Screams the headlines in various media: "Oh nos, H5N1 is 50% fatal in humans, but there's nothing to fear as so far there are only two human cases -- but we have detected it in cows and cats, so here it comes."
Ok folks, a few facts.
First, avian influenza is really nasty if you're a chicken. It is especially nasty if you're a chicken confined into a small space for maximum egg-laying capacity and one of the other birds in there is sick. The reason they kill all the birds in such a circumstance in a given facility when that happens is that a huge percentage of them will die anyway and waiting for it to burn out and leave however many survivors means you can't replace the dead ones with more live ones (they'll simply get it and many of them will die too) and your egg production goes to shit, obviously. Thus the fastest way through the problem is to cull them all and replace and the modest lifetime of a laying hen (and even less by a lot for a meat chicken) means the conferred immunity in the survivors is almost-entirely worthless.
However, this is typically not really a threat to anything else because the immune system in a bird is very different than the immune system in a mammal such as a cow, dog, cat, pig -- or human. Thus while you can detect virus in any of them in their nose as we saw with Covid using a PCR test does not tell you that the virus is live and reproducing at a level sufficient to cause disease; you would have to culture for that and that both takes time and is expensive, so "detection" via such a test is bullshit. By definition for something to be diseased it must have some disorder or symptom of metabolic disruption; mere detection of viral fragments does not tell you anything at all. Indeed even detecting virus in something like raw cow's milk tells you nothing about whether the cow is diseased or you would be if you drank it. We have viruses (and bacteria) all through and around us all the time without producing disease; a single gram of feces contains billions of bacteria and viruses in a healthy animal, including humans. It is only when your body's immune system becomes overwhelmed to the point of physical impact on your bodily systems that you, or any other entity, are in fact diseased.
Second, if the virus is 50% fatal in humans then why is it that despite huge numbers of people working around birds and other animals allegedly "infected" the single documented human symptomatic case resulted in conjunctivitis -- that is, red around the eyes for a bit? A virus that is 50% fatal and airborne in a chicken coop or dairy barn should have infected and killed half the people working there and obviously that has not and is not happening. One dude got..... pink eye from being infected. Whoopie-deal, he was uncomfortable for a bit, now has immunity, and is fine.
That is, given what we know about avian influenza it is in fact almost impossible for non-birds to actually get symptomatically ill from it, say much less be killed by it. Further, getting it and having a few non-serious symptoms confers immunity at least in part so what's the problem?
You do remember all the PCR hysteria from the last four years, yes? You also do remember that if you crank up the PCR cycle count high enough you will detect said fragments in huge numbers of things that are not in fact ill and never will get ill because what you're detecting is what they picked up in the environment and not something that is actively replicating in their nasal passages with any sort of efficiency. Only the latter can produce disease or be transmitted to anyone else.
Further, the facts are that avian influenza is neither new or uncommon. It happens all the time; its a respiratory virus and its natural reservoir is, as the name implies, birds. There are a lot of birds and as a result there will always be avian influenza; like all viruses if an infection manages to get to another victim before the first one either shakes it or dies, it continues onward. With somewhere between fifty and hundreds of billions of birds on the planet (somewhere between a half-dozen and fifty per human; yeah, we're that uncertain how many there are) there is zero possibility of us ever getting rid of this sort of virus and as with all other respiratory viruses it reassorts itself among hosts all the time when it happens to get into a bird that has some other viral infection at the same time. That's how viruses mutate, absent human tampering.
This is where the next important fact comes from: Zoonosis is statistically so far down the probability curve with avian influenza it has to be rated as roughly as likely as an asteroid killing us all next week because otherwise, with this wild imbalance in the population of the two types of animal we would have been, through the ages, relentlessly assaulted by these zoonotic viruses and, since modern medicine is quite new we'd all have been dead before we were born.
Now let's contrast with swine, which we know have a decent immune congruence with humans (thus experiments to use them for organ sources, insulin and similar) and a history of zoonosis. H1N1 in particular, we are pretty sure, got to humans via that path -- that was the 1918 version of flu that whacked a huge number of people and it has come around several times since, including in late 2019 and early 2020, and I personally got it by the way -- it is damn nasty but I'm not dead, am I? Why didn't it kill a huge number of people in late 2019? Because influenza, in humans, usually doesn't directly kill -- it is the secondary bacterial infections that do, and we now have antibiotics we didn't have in 1918 -- thus those infections can be managed where before you either fought it off on your own or you died. There are perhaps 800 million swine in the world or about ten humans per pig as compared with somewhere between five and fifty birds per human.
In other words if the zoonotic risk was even one hundredth that of swine we'd all have all been repeatedly screwed by this and we're not -- the reason is simply that the immune system of a bird and its biome environment are different enough that zoonosis is so far down the list of risks that its safely ignored.
But enter the people in our nation and elsewhere funded by our government who like to play with genetics -- particularly viral genetics. You'd think they learned something from screwing around with coronaviruses, but you'd be wrong.
Nobody has been arrested for what happened with Covid despite the clear evidence that it was known what they were doing and the congruence between Wuhan's original strain in the "wild" and a technology transfer in the months prior back into the US, which is documented, is genetically an almost exact match. We also know that multiple people, including many in government agencies, directly lied as to what happened surrounding and immediately preceding Covid showing up. While we can't exactly arrest people in China we sure can do so here and we can destroy the institutions that were involved in this, which directly and indirectly led to more US deaths than every war we've been involved in since WWII along with promulgating a dangerous countermeasure that we now know had material evidence of its harm deliberately concealed during the original trials.
We've done none of that and that is all of our responsibility because if the government won't arrest people when their actions lead to a biological agent's release into the environment, whether directly or otherwise, then who's responsibility is it to do so? The fucking tooth fairy?
Worse, every single one of our Congresspeople and the entire Executive currently in power never mind Trump's administration which was in power when that started and was in power when the proposal was submitted to DARPA and turned down, thus it WAS KNOWN when he was in office, have done nothing to stomp on this crap even on a forward basis, say much less appropriately prosecuting those involved in what happened the last time.
Again, I will note that there is no evidence that avian influenza has or can naturally cross into humans and you had better drill that into your damned head because it is fact and that fact is why you are here and alive right here, right now. Anyone who claims otherwise is a lying sack of crap and is likely trying to cover up their own criminal acts or complicity and even conspiracy with someone else's actions.
Therefore if it happens and there is such an epidemic human intervention is, well beyond reasonable doubt responsible and the United States Congress, each and every member, along with every member of federal and state Executive departments including but not limited to so-called "law enforcement" that have refused to arrest anyone for any of the bullshit over the last four years and in fact both funded and directly enabled it will have been directly responsible and must be held PERSONALLY responsible and liable for said outbreak and all harm that comes.
These people know damned well what they're playing with because it went wrong the last time and there is a statistically ZERO probability, much less than with a coronavirus, that such an event if it does happen this time, was of natural origin.
Those in positions of authority have the power to put a final and absolute stop to this crap right here, right now and forevermore and if they don't and the statistically impossible "natural thing" occurs this time there is ZERO question that it was man-engineered and released through either negligence or intent.
NO MORE GODDAMNED EXCUSES.