Why The Biggest Threat from Bird Flu is Neoliberal Propaganda

A nurse took her 12-year-old immunocompromised daughter to a farmer's market. They both wore masks. Unfortunately, two vendors started shouting and cursing at her daughter, who ran away in tears. That's what we get from the crowd who wants to protect children. That's how they act. They act this way because they eat out on a constant stream of misinformation about public health, by bad-faith "scientists."

You've probably seen the spate of articles telling us we're not ready for the next pandemic, which is running at us full speed with its sword drawn. Bird flu has been decimating wild bird and mammal populations around the world for four years now. Now it has found a reservoir in our dairy cattle, and the World Health Organization describes its pandemic potential as a certainty. Meanwhile, our public health officials stand around like the clueless guards in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Our hospitals are giving surgical patients Covid infections and killing them. They're doing absolutely nothing to control the spread. So it's true, we're in worse shape than we were five years ago.

You know what doesn't help?

The New York Post recently ran an op-ed declaring that the biggest threat from our latest pandemic doesn't come from the virus or the government's tepid response. It doesn't come from the outrageous negligence of an industry that fed chicken litter to cows, knowing full well that bird flu was spreading on poultry farms. It comes from overreaction.

How predictable...

The author offers up a biased, distorted history of the Covid pandemic as an example of what we shouldn't do this time. Although he claims to be advocating for a calmer approach to this crisis, he's simply spreading his own version of fear. Don't fear the virus, he says.

Fear precautions.

The article itself does something we've talked about. Sociologists describe it as spreading memory ignorance. By offering up a distorted version of the past, they hope to shape the future. The elites desperately want us all to keep eating hamburgers, drinking milk, and going to work with our smiles plastered on while letting bird flu rip through the population. They want to skip any phase where we try to control the spread. They don't care about the mortality rate. It could be 10 percent or 50 percent.

That doesn't matter to them, only profits.

The op-ed has strange timing.

Just a few days ago, yet another major study appeared in a scientific journal underlying the severe long-term harm Covid does to people who "survive" the acute phase of infection. Three years later, they're still facing an elevated risk of death from heart attacks, strokes, seizures, and organ failure. The authors are major advocates with large followings. So the article is gaining a lot of attention. So, it makes perfect sense that this new information would cause some stress for the elitists who own outlets like The New York Post. It's totally expected they would print their own rebuttal.

It's a lazy rebuttal.

This piece does nothing but repeat the tired lie surrounding Covid's 99 percent survival rate. As any good scientist will tell you, the survival rate for a disease depends on a range of factors. It depends on your age and overall health. It depends on your access to treatment. It depends on what time frame you're looking at. It depends on how you classify someone's cause of death. If you pass out from Covid syncope and split your head open on a trash can, did Covid kill you, or did the fall? If Covid shreds your arteries and you have a heart attack six months later, do we blame Covid or your coffee habit?

That's the game Covid minimizers play.

It's the same game Amazon publicists play when someone dies from a heat stroke in their shipping centers. They're so quick to point out this or that worker didn't technically die on the job. They died at the hospital.

See?

There's so much evidence on Covid's long term harm, it's hard to keep track of. We have dozens and dozens of major studies now showing the damage this virus does to your brain, to your heart, and to your immune system. That's just scratching the surface.

It's true, our children are struggling in school now. Covid minimizing articles maliciously attribute that to lockdowns and closures, hoping to skirt the more unsettling truth. Our public officials rushed kids and teens back to school before vaccinating them. They didn't spend the billions of dollars given to them to upgrade the air quality in their classrooms. In some cases, governors bragged about reopening schools without mitigations.

It has been a disaster.

A range of public health grifters promised everyone Covid posed no risk to their children. They were wrong. Jonathan Howard chronicles the stream of lies we were told in We Want Them Infected.

We now have overwhelming evidence that Covid does the same harm to children as adults. They don't display the same immediate symptoms. So they don't look as sick, at first.

You don't need a peer-reviewed article to see the results. Parents are flooding social media with stories about their children's constant illness now. It happens all year long. Test scores have plummeted. Teachers are shocked at the behavioral problems they're witnessing.

If you want the truth, here it is:

The Biden administration campaigned on science and safety. Once elected, they shifted away from that and focused all of their attention on reopening the economy. They downplayed and minimized the threat Covid still posed to everyone. So if you want to get angry at the government, get angry at them for lying to us about Covid, not for overreacting.

They didn't.

These lazy op-eds are doing exactly what sociologists talk about when they discuss collective amnesia. Our politicians and corporate ruling class know they've sacrificed the health of entire generations on the altar of the economy. It didn't even work. The economy is terrible, and it's because of Covid. A handful of economists even tried to tell them letting Covid spread would cost us trillions of dollars. Nobody in power listened.

Now the elites want to exonerate themselves and dodge accountability. Worse, they also want to shirk the responsibility of protecting everyone from a looming bird flu pandemic, which will do equal if not greater harm. And finally, I hate to tell you this, but pandemics are the new normal.

Expect one every few years.

This country originally allocated tens of billions of dollars toward upgrading our schools and offices to address this threat. So did many others. Politicians squandered it on forgivable payroll protection loans that rich people spent on yachts and cars. They also squandered it on militarizing the police. Look at all the cop cities going up around the country.

That's our clean air money.

That's where it went.

The elites want nothing more than for us all to smile our way through a bird flu pandemic while they hide in their bunkers.

As long as grifters keep spreading lies and misinformation about Covid, we have to keep speaking up. We're watching the elites change the story in real-time, precisely because they don't want to cough up the billions we need to protect ourselves during a future where more and more airborne diseases, not to mention pollution, slowly kill us all dead.

That's why we keep clapping back.

The past shapes the future.

Always.

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