Everything "That Friend" Wants You to Know About H5N1 Bird Flu

In their typical Friday news dump, the CDC confirmed that H5N1 bird flu has infected a child in California. It’s the first.

It won’t be the last.

This news comes after the virus hospitalized a healthy teenager in Canada. Even as we see growing evidence of respiratory spread among humans, health officials insist there is “no evidence” of that so far, while refusing to talk about mitigation measures like N95 masks and clean air technologies, steps that should already be in place against existing diseases. Remember, these statements come from the same network of agencies that failed to catch H5N1 in cattle and spent the last year largely watching it spread while playing biosecurity theater.

It’s also in pigs now.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack once said his agency would “corner” the virus. He was wrong. Instead, the virus cornered us. We now have multiple clades threatening spillover from multiple directions. As Katherine Eban confirmed in a bombshell Vanity Fair report, these same agencies have also presided over a culture of complicity and fear, censoring their own veterinarians and forcing them to choose between their careers and speaking the truth.

Experts are beginning to predict H5N1 could start spreading among humans at scale this flu season. One healthcare worker even said, “My medical billing app just added it, novel avian influenza is now a billing option when I code acute hypoxemic respiratory failure. It was never there before last week.” You can always count on the healthcare industrial complex to be on their toes as agencies like the CDC and the FDA behave increasingly like PR agencies, telling the public to wash their hands while they roll back infection protections in hospitals and stall progress on promising vaccines by companies like Novavax.

Last month, the CDC also announced that they’re partnering with Walgreens to develop a test for bird flu in humans. As their release says, the program wants to prepare for “the symptoms and risk factors for infection with H5N1 bird flu among higher-risk populations,” including dairy and poultry workers. Bird flu promises us a pandemic as the incoming president makes plans to infuse our top healthcare institutions with an army of conspiracy theorists that includes Janette Nesheiwat as surgeon general, a woman who has written about “miracles” in medicine and sells her own brand of sketchy diet pills.

We’ve seen this movie before.

Not only did we watch these same mistakes five years ago, the 1918 flu appeared mild at first, so mild that doctors around the world dismissed it as harmless. Then it mutated into something highly contagious and deadly. The Woodrow Wilson administration devoted their energy to censoring information and manipulating