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Heads Up on Bird Flu |
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By Jeffrey Tucker |
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Commentary
Have you seen egg prices? They are higher than ever, if you can find them. The stores around me are placing limits on how many people can purchase. Egg prices are far outpacing inflation, which has otherwise been trending down in recent weeks. The White House spokesman was exactly correct that this problem traces to the mandated slaughtering of chickens, many millions of them.
There is a larger context here that revolves around Bird flu, also known as H5N1. For 20 years, federal officials have warned about the coming pandemic that never seems to happen. The great fear is that H5N1 will leap in large numbers from animals to humans.
In order to prevent that, officials are mandating mass slaughtering of animals. From 2022 to 2024, more than 147 million birds across all 50 states were slaughtered by mandate in the name of infectious disease control.
A number of data points in recent weeks truly concern me, not about mass flu infections but government actions that could prove tremendously disruptive to food supplies.
There was a time when I would look at these data points and see little more than bureaucratic incompetence. These days and in light of the COVID experience, there is every reason to be more vigilant and suspicious.
Let’s walk through them.
Three days before the Trump inauguration, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a new grant to Moderna to mass produce its mRNA vaccine for Bird flu.
HHS slated approximately $590 million to Moderna “to accelerate the development of mRNA-based pandemic influenza vaccines,” said the press release, “and enhance mRNA platform capabilities so that the U.S. is better prepared to respond to other emerging infectious diseases. The award was made through the Rapid Response Partnership Vehicle (RRPV) Consortium with funding from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the HHS Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR).”
That’s some serious money, pushed out just before the inauguration. The stock price of Moderna spiked on the news of the grant.
What’s interesting is that the link to this press release is now deleted from the HHS site. Does that mean that the Trump administration has withdrawn it? We have no way of knowing for sure. There has been no official statement either way but you can be certain that if RFK, Jr. is confirmed as secretary of HHS, this grant will come under fire. It will certainly be withdrawn if he has anything to say about it.
At the very same time, the CDC crafted new testing guidelines to hunt down H5N1 among the animal population. The date was January 16 but the alert was not sent until after the inauguration. It still survives on the CDC website now. But it comes with a top tagline: “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.” What that means for this edict is anyone’s guess.
Meanwhile, just last week, Governor Hochul of New York issued a mandatory shutdown of 80 chicken markets as some kind of cautionary to check for the presence of the virus.
“Governor Kathy Hochul today announced that, as part of New York State’s continued effort to combat the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), the Department of Agriculture and Markets (AGM) has issued a new Notice and Order for live bird markets that have not had a detection of HPAI in New York City and Westchester, Suffolk, and Nassau counties. The order requires those markets to sell down all inventory, complete cleaning and disinfection procedures, and remain closed for a period of five days after cleaning and disinfection.”
One week earlier, on Jan. 17, the Georgia Department of Agriculture closed poultry auctions under the same rationale. “Today, the Georgia Department of Agriculture and the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service confirmed a positive case of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) in a commercial poultry operation located in Elbert County, Georgia. This is the first confirmed HPAI case in a commercial poultry operation in Georgia, and the fifth detection in the state of Georgia. As a result of this detection, effective immediately, all in-state poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales are suspended until further notice.”
As a final data point, there is the strange appointment of Dr. Gerald Parker, a staple within the biotech/vaccine industry and a major advocate of “One Health” theory, who was seemingly tagged by Trump to head the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy. CBS News reported on it and so did Parker’s own institution,
And yet here is what is strange. There has been no announcement about this from any source within the Trump administration. In fact, there has been no official confirmation about this at all. I corresponded with the journalist who wrote the story who said that he could not get confirmation from with the White House or Texas A&M, which raises real questions.
“One Health” seems on its face to be a reasonable view that the health of people, animals, and plants are all related. In practice it has come to mean something else, essentially a totalitarian claim by governments that they must serve in some kind of oversight relationship to all living things, crushing pathogens wherever they may appear. This of course is bound up with the vaccine industry and its new mRNA tools that allow scientists to essentially print a claimed cure in a matter of days.
Parker is perhaps the leading advocate of this view. He served with the Biden administration and his “appointment” to this new position was met with praise from Biden-era officials and others within this sprawling industry that hunts down infectious disease with the purpose of inoculating the whole of the animal and human population.
The use of testing in this case parallels very closely with the COVID experience during which the PCR test set at high cycle rates can detect the presence of virus in nearly anything, where every positive test is treated as a medically significant event even in absence of any symptoms.
During these years, the traditional distinction between exposure, infection, and cases was entirely obliterated.
Nothing seems to have changed since those days. There is every reason to be concerned about what is unfolding here and whether and to what extent the groundwork is being laid for another political disruption such as Trump faced in his first term. From January 2020, the public was treated to a crescendo of news and fear that culminated in lockdowns that diverted and ultimately ruined his first term in office.
It might seem implausible that Bird flu would be deployed in a similar manner but perhaps it is not. All the pieces are in place, from the testing to the shots to the closure methods that were used last time around. Rather than simply allowing chickens to develop natural immunities as traditional farming would do, the regulators are using extreme methods to wipe out whole flocks and herds of cattle.
In January 2020, I wrote to warn about possible lockdowns on the way. People said that I was being alarmist but they came in any case. For this reason, I’m no longer shy about confessing my worst intuitions about what is going on here. There are just too many data points firing right now to make me think that this is an accident.
The Trump administration needs to be on notice about what is developing here beneath the surface. The appointment of Gerald Parker in such a powerful position at the White House—combined with grant money and CDC testing mandates—is highly suggestive that something is brewing.
It seems completely crazy to think that the second Trump term would again be disrupted by a pandemic, whether real or imagined or wholly manufactured, but experience would suggest every reason to be concerned.
The fear of Bird flu dates far back in time, and there are records dating from 2005 of the one-and-only Anthony Fauci warning that a leap from chickens to humans could result in fatality rates of 50 percent. That never happened of course but with today’s testing equipment combined with mass testing mandates of all livestock, the possibility of actually manufacturing a pandemic is not entirely impossible.
One can hope that all the above data points are entirely coincidental and will amount to nothing more than higher prices for eggs. Experience suggests that they are not. When the food shortages arrive and regulators start mandating mRNA shots for all livestock, and then turn to the human population, we’ll regret not having taken an interest when this could be stopped.
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Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. |
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