The Highwire with Del Bigtree - IS BIRD FLU THE NEXT COVID?

Episode Date: May 12, 2024

As America faces an unlikely bird flu ‘outbreak’ in chickens and cows, many are speculating on when this rare illness will jump to humans. Jefferey Jaxen looked into the previous gain-of-function lab work on H5N1 funded by Tony Fauci and NIAID, and found something very interesting. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Bird flu is back making headlines. A lot of consumer concern about avian flu. H5N1, avian influenza, aka bird flu. Federal officials are expanding bird flu testing as outbreaks continue to pop up. The largest supplier of eggs in the U.S. has halted production after some of its chickens at a Texas plant tested positive for bird flu. Six states are reporting outbreaks of avian flu among dairy cows. This week, a Texas dairy worker had pink eye after testing positive for the virus. It's not only affecting birds, it's affecting squirrels, dolphins, all different

types of mammals. The more that we allow this to spread mammals, the more we're tempting faith that this could evolve in ways that it could threaten humans. We are definitely taking this seriously. This is a new development. Cows, mammals, being a reservoir gives this virus new opportunity to change. And that's what we're watching for really closely. Could this be the next pandemic. In terms of the animal kingdom, it already is a pandemic. It's in every continent. It's infecting all types of animals. Is this COVID all over again? Is it far worse than COVID? It's one of the worst we've seen. So, you know, again, without scaring people, it has the capacity to be worse than COVID. What's not reassuring is that we've learned as recently as COVID that we can be surprised.

So I think vigilance is appropriate. Why stop at vigilance just cut right to hysteria. Exactly. I can't believe we're here again. And, you know, seeing, just coming out of COVID. I just want to say, Jeffrey, one of the funny things here is like, you know, I worked for CBS. I even worked with Jennifer Ashton, who was the last doctor on there. And I just, there's moments like this where I just thank my lucky stars that I found you,

that I found this great team, that I'm not being paid to shill these incredibly ridiculous stories and try and incite fear and hysteria around non-existent problems. It's just it's nice to be able to sit here. I'm a little giddy today at my fate. Yeah, well, we're glad to have you. Glad to be sitting next to you talking about this. Let's expand this little bit in a way the legacy media will never do. And so it's interesting because in 2023, Reuters a year ago,

Reuters ran this headline. It says vaccine makers prep bird flu shot for humans just in case. Rich Nations lock in supplies. And that's Reuters. And now the current headlines, they're still talking about this. It says U.S. could vaccinate a fifth of Americans in a bird flu emergency. So those headlines are already being prepped. They're already being rolled out there.

The FDA, because this has jumped to cows, is testing milk. If you go to their website, they're giving regular updates here. But you have this, one in five samples of pasteurized milk had bird flu virus fragments, FDA says. So they're PCR testing milk products on the shelf. And if you go to their actual website, the FDA, It says this. The FDA continues to advise strongly against the consumption of raw milk and recommends that industry does not manufacture, sell raw milk or raw milk products.

FDA has a long history of going to war with raw milk manufacturers, literally, like swat-teaming them. So this is... Look at what that reporting just was. We found it in pasteurized milk, but we're really concerned about raw milk. I mean, again, if they'd have found in raw milk, you'd be hearing about it. I guarantee you, but they didn't. Where they found is in pasteurized milk. When we put thousands of cows milk all into one barrel, as it turns out, that contamination can get to the grocery store.

But stick with that process, and don't you dare go to a healthy farmer that's actually treating their cows well, not like injecting them with all sorts of antibiotics and chemicals and covering the food they're eating with glyphosate and feeding them corn when they should be eating grass. Forget about all that. That's where that's a healthy cow giving you that raw milk. That's the danger. We've found it yet, but it's what we're investigating. Yeah, so the FDA is out there, they're testing cottage cheese,

they're testing baby milk formula, haven't found anything in those yet, but that's the story there. But with the other part of this conversation is the cases. So there's been two cases in the US. This H5N1 is really not very good at when it gets into a person, jumping to another person. It does not transmit very well. So we've had two cases, one in 2022.

This is the CDC's own report from that time. from that time. And you can see it's kind of a milk toast report, a US case of human avian influenza A H5 virus reported. It says person at contact with infected poultry. So they were culling some of their poultry, heard basically because of suspected cases of H5N1. But it says public health risk assessment remains low.

And that person had, if you go into that report, fatigue for a few days and that was their only symptom and they recovered. Not to say this is a mild disease, but then we have 24 this year, we have another person who allegedly have to come down with it. CDC report again, and this report's a little strongly worded as highly pathogenic avian influenza A virus. And as you saw in that news report, the patient reported eye redness, basically, some pink eye as the only symptoms and is recovering. But the bigger conversation here, as everyone knows, coming out of COVID,

we have a little COVID fatigue, but we've also been burned a little bit. So a lot of people are looking rightfully so at the biolabs. And we have to be doing that. I mean, just recently, yesterday, Peter Dasik, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, was dragged in front of the Coronavirus Committee and questioned for a very long time. This is one of the headlines that came out of there. House COVID panel grills EcoHealth Alliance chief demands criminal probe over virus research in Wuhan. They are asking Health and Human Service to initiate a suspension and disbarment proceedings against DASIC and Equal Health Alliance, barring them from ever getting any type of funding from the United States again. So that is, that's what's come out of their new like 30,000 emails.

