The Highwire with Del Bigtree - IS BIRD FLU BEING WEAPONIZED?

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

As countries order millions of bird flu vaccines, Jefferey Jaxen investigates the unfolding media excitement surrounding the Bird Flu. He dives deep and reveals that the trajectory of H5N1 outbreaks since 1997 have run parallel with gain-of-function research. Now, scientists around the world continue the call for a pause on this research before another pandemic arises.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

We reported last week out of Mexico was the first fatal case of a subtype. It was H5N2. This was the avian, highly pathogenic avian bird flu. And the WHO put out its own press release on its own website, and we broke this down, and they broke down the first case here in Mexico, and they were bringing it down, showing it, and they tested this individual four times up the chain of PCR tests. They're really looking hard to see if they can find this, make sure this, sample was right. And they said this person, you know, they died from this H5N2. But hold on one second.

The CBC comes out and says this. Mexico says patient died of chronic disease, not H5N2 bird flu. As we told you, there was a lot of issues with this certain patient. It says Mexico's health ministry on Friday stressed that the 59-year-old man's death was due to chronic conditions that led to septic shock. It was not attributed to the virus. They say, quote, the diseases were long term and caused conditions that led to failure of several organs, the ministry said, citing the findings by a team of experts. The man had chronic kidney disease, diabetes, and arterial hypertension over the past 14 years, according to health officials. Why did they look so hard? This is the open-ended question. To try to find bird flu in this person. Again, is this died because of bird flu or with bird flu,

or what's going on here? And we're seeing the headlines that are really mirroring, you know, it's bringing back probably for some people from trauma mirroring the run-up to the COVID response. Here's one of them. With bird flu tests hard to get, how will we know when to sound a pandemic alarm? I mean, that's that headline right there says so many things. You can teach a class on it from what we saw with COVID because, you know, how are we going to know? But regardless, here's the European Union. They're securing their vaccines right now. They've secured over 40 million avian flu vaccines for 15 countries. So they are not screwing around. People have to need. to take this really seriously. But the big question, yeah, the big question with this conversation

with bird flu is gain a function. That should be on everybody's mind. And we've been talking about it. We broke it down. We're going to go deeper into it here because Dr. Peter McCullough and his co-authors have now put out a paper that have broken down the currently, the current strain that is affecting animal species and causing sporadic human infections. This is the proximal origin of this highly pathogenic avian influenza. And it says the problem. proximal origins of HPAI H5N1 clad two point. This is basically the current version of this virus affecting. It says maybe the USDA Southeast poultry research laboratory in Athens, Georgia,

and the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. And of course, McCullough and co-authors say they conclude a moratorium on gain of function research, including serial passage of H5N1, is indicated to prevent a man-made influenza pandemic, causing animals, affecting animals and humans. And this is what everyone's talking about, even the House Energy and Commerce Committee is saying, we need a completely independent body. We need to take this idea of gain of function away from NIH

and have an independent body that looks at these, because this is a major danger. And the Organic Consumers Association, they wrote a great article just a couple of years ago, really outlining this, and it's titled, is Bird Flu being weaponized? And they go into this, now, Bird flu in humans has only been known for just a couple decades here.

So this isn't something that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years in the scientific literature. So they break down the history of this. And you'll notice as I go through this segment at every juncture in the history of bird flu over the last couple decades, we have right next to it, the Bedfellow is gain of function. So organic consumers association writes this. The first human H5N1 outbreak occurred in Hong Kong in 1997, the year of what the British called the Hong Kong hand, when sovereignty over Hong Kong was transferred. Hangover, I think it was supposed to say.

