Kit Knightly
Hey remember last year? Remember the spring “bird flu outbreak”?
Remember how it was all just a fear-porn story designed to discourage people from eating real food, drive up the price of poultry and eggs and sell more vaccines?
Well, guess what…
It’s groundhog day again. And I mean that quite literally since it was actually reported on February 2nd:
Bird flu has jumped to mammals in the UK – so how worried should humans be?
Yes, the experts are back and they have more “warnings”. But don’t worry “It’s not that alarming”…yet. Although clearly someone at the New York Times didn’t get the “don’t be alarmist” memo, because they went with…
An Even Deadlier Pandemic Could Soon Be Here
Anyway, the story is that scientists have found bird flu in otters, bears, dolphins and foxes in the last year. And that means it could potentially jump to humans.
Because the order goes otters->bears->dolphins->foxes->people. That’s like biology 101.
Seriously though, what makes this story nonsense is the only reason they found this virus is that they were looking for it. After last year’s “scare” they have increased screening…using PCR tests.
PCR tests which don’t diagnose disease, don’t reliably work and can find basically anything basically anywhere. You know the arguments.
Essentially, now, all that needs to happen is some nature reserve sends a sample of (dead?) otter to a government lab, the lab runs “routine bird flu screening”…and finds it. Becuase of course it does.
Just like that Bird flu can jump from birds to otters to foxes to dolphins.
…like how “Covid” jumped from bats to people to goats to guavas to motor oil. Remmeber?
But what’s the next step?
Well, testing people of course, since we know it can infect mammals now.
And, like clockwork, cue the “experts” in the Guardian saying [emphasis added]:
scientists warn there is a possibility that bird flu viruses could change and gain the ability to spread easily between people. Monitoring for human infection is extremely important
And – just like Covid – if they start testing everyone for bird flu, they will find it.
We all know where it goes from there: Vaccines.
But, apparently, the already-approved vaccines aren’t good enough. Just ask the New York Times…
Perhaps the best news is that we have several H5N1 vaccines already approved by the Food and Drug Administration whose safety and immune response have been studied…The current plan is to mass-produce them if and when such an outbreak occurs, based on the particular variant involved […] Worryingly, all but one of the approved vaccines are produced by incubating each dose in an egg.
Good news though, there’s a solution on the way. An mRNA-based solution…
The mRNA-based platforms used to make two of the Covid vaccines also don’t depend on eggs[…]those vaccines can be mass-produced faster, in as little as three months. There are currently no approved mRNA vaccines for influenza, but efforts to make one should be expedited.
It really is groundhog day all over again.
