Bird Flu, Fear, and Perverse Incentives
By David Bell, Brownstone Institute
A 59-year-old man unfortunately died in Mexico in late April. Having been bed-bound for weeks and suffering from type-2 diabetes and chronic renal failure, he was at high risk from respiratory virus infection.
It became newsworthy, and the World Health Organization thousands of miles distant even released a media statement, because recent advances in genetic sequencing allowed the presence of Type A (H5N2) influenza virus – a type of bird flu – to be reported in a single clinical sample a month later. Refuting the WHO’s distant bureaucrats attributing mortality to the virus, Mexico’s health secretary is reported as noting that it was chronic illness that caused the death.
Irrespective of cause, deaths are a tragedy for family and friends. This one made global news purely because of advances in diagnostic technology. The WHO, the media, and a growing pandemic industry had been waiting for this inevitable event, testing and screening, as it is critical to perhaps the largest business scheme in human history. There are hundreds of billions on the table, and the will and means to take it. We all need to understand why, and what is supposed to happen next.
Covid and the Resetting of Public Health
Covid-19 has proven the business case for gain-of-function research. It looks increasingly likely that some genetic fiddling really did succeed in moving a bat coronavirus into humans, where it is more amenable to monetization (there is no profit in sick bats, or fear of them). Importantly, despite the broad economic and health catastrophe that followed, those behind the program are continuing much the same work, and not being held to account. There is vast profit with little or no real risk.
However, what the Covid episode really demonstrated is the financial and political gains that can be achieved irrespective of outbreak severity. As Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret pointed out in mid-2020 in their book Covid-19: The Great Reset, Covid-19 can be used to subvert post-World War II concepts of democracy and human rights and return society to a corporate authoritarian model (“Stakeholder Capitalism”), even though the illness is usually mild.
What is needed is a shared narrative among those who stand to benefit; media, governments, and the corporate world. While the term “Great Reset” seems to have been discarded as unpopular, the World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) stated intent to penetrate governments and change society to the benefit of their members is clearly undiminished.
Devastating mortality is not needed to drive societal change; just the fear of it. You need a test, visuals such as masks and circles on the pavement, a dependent media, and a research and health establishment whose career opportunities are dependent on compliance. The ramping up of surveillance for the vast sea of viral variants that is nature has just been officially confirmed through the adoption of amendments to the 2005 International Health Regulations at the World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva. Irrespective of the reality of risk or the massively disproportionate public funding required, the world is going to find a lot more potential threats, and is building a whole industry that will ensure they translate into corporate profit.
The Opportunity of Influenza
Avian influenza, or bird flu, has been around perhaps as long as birds (so was likely a dinosaur malady in Cretaceous times). Humans must have lived alongside it for over 200,000 years, and our primate ancestors far longer. Bird flu viruses are part of a range of variants of...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE, FREE, HERE).