I think it's the Hong Kong hangover. Okay. Was it handover? Okay. Handover, yeah. From the UK to China. It was during this politically sensitive year that Kennedy Shortridge and Australian scientists, who was the director of the World Health Organization's reference laboratory at the University of Hong Kong,

confirmed human cases of highly pathogenic bird flu. It says in this article, the LA Times reported, quote, the H5 piece came from a virus in a goose, the N1 piece came from a second virus in a quail. the remaining flu genes came from a third virus, also in a quail. Shortridge had been studying how avian influenza viruses spread in humans since 1975, prior to discovering H5N1, Shortridge, eerily predicted its emergence. Guys, studying it, he predicts it's going to happen. It says at the time, the natural leap of flu directly from poultry to humans,

was thought to be so unlikely that scientists first suspected contamination from Short Ridge's lab was the cause of the highly improbable H5N1 diagnosis. We noticed unfortunately we didn't have alternative researchers, independent journalists to dig into this because we might have found something else. But now this handoff comes from Shortridge now to two other scientists that make a big splash here really in America. And this is Yushihiro Kai Waka and Ron Fouchet. And these researchers have been doing straight up gain of function work since 2011 and they produce a paper and they say, hey, we were able to soup this virus up, this bird food virus up. so much that it's now highly pathogenic in our lab in a ferret in a ferret model, which is a substitute for a human model. And they're going to publish the paper. And the entire research community,

most of them said, we can't do this. It's way too dangerous because other labs are going to try to recreate this and we might have a lab accident or terrorists might get this and do it. They published it anyway. This was the paper they publish. A mutant flu paper published controversial study shows how dangerous form of avian influenza could evolve in the wild. Now it goes on to say H5N1, commonly known as bird flu, is a highly pathogenic and often lethal in humans, but it cannot spread efficiently between people in cases seem to be rare. To find, not anymore, to find out if H5N1 could evolve easy transmissibility between humans, Kiowka and his team mutated a hemaglutin, an H-A-gene, which produces the protein that the virus uses to stick itself to host cells.

The first hints of Kaiowka's work emerged last year, along with details of similar experiments led by Ron Fischet at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. the Netherlands. What's the commonality between these two individuals? They're both creating these viruses that have gained the ability to spread through air between ferrets and they were both funded by NIH under Francis Collins and NIAID under Anthony Fauci. They are funding their research. So as we know, as this story goes in 2013 and 2014 specifically, there was a moratorium on gain of research. Everything stopped because there was this understanding in these reports that there's way. way too many mishaps going on in these labs that are working with these highly pathogenic viruses. One of those mishaps was a report from the CDC, and this is what this said here.

It said, sloppy practices by CDC scientists cited in lab mishap. So let's go into this. Again, this is 2014. We have a moratorium that says the CDC investigation found a wide range of serious lapses and revealed additional flu research that was jeopardized because of contaminated samples. The CDC scientists may have even handled both the benign strain of bird flu and the dangerous H5N1 strain inside a biosafety cabinet at the same time. The report concludes, which would be a significant breach of basic procedures that carries risks of cross-contaminating specimens. It gets better. A contaminated sample of the benign bird flu virus also was sent to another CDC lab where it was still being used in experiments

more than a month after the mistake was discovered because nobody alerted that lab to the problem. In addition, the CDC had also planned to send a sample from the contaminated virus batch to the infection disease department at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which has a prestigious influenza research facility. But now it goes on. We have 2017, the moratorium on gain of function research is lifted. We know how that goes with coronavirus research. But Kiwaka's research and Ron Foucher's research, they get the green light again. This is 2019. Science.org says exclusive.

of controversial experiments that can make bird flu more risky, poised to resume. These are the gain of function projects that were halted four years ago. And so what happens there? Well, in 2019, Kai Waukes' lab at the University of Wisconsin actually has basically an accident there while working with the bird flu.

It was chronicled in this paper right here, in this editorial in USA Today, lab created bird flu virus accidents show lax oversight of risky gain of function research. So this is, this is, This is the main story here with this bird flu conversation. I mean, we keep talking about it, but it's so much more serious. I'm sure people going, wow, this is like really getting in the weeds. I'm not sure how it affects me.

Folks, I mean, this is like potentially world-ending stuff. Like, these people mess this up. They give a function to a virus that it never was going to have naturally, and suddenly one of these bozos gets a cough, carries it out, you know, themselves, or a mouse or something, or ships it in the freaking mail, and now suddenly you have, you know, a deadly virus sweeping the world. And we're just like, yeah, I suppose it could happen. Oh, yeah, it sounds like a lab leak in Wuhan is what it was.

And then next story, like next story, these are the biggest stories of our lifetime, people. This is the biggest issue. This is literally like a nuclear weapons being built by a junior high student in the basement next door, and you don't know about it. What could possibly go wrong?