Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently released statements indicating that bird flu remains a low risk to people in general.
“In the cases identified to date, A(H5N1) viruses generally caused mild illness, mostly conjunctivitis, of short duration, predominantly in U.S. adults exposed to infected animals,” said a new study funded by the CDC and published December 31 at the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
“[M]ost patients received prompt antiviral treatment,” the paper added. “No evidence of human-to-human A(H5N1) transmission was identified.”
On the same day, NIH issued a media advisory stating that the highly pathogenic avian flu (HPAI) “remains a low risk to the general public,” and that “[f]ortunately, so far most U.S. cases of HPAI H5N1 have been mild and resolved on their own without the need for treatment.”
NIH added, nevertheless, that “available treatments and vaccines, as well as those in development, are sufficient to prevent severe disease.”
Despite the acknowledged “low risk” of bird flu to humans, prominent health pundits from the COVID era are back on the scene, urging the Biden administration to make rapid test kits available and quickly approve vaccines before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated. Alarming commentary, apparently concerning approval of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has reached a frenzied level.
In early December, Baylor College of Medicine Dean Dr. Peter Hotez told “Deadline: White House” hostess Nicolle Wallace that, beginning the day after Trump’s inauguration, some “big picture stuff [will be] coming down the pike.”
Hotez said he’s especially “worried” about H5N1:
It’s all over wild birds on the western part of the United States, and going up in the north, it’s getting into the poultry. We’re seeing sporadic human cases, no human-to-human transmission yet. But that could happen. It’s in the cattle. It’s in the milk, and that’s just the beginning.
A zealous supporter of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Hotez’s political tone had been duly noted during the COVID years by legal analyst Jonathan Turley. He observed in August 2021 that the Baylor professor had called for hate-crime protections to be granted to Fauci and other experts who, Hotez argued, were being “targeted by far-right extremism in the United States.”
“A band of ultraconservative members of the US Congress and other public officials with far-right leanings are waging organized and seemingly well-coordinated attacks against prominent US biological scientists,” Hotez wrote in a July 2021 paper published in Plos Biology.
Turley responded with an observation about a particular quality in Hotez’s comments:
What is most striking about the article of Hotez is its lack of analytical balance. He rages against the right without even acknowledging how social media companies have already enforced a massive censorship program that bars even reporting the results of public clinical trials or repeating CDC positions on vaccinations.
On December 18, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a State of Emergency over bird flu having been detected in dairy cows in southern California – even though the proclamation declared “no person-to-person spread of Bird Flu has been detected in California and nearly all infected individuals had exposure to infected cattle.”
Egg prices in the state have now soared to nearly $9.00 per dozen, a 70% increase since November, reported WATTPoultry, which also observed that, “[a]ccording to the USDA, the sharp increase in price is due to nine confirmed cases of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) across the state in December 2024 alone, which led to the depopulation of almost six million layers.”
Numerous scientists and physicians are speaking out about the unnecessary killing of domestic laying hens due to fearmongering about bird flu.
The McCullough Foundation recently released a video titled “Bird Flu: Separating Fact from Fiction and True Danger from Fear-Mongering” to differentiate science from propaganda.
The Foundation’s investigative author John Leake also asserted in December that the spread of H5N1 in cattle is “extremely suspicious.”
Pointing to data that shows that, up until 2024, avian flu infections in cattle had been “extremely rare,” Leake observed:
Strangely enough, I cannot find a single serious investigative report—conducted by large animal veterinarians—that attempts to answer how and why this particular virus … has so dramatically expanded its host range into a bovine animals with lethal effect.
“Is it possible that this unprecedented and lethal influenza A infection in cattle came out of a lab?” Leake asked.
Amid concerns about the bird flu, the Biden administration should be making rapid tests available and ask the FDA to authorize the already-existing H5N1 vaccine, says former Baltimore health commissioner @DrLeanaWen.
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) December 29, 2024
"I feel like we should've learned our lesson from COVID, that… pic.twitter.com/Hb38r1RWJ7
Nevertheless, former Planned Parenthood CEO Leana Wen, M.D., who served as a COVID “expert” for leftwing news shows and media, returned to urge Biden to get rapid bird flu tests into the homes of Americans and to also push through approvals for vaccines before Trump takes the reins in the White House.
In July 2021, Wen recommended that life needed to be “hard” for Americans who refused the COVID shots:
CNN medical contributor Leana Wen says that life needs to be "hard" for unvaccinated Americans!
— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) July 11, 2021
What a tyrannical monster!
pic.twitter.com/yYa45KCR1Z
“There actually is a vaccine developed already against H5N1,” Wen said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “The Biden administration has contracted with manufacturers to make almost five million doses of the vaccine. However, they have not asked the FDA to authorize the vaccine.”
“They could get this authorized now, and also get the vaccine out … and to farm workers and to vulnerable people,” Wen pressed. “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?”
As CatholicVote reported in July, pharmaceutical giant Moderna was awarded $176 million in federal funds to create a “pandemic influenza mRNA-based vaccine” for bird flu.
Scientist and physician Robert Malone, M.D. has referred to the ramp-up of hysteria over bird flu as yet another “psyops campaign being conducted by the administrative/deep state, apparently in partnership with Pharma, against the American people”:
They know and we know that the “vaccines” being produced will be somewhat ineffective, as all flu “vaccines” are. The government is chasing a rapidly evolving RNA virus with a syringe, just like they did with HIV and C-19 … All the while they are getting prepared to roll out masks, lock-downs, quarantines, etc. All the while getting ready to roll out mRNA vaccines for poultry and livestock, as well as for all of us.
Harvey Risch, M.D., professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine, notes the CDC study “shows that the human bird flu cases that have occurred to date are essentially in people with workplace exposures to infected animals.”
“These cases have generally been mild and treatable,” Risch, the chief epidemiologist for The Wellness Company, told Lumen-News. “There has been no secondary spread from them. Thus, the public fearmongering statements various people have been making must have some other motivation or incentive rather than pretending to be informative.”