The Highwire with Del Bigtree - H5N1’S LAB LINK? DR. MCCULLOUGH EXPOSES SHOCKING ORIGINS

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

Cardiologist & Epidemiologist, Peter A. McCullough, MD, joins Del with a shocking study linking the origins of the current clade of H1N5 dominating the news cycle and crushing the egg industry can be tracked back to a USDA poultry research lab in Georgia.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Well, it's been a super interesting week. We've got a measles outbreak here in Texas. We were talking about it last week. And now Robert Kennedy Jr. at HHS Secretary has put out an op-ed that has everybody buzzing from all sides, proving truly you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. I'm going to get to the bottom of that op-ed later on in the show. But first, let's talk about the other outbreak that is killing all of our chickens and taking away all of our eggs. Of course I'm talking about the bird flu. Take a look at this.

Bird flu is wreaking havoc on egg production. For weeks, the cost of eggs has dominated the conversation. On farms nationwide, bird flu is spreading like wildfire among livestock as the outbreak reaches a very critical point. According to the National Chicken Council, egg laying hens account for 77% of the poultry affected by the virus. The Department of Agriculture is now warning that Americans could see the price of egg spike. more than 40%. Nationwide, 65 people have been infected with bird flu, and one person from Louisiana died from the disease.

But the outbreak has prompted millions of chickens across the country to be killed in order to contain the virus. So far, more than 162 million poultry birds infected by the virus since the start of 2022. The result, a dozen eggs now averaging $8, more than tripling since just last October. You're seeing the entirety of that chicken house killed.

right but then you're still having interactions with wild birds that are coming into the chicken houses and then spreading the avian flu it's a big problem and it's not an easy one to solve well it's an issue we've been talking a lot about we're culling hundreds of millions of chickens obviously driving up the price of eggs probably chicken and other things but i wanted to get into this uh one of the great scientists and doctors out there that's been discussing this in detail is dr peter mccullough He joins me now. Dr. McCullough, thank you for taking the time today. Thank you.

There's just so many sides to this story right now. But number one, let's just start with culling birds. This is something that happened in England, has had moments where they cold all their animals and found out that, you know, their charts and science was wrong. I just heard that, you know, farmers are paid for every chicken that they can. as long as it doesn't end up testing positive for avian flu, which it seems to, you know, inspire farmers to kill their chickens prior to seeing an infection or very early on. I don't know if that's true, but we could end up hurting our food supply. And the question I have is, does it, is there a herd immunity we should be thinking about

with animals? And if we're killing every animal that's getting infected, how do those animals ever get to herd immunity? That'd be, I think, where I'd lead out with this. Let me say, Del, that bird flu has been around for many decades, probably well more than a hundred years documented in a review by Lysette and colleagues. And so in the absence of anything else in a bad bird flu season, you know, some birds succumb to the illness and then others develop immunity.

And because the birds are not all on the same time schedule. there is this kind of Venn diagram of herd immunity, and a typical viral outbreak would last about two years. That's about what it is. Now, our research at McCullough Foundation, Nick Hulcher, the lead, this strain of bird flu is different. This looks like it has actually come from serial passage research done at the USDA Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Georgia. Serial passage is when there's a blend of viral strains that's intentionally put in this case in a mallard duck, they were trying to see which strain would pass to the next mallard duck. And the mallard ducks are studied because their gullet is where the virus attaches, but it doesn't go into the lungs. And indeed, they found clade 23446 that looked like it transmitted.

And sure enough, you know, that's where the first cases were. around Athens, Georgia. Now, the unique aspect to this clade is that it was very mild in the mallard ducks. They could spread it all over another migratory waterfall. It quickly spread into mammals. We're now up to about 40 different species of mammals. And so what the USDA and other public health officials

have done over the last several decades is what's called biosecurity. So biosecurity would be this idea that, well, If one chicken has bird flu, if we sterilize the whole farm, they won't get it again. Well, that doesn't work in this case because the mallard ducks will just continue to infect the farms. In fact, a guest on that clip you showed pointed that out. So immediately we think we should not do culling because of the fact we can't stop the reinfection with the mallard ducks. But this is how they do it.

