Tag: bird flu

Bird Flu And The Importance Of Another Pandemic

A 59-year-old man unfortunately died in Mexico in late April. Having been bed-bound for weeks and suffering from type-2 diabetes and chronic renal failure, he was at high risk from respiratory virus infection. It became newsworthy, and the World Health Organization thousands of miles distant even released a media statement, because recent advances in genetic sequencing allowed the presence of Type A (H5N2) influenza virus – a type of bird flu – to be reported in a single clinical sample a month later. Refuting WHO’s distant bureaucrats attributing mortality to the virus, Mexico’s health secretary is reported as noting it was chronic illness that caused the death.

Irrespective of cause, deaths are a tragedy for family and friends. This one made global news purely because of advances in diagnostic technology. WHO, the media and a growing pandemic industry had been waiting for this inevitable event, testing and screening, as it is critical to perhaps the largest business scheme in human history. There are hundreds of billions on the table, and the will and means to take it. We all need to understand why, and what is supposed to happen next.

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The Trouble with Testing

Deborah Birx is at it again, urging mass testing for the detection of bird flu. She wants cows and dairy workers examined to ferret out asymptomatic infections and exposures in animals and people. We have the technology so why not use it, she demands to know. We are making the same mistake we made with Covid early on, she argues. 

The role of testing is relatively uncontroversial but it probably should be. Early on in the Covid crisis, though completely against the lockdowns, I was an enthusiast for testing simply because I thought doing so would overcome the epistemic void that was driving public panic. 

If you are scared of a disease and have no means to discover whether or not you have it, what is your choice but to hop around in a frenzy and comply with every edict? That was my thinking in any case. We live and learn. 

What’s left out of the testing issue is the great question of why. Is it track, trace, and isolate? That has been proven impossible – and long known to be impossible – in the case of a fast-spreading and fast-mutating respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. They tried it anyway with many states quickly hiring tens of thousands of contact tracers. 

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PCR Testing for Bird Flu ‘Will Only Serve to Raise False Case Count’ Critics Say

Dr. Deborah Birx, the Trump administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, told CNN’s Kasie Hunt the U.S. is making the “same mistakes” with bird flu that it made with COVID-19, which she said spread because there wasn’t enough testing for asymptomatic infection.

Birx is now calling for every cow to be tested for bird flu weekly and for regular pooled tests for dairy workers. She also said it’s likely that undetected cases are circulating in humans.

“We have the technology,” Birx said. “The great thing about America is we’re incredibly innovative and we have the ability to have these breakthroughs.”

The technology Birx referenced is polymerase chain reaction or PCR testing — the same diagnostic tool that came under fire during the COVID-19 pandemic for producing inaccurate results, including false positives.

Speaking out on X (formerly Twitter), critics like Simon Goddek, Ph.D., pushed back, accusing Birx of “deliberately using the same strategy to fabricate another fake health emergency.”

On Wednesday, the day after Birx’s interview, JAMA published its own article advocating for more widespread bird flu testing.

“No animal or public health expert thinks that we are doing enough surveillance,” Keith Poulsen, DVM, Ph.D., director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told JAMA.

Andrew Pekosz, Ph.D., from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told JAMA that more testing should be conducted to find asymptomatic and mild infections. Workers at infected farms should be tested twice weekly, he said, and cows should be tested once a week.

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Scientists Used CRISPR Gene Editing to Make Chickens Resist Bird Flu — Here’s What Happened

Scientists who used the gene-editing technology CRISPR to create chickens resistant to avian influenza also showed how quickly a dangerous bird flu could mutate from laboratory chickens to humans, critics of a new study in the journal Nature Communications told The Defender.

The authors of the study, led by researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh Roslin Institute and Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, altered the genetic code of 10 chickens to make them resistant to a bird-flu virus and then exposed them to the virus.

They also included 10 chickens in the study that were not genetically altered. All 10 chickens not genetically altered got sick when they were exposed to the virus. Only one of the genetically altered chickens got sick with the bird flu.

