H5N1 Bird Flu Is Starting To Look A Lot Like COVID... Senator Ernst Initiates Inquiry
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U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) is demanding answers to why the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is funding a collaboration with a Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-linked researcher involving dangerous bird flu experiments.
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In a letter to Secretary Tom Vilsack, Ernst wrote, “I am writing to obtain information about the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s ongoing funding of a collaboration with a Chinese Communist Party-linked researcher involving dangerous bird flu experiments and recent support for other animal labs in adversarial nations. I was troubled to learn from the non-profit group White Coat Waste Project that USDA is supporting experiments involving “a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus” that poses a “risk to both animals and humans” in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, and a researcher affiliated with the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Biden USDA began financing the collaboration for “wet-lab virology” to study “newly emerging avian influenza viruses” in April 2021. The project has already received at least $1 million of U.S. taxpayers’ money to date and is slated to be funded through 2026.”
Inside the high-security Influenza Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, two experienced scientists were pulling ferrets out of their HEPA-filtered cages on a Monday in December 2019.
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One by one, the animals were put into a biosafety cabinet, where a solution was washed into their nostrils. It’s a procedure used to collect evidence of infection, and this particular experiment involved exposing the animals to a highly controversial lab-engineered strain of H5N1 avian influenza virus.
The experiment underway involved one of two infamous lab-made bird flu viruses that had alarmed scientists around the world when their creation became widely known nearly a decade earlier. In each case, scientists had taken an avian influenza virus that was mostly dangerous to birds and manipulated it in ways that potentially increased its threat to humans.
December of 2019... they were working on this before COVID was a thing. And again - we see the 'gain of function' principle being utilized.
Here's the kicker...
The ultimate goal of this work was to help protect the world from future pandemics, and the research was supported with words and funding by two of the most prominent scientists in the United States: Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
How'd that workout with these two madmen regarding COVID? Millions dead and a world changed for the worse...
Researchers and universities are offering mixed reactions to two sets of rules announced last week. They are a direct response to a global controversy that erupted in late 2011 after scientists created H5N1 viruses that some feared could spark a deadly human pandemic. Meanwhile some researchers are resuming their H5N1 work now that a voluntary moratorium is over, including a laboratory in China with year-old results apparently similar to those that caused the initial furor.
Did you read that? Scientists created H5N1 viruses.
Also...
Existing U.S. rules, released in March 2012, already require funding agencies to consider whether studies involving 15 especially dangerous agents, including mammal-transmissible H5N1 and anthrax, could be "directly misapplied" to do harm.
They already knew that there are evil people that could use this for harm. Here we are a decade later and they are making H5N1 transmissible to humans.
Federal scientists are gearing up to test the first vaccines in poultry against bird flu in years, as Biden administration officials say they have now begun weighing an unprecedented shift in the U.S. strategy to counter the growing outbreak.
The move comes amid mounting concern over the threat posed by the ongoing spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza over the past few years, which has devastated flocks of wild and commercial birds around the continent.
A record 58 million birds — mostly commercially-raised poultry — have died in the outbreak so far, according to figures tallied by the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service — either killed by the virus itself or put down in efforts to quash its transmission.
Nebraska agriculture officials say another 1.8 million chickens must be killed after bird flu was found on a farm in the latest sign that the outbreak that has already prompted the slaughter of more than 50 million birds nationwide continues to spread.
So they say 58 million were killed in the outbreak... but were over 50 million killed - not because they were infected - but because of precautionary measures?
The Nebraska Department of Agriculture said Saturday that the state's 13th case of bird flu was found on an egg-laying farm in northeast Nebraska's Dixon County, about 120 miles north of Omaha, Nebraska.
Just like on other farms where bird flu has been found this year, all the chickens on the Nebraska farm will be killed to limit the spread of the disease.
If I am reading this properly - 13 actual cases are leading to the slaughter of millions of chickens and turkeys. Then there's this at the bottom of the article.
Officials say there is little risk to human health from the virus because human cases are extremely rare and the infected birds aren't allowed to enter the nation's food supply. Plus, any viruses will be killed by properly cooking poultry to 165 degrees Fahrenheit.
But the bird flu outbreak has contributed to the rising prices of chicken and turkey along with the soaring cost of feed and fuel.
NO - it's not the outbreak that's the problem. It's the government killing off the food supply that's the problem.
But note - there is little risk to human health from this virus... UNTIL gain of function research can figure out how to make it a danger to humans.
A global furor erupted in 2011 when two labs revealed that they had altered a deadly type of bird flu virus in a way that made it more contagious among ferrets, which catch the flu in much the same way people do and are used to study how it might spread among humans.
One lab was led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and the other by Ron Fouchier, at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.
That particular bird flu, a type called H5N1, rarely jumps from birds to humans, but is highly lethal when it does. Infected people do not seem to spread the disease to others, but if it did become transmissible between humans, it could cause a pandemic with an enormously high death rate.
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One of the studies from the Netherlands lab is detailed here...
Fouchier's team started with an H5N1 virus collected in Indonesia and used reverse genetics to introduce mutations that have been shown in previous research to make H5N1 viruses more human-like in how they bind to airway cells or in other ways.
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At yesterday's press conference, Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the US National institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, defended publishing the full details. "I think the benefits that will come out of the Fouchier paper in stimulating thought and pursuing ways to understand better the transmissibility, adaptation, pathogenicity [of H5N1] in my mind far outweigh the risk of nefarious use of this information," he said in response to questions.
"When you get something out in the general literature, you stimulate thought and input from people who at first glance you wouldn't think would have an interest in it," he added. He said publication can trigger involvement by people in a wide range of disciplines, which can pay benefits.
Some biosecurity experts, though, voiced misgivings today.
Eric S. Toner, MD, senior associate in the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, commented by e-mail, "I think that the publication does increase the probability that others will want to replicate the experiments and pursue this line of research further. The more labs that are doing this research, the more likely an accidental escape becomes.
Isn't this what we were expecting for this election year? Yes, we know which specific virus they would use, but we knew it would be something. Maybe late to the game this year thinking the 2 or 3 wars that we are fueling, the Middle Easterners coming through the border, fentanyl deaths, homelessness and crime would distract us from the seriously declining mental and physical health of Biden, and the failure of every policy he coughed up!
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