testing and vaccines widely available so that at least it empowers state and local health officials and clinicians to do the right thing for their patients.
MAJOR GARRETT: Dr. Wen, is bird flu in humans super dangerous?
DR. LEANA WEN: Well, the World Health Organization estimates that in prior outbreaks of the bird flu that the mortality rate is 52%. 52%. However, in the- in this most recent outbreak, it seems that most cases have been mild and maybe some people even have asymptomatic infection. But the question is, we don’t know what happens when bird flu affects more vulnerable individuals. People infected so far in the US have been mainly farm workers who are working, presumably generally healthy, as opposed to what happens when you get to children, to pregnant women, to older individuals with chronic illnesses. We don’t know how deadly, how dangerous bird flu is going to be for those individuals. And again, that’s one more reason why we don’t want it to spread and acquire more mutations.
Nearly chickens and other poultry have been killed this year to stop the spread of the disease, and they show signs of wanting to go after cattle because birds or something.
I can’t say with certainty that they are spouting nonsense, but it resembles it. Bird flu, H5N1, has been around since at least 1959. It hasn’t shown a history of poultry-human transmission outside of China (does this sound familiar?).
BTW, this meme is floating around. It is FAKE FAKE FAKE. Look up the Time Magazine covers for yourself.
These virus scares plow through the media about annually. As recently as August, we were warned about a monkeypox pandemic. How you react is a matter of prudential judgment, but in this case, I’d say that the history cast of characters demanding we take the scare seriously goes a long way toward undermining the likelihood of it being anything other than a line of attack against the incoming administration.