Altering a species’ DNA “promises a new way to make permanent changes in the disease resistance of an animal,” University of Edinburgh embryologist Mike McGrew, Ph.D., an author of the study, said at an Oct. 5 news briefing announcing the peer-reviewed research.

“This can be passed down through all the gene-edited animals, to all the offspring.”

According to the study, “Chickens genetically resistant to avian influenza could prevent future outbreaks. … Breeding for resistance and resilience to disease has significant potential in farmed poultry,” freeing farmers from routinely having to vaccinate birds.

But Jonathan Latham, executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project, who has a master’s degree in crop genetics and a Ph.D. in virology, told The Defender,

“The experiments were ultimately a failure of ‘the operation was a success but the patient died’ variety.”

When the 10 genetically altered chickens were exposed to a much higher dose of bird flu — more in line with what the chickens could be exposed to in nature or a factory farm setting — five of the 10 chickens developed the flu.

Virus samples collected from the infected, genetically altered birds showed the virus had made several mutations that seemed to allow it to bind to the ANP32A protein to replicate in the chickens, the study reported.

The virus also mutated a workaround to bind to two other related proteins for replication.

Worse yet, according to Latham, mutations also helped the virus replicate more efficiently in human cells.

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Gain-of-Function May Explain Bird Flu Jump To Cows And Humans

In the past six months, bird flu has surprised scientists at least twice.

Bird flu viruses have circulated mainly in birds for a long time. However, in early December 2023, an outbreak occurred in U.S. dairy cows, even though cattle are not typically susceptible to avian influenza A, the bird flu virus.

In late March, a U.S. dairy farm worker was infected by a H5N1 virus from a cow.

On May 22, a second human case of H5N1 infection was reported with prior exposure to infected dairy cows in Michigan.

On the same day in May, an Australian child was infected by an H7 strain,  another subtype of influenza A  known to cause human infections.

Since bird flu infections in humans are rare, these incidents have raised significant concern among scientists.

Why is this happening, and how concerned should we be?

This article aims to avoid unnecessary fear about a potential future pandemic. Instead, we encourage people to think rationally and make appropriate adjustments for the future.

Rapid Spread in Birds

The history of the H5N1 virus family can be traced back to 1996 when it was first discovered in a sick goose in the Guangdong province of China.

H5N1 has evolved, resulting in different genetic lineages (clades) as they mutate, similar to a typical pattern of behavior for RNA viruses such as the ever-emerging COVID-19 variants. In 2013, the H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b emerged. Since then, it has spread rapidly to nearly 100 countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, and America, becoming the most dominant clade and causing significant losses to the poultry industry.

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Moderna Shares Rise On Report US Gov’t Preparing Funding For mRNA Bird Flu Vax

Shares of Moderna are up more than 4% in the New York premarket trading session following a report by the Financial Times that the US government is preparing to “bankroll a late-stage trial of Moderna’s mRNA pandemic bird flu vaccine.” H5N1 is spreading across the US ahead of the November presidential elections, and some prominent doctors have already warned about university labs experimenting with H5N1 gain-of-function. 

Sources familiar with the talks between Moderna and the government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, known as Barda, say federal funding could be allocated to the pharma company as early as next month. 

“It is expected to total several tens of millions of dollars, and could be accompanied by a commitment to procure doses if the phase-three trials are successful,” they said.

Moderna has previously said it was trialing H5N1 flu vaccines, with interim data expected soon. 

Moderna is currently testing an H5N1 vaccine, from the 2.3.4.4b subset of viruses, in people. That trial began last summer.

But the trial’s listing in the Clinicaltrials.gov database is cagey about the dosages Moderna is testing, calling them simply dose number 1, 2 and 3. -Statnews

As of Wednesday, the US Department of Agriculture has detected 67 dairy cow herds with H5N1 infections in nine states: Texas, Kansas, New Mexico, Michigan, Idaho, North Carolina, South Dakota, Ohio, and Colorado. 