This is how they do it, Del. They will take samples of about 11 birds. on different swabs, put it into the same test tube, and then do another 11, and then a different test tube, and then they send it off. Now, they throw the birds back into the coop or the bin, so they don't know which birds are tested. And so when one of the tubes turns positive, you never know which bird, the decision is to call them, to kill them all. And when they extinguish all the birds by either pulling the oxygen out of the chambers or smothering them, with foam. What happens is the whole facility has to be sterilized, disinfected, and our research

shows, Dell, is taken offline for 111 days. Wow. So Colleen is a big deal. I attended the University Arkansas Bird flu summit this fall, and they thought there was about 10,000 birds that had died of bird flu. None of them adjudicate are confirmed, but the estimate is 10,000. And now you saw in that clip, you're approaching 200 million killed through this process of calling, obviously, the vast majority, perfectly good birds. I mean, that seems, and so let me just get this straight. You're essentially saying that this is a lab grown clade, that this was something made in a lab, that it's, I mean, are we talking about a lab leak again when we're talking about

bird flu right now? We're so sure of it. We've published this in a peer-reviewed paper. titled The Proximal Origins of Clay 2, 3, 4, 4,6, Avan Influenza. It was published in the peer-reviewed journal, Poultry and Wildlife Sciences. And it hasn't been disputed by any of the public health officials. We cite the USDA research, research done by Dr. Karakawa at University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine and Dr. Ron Foucher at Erasmus.

So, yeah, it looks like this, mankind brought this on, Dow. Now the twist that we've seen is the major. strain of this clade. The clade is the original source. The restraint that was so mild that was just causing pink eye in humans in mild cases and animals was B3.13. Now we've seen the emergence of D1.1, and it's a totally different ballgame. There's a teenager in British Columbia who gets D1.1. She gets severe human bird flu, ends up on the ventilator, needs ECMO for life support. Thankfully, she survives. down in Louisiana gets it.

He dies. He had some birds in his backyard. And now a toddler in Cambodia has died. And it's a different form of what we call genetic reassortment. And Del, what I've concluded is, you know, this culling has caused this outbreak to last so long because of virgin flock after virgin flock. Now the virus has had enough opportunity to reassort and mutate. And I think it's taken a turn for the worse.

Well, that's incredibly scary. I recently interviewed Dr. Robert Redfield, former head of the CDC. He has been shouting from the rooftops that he believes bird flu is what he's the most concerned about. And he has said time and time again, I believe it's going to be a gain of function or a lab leak that most likely will cause the problem. And here you're saying the first, you know, form that's really starting to affect mammals looks like it came from a laboratory. when are we going to learn our lesson on this? I mean, at what point do we stop messing with nature this way? And, you know, right now it's just an economics problem.

We're making the price of eggs astronomical. We're looking to Turkey to try and import eggs. But if you're right and we start seeing people getting infected and is creating a demand for a human vaccine, which will have its own issues to it. But over and over and over again, now we're watching man-made disease sweep this nation. And then the only cure is the same scientist from the same lab giving us a man-made vaccine to handle it. It's, you know, a lot of people lean towards

conspiracy theory, like they're doing it on purpose. But either way, it has the same result. It's clearly scientific misadventure. You know, we have over a dozen BSL-4 labs in the United States. This is the highest-risk pathogens that can get the whole world sick. We have well more than 140 BSL3 labs. The Biden administration guidance that came out on this Dell was very light, voluntary reporting. You know, most public health officials don't even know if they have one of these high-risk labs in their state. I'm on a standing committee in the Arizona Senate, and I've implored at the state of Arizona to come on, do an inventory. This is like working on a nuclear bomb in your university lab with no oversight.