Internal emails have just been released as well about all the stuff that's been going on there. Samples were at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that were being kept there of the coronavirus. So a lot of information is coming out there. But this is, you know, we're still four years later trying to figure out this thing. and we're now being shown the bird flu, the organic consumers association last year put out a wonderful article and anybody wants to really do a deeper dive

and they have the time, this is the article to do it, is bird flu being weaponized? And so they go into the history of bird flu. It hasn't been around, at least known, for forever. It's really 1997 was when the world first learned about it in an outbreak, and it says this in the article. The first human H5N1 outbreak occurred,

in Hong Kong in 1997, the year of what the British called the Hong Kong handover when sovereignty over Hong Kong was transferred from the UK to China. It was during this politically sensitive year that Kennedy Shortridge, an Australian scientist who was the director of the World Health Organization Reference Laboratory at the University of Hong Kong confirmed human cases of highly pathogenic bird flu. The 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 virus was unique in every aspect. Time magazine reported, on the H gene, at a point called the cleavage site, this is starting to sound like COVID, was found a telltale mutation, the same kind of mutation found in other highly pathogenic avian viruses. The virus had regions that were identical to portions of an avian virus that struck

Pennsylvania chickens in 1983. 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 to humans since 1975. Prior to discovering H5N1, Shortridge eerily predicted its emergence. At the time, the natural leap of a flu directly from poultry to humans was thought to be so unlikely that scientists first suspected contamination from Shortridge's lab was the cause of the highly improbable H5N1 diagnosis. So at that time, 18 human cases of the disease were recorded. There were six deaths because there is a known high fatality rate of this disease.

But media was not like it was back then that it is now, investigative media. So you're literally saying experts thought it may have came from his lab, but there was no further deep investigation, independent investigation of that. So there's a big question mark hanging around that conversation there. So leaving that there, that brings us to the, the 2010, 2011, and 2012, and that's where we pick up this story. And there's two researchers, Yoshihiro Kayawoka and Ron Foucher. And these two researchers working separately, not in the same lab, were funded to see if they

could make this straight up gain of function, see if they could make this more transmissible, they could make it jump, because that was the problem for the virus, is it couldn't jump, couldn't transmit very well. So in people, basically. So they did it in ferrets and they were about to publish a paper and the scientific community said, hold on, hold on, we can't put this out here. So this was the paper. It eventually was published. This is Nature in 2012. It says mutant flu paper published. And it goes on to say in this H5N1, commonly known as bird flu, a highly pathogenic and often lethal in humans, but it cannot spread efficiently between people and cases seem to be rare. To find out if H5N1 could evolve easy transmissibility between humans,

Kayaoka and his team mutated a hemagglutinin H.A. gene, which produces the protein that the virus uses to stick itself to host cells. The first hints of Kayaoka's work emerged last year, along with details of similar experiments led by Ron Bouchet at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. However, the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecure NSAB, an independent government advisory board, recommended in December 2011 that both papers should be censored before publication, citing concerns that the strains could be used by bioterrorists or that untrammeled proliferation of the work would raise the risk of an accidental release from a lab, still a problem. But it says after a meeting that included international flu experts and health agency representatives, the NSABBB decided in March that revised versions of the two papers should be published in full.

And that is what happened. And you think, who would do this? Why would you do this? Who's funding this? Well, get ready, because we look at the work. We look at the actual studies that led to those two papers being published. And here's the work. This is Kiwaka's work. You look at this name of the study, pandemic potential of H5N1 influenza viruses. And you look at the funding. Who's funding this? Well, we have NIAID to a tune of over $500,000. That's Anthony Fauci. organization, Anthony Fauci himself, is at the basically the root of this. And then we have Ron Foucher's funding, and his study was airborne transmission of influenza A, H5N1 virus between ferrets, which they were successfully able to do that. And his work, it says in this article at the end, this work was financed through NIAID, NIH contract, and there's a whole bunch of letters there. So Fauci and, you know, Gates, too, is a part of this. They've figured out how to get scientists to basically do biological weapons research with a clear conscience by saying, look, there's

pathogens that don't really infect humans too much. So let's use some genetic engineering to find out how we can make them infect humans a whole bunch. And this is at the heart of this. So I'm sitting here talking to you, hopefully this is not turning to a COVID situation. If it does, we don't wait four years to haul the bird flu Peter Dazek in front of Congress. We do that on day one to really get to the bottom of this. That is, that would be a suggestion just looking at this, this research here.