The ongoing outbreak is linked to dairy cattle. Only two H5N1 cases have been detected among humans. The first was in April, with a Texas dairy worker, and the second was from a Michigan dairy farm last week. Both had mild infections and have since recovered.

FT also said the federal government is in talks with Pfizer about an mRNA vaccine targeting H5N1. 

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NIH-Funded Scientists Develop mRNA Bird Flu Vaccine ‘to Prevent Human Infections’

Federally funded researchers have developed an experimental mRNA H5N1 bird flu vaccine that they said is “highly effective” in preventing severe illness and death in infected lab animals.

According to a University of Pennsylvania press release, the vaccine “could potentially help manage the outbreak of the H5N1 virus currently circulating in birds and cattle in the United States, and prevent human infections with the virus.”

The news comes as the U.S. and European nations consider vaccinating workers deemed as at risk for contracting bird flu.

The researchers — who on May 23 published their results in Nature Communications — reported their mRNA lipid nanoparticle vaccine elicited “strong” T cell and antibody responses in female mice infected with H5N1.

They also said their vaccine produced an immune response in male ferrets and prevented death.

U.S. News and World Report and other media outlets reported on the study, which was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Robert Malone — an early pioneer of mRNA vaccines technology and an outspoken critic of U.S. federal biomedical corruption during the COVID-19 pandemic — called the news coverage of the study “investor hype” and “fear porn.”

“There’s no evidence of human-to-human transmission of H5N1,” Malone told The Defender.

Malone said the researchers would need to show that there’s a “reasonable facsimile” between ferrets and humans to claim the vaccine can prevent severe illness and death in humans.

The likelihood of people getting H5N1 is very small, Malone said. “The thing is, it doesn’t readily infect humans.”

Only those who are immunocompromised or who slaughtered an infected waterfowl might be at risk of transmission, he said, so H5N1 is being “used to instill fear” in the public to generate federal funding for H5N1 vaccine research.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of evidence that the lead researchers have clear conflicts of interest, Malone said. “They absolutely stand to profit” from their experimental bird flu vaccine.

Scott Hensley, Ph.D. and Drew Weissman, M.D., Ph.D. at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania — who led the research — are listed as co-inventors on patents for mRNA vaccine technologies.

They’ll likely receive royalties payments, Malone said. “It’s similar to how [Dr. Anthony] Fauci gets money from his royalties.”

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Corporate media is ramping up the fear about bird flu ahead of the vote on WHO’s pandemic plans

Health officials are issuing very ominous warnings about the potential for an H5N1 (bird flu or avian influenza) pandemic among humans at the same time that the WHO is preparing for a vote on the global pandemic treaty at the 77th World Health Assembly at the end of this month. 

The global pandemic treaty will give the World Health Organisation far more authority than it had during the last pandemic, and a lot of people are deeply concerned about how that power will be used during the next major health crisis. 

As you will see below, two more human cases of the bird flu have just been confirmed.  If the bird flu mutates into a form that can spread easily from human to human, that will create an enormous amount of fear, and the death toll could potentially be catastrophic.  In such an environment, what sort of extreme measures would the World Health Organisation decide to institute?

In recent weeks, negotiators have been feverishly working to finalise the global pandemic treaty.  The following comes directly from the official WHO website:

Governments of the world today agreed to continue working on a proposed pandemic agreement, and to further refine the draft, ahead of the Seventy-seventh World Health Assembly that starts 27 May 2024.

Governments meeting at the World Health Organisation headquarters in Geneva agreed to resume hybrid and in-person discussions over coming weeks to advance work on critical issues, including around a proposed new global system for pathogen access and benefits sharing (i.e. life-saving vaccines, treatments and diagnostics); pandemic prevention and One Health; and the financial coordination needed to scale up countries’ capacities to prepare for and respond to pandemics.Governments agree to continue their steady progress on proposed pandemic agreement ahead of the World Health Assembly, WHO, 10 May 2024

Here in the United States, the corporate media has been strangely quiet about this treaty, but it is a really big deal.

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KA-CHING! Big Pharma Stocks Soar as They Plan Next Vaccine to Solve Bird Flu Pandemic

Major pharmaceuticals had a fantastic week in the global markets amid speculation that they may be ready to develop a vaccine to treat bird flu.

As fears grow around the world over the risk of another pandemic following the detection of avian bird flu in humans, pharmaceutical companies are benefitting from talk that they may be ready to develop another vaccine to stop another pandemic in its tracks.

The Motley Fool reports:

Shares of vaccine stocks Moderna, Novavax, and BioNTech SE rallied this week, appreciating 23.4%, 16.4%, and 9.3%, respectively, through Thursday trading, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

While these three stocks gained notoriety back in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears this week’s detection of avian bird flu in a second U.S. citizen and the first-ever detection of avian flu in a human in Australia are spurring fears of an outbreak and thus a possible boon for companies that can quickly produce a bird flu vaccine.

A new avian flu, H5N1, was detected in cattle back in March, with one worker in Texas coming down with associated conjunctivitis at that time. But on Wednesday this week, a second U.S. dairy worker in Michigan tested positive for the avian flu as well. That same day, an Australian dairy worker also tested positive for avian flu, marking the first-ever human case of avian flu in that country.

The discoveries spurred fears of an outbreak. That same day, the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response at the Department of Health and Human Services, Dawn O’Connell, noted that Moderna and Pfizer, which partnered with BioNTech on the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, were in talks over a potential mRNA vaccine program for the new avian flu.

As has been extensively reported by The Gateway Pundit, major pharmaceuticals including Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca made billions in profits for their shareholders after developing a series of vaccines intended to treat COVID-19.

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H5N1: Truth Over Fearporn

Fearporn definition

Fear porn refers to mainstream media content that deliberately and enticingly plays on people’s fears about disaster, disease, and death. It is often used to describe sensationalized and exaggerated reports or stories that aim to provoke strong emotional reactions, such as fear, anxiety, or outrage. This type of content can be found in various forms of media, including news, social media, and online articles.

Some definitions of fear porn also include the idea that it is used to manipulate people’s emotions and attention, often for the purpose of increasing viewership, engagement, or clicks. Fear porn can be seen as a form of psychological manipulation, as it preys on people’s natural fear responses to create a sense of drama or excitement.

In some cases, fear porn can also be used to describe conspiracy theories or misinformation that is spread online, often with the intention of generating fear, anxiety, or outrage. This type of content can be particularly harmful, as it can spread misinformation and perpetuate harmful stereotypes or biases.

Overall, fear porn is a term used to describe a type of media content that uses fear and sensationalism to engage audiences and manipulate their emotions.

AI-generated answer to Brave search query “Fearporn Definition”

The above definition is close, but misses the role of various stakeholders in the Fearporn ecosystem. In the case of the weaponization of fear of infectious disease to advance hidden agendas relating to “public health”, and to manipulate citizen and voter consensus, these stakeholders include a wide range of Governmental (State), Non-governmental organizations, corporations and transnational actors.

Organizations within the US Federal government which routinely weaponize infectious disease fear and anxiety to manipulate public opinion include the White House (in particular the The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)), the US “Intelligence Community” (18 agencies and organizations, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)), Department of Homeland Security, and of course offices within the Department of Health and Human Services including CDC, FDA, and ASPR/BARDA.

Examples of Non-governmental organizations that routinely practice this include the Gates Foundation, United Nations, World Economic Foundation, and of course the World Health Organization.

In the case of the European Union, national governments, the European CDC, and various institutes associated with the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) routinely resort to deploying both nudge and outright fearporn to generate support for infectious disease public policy agendas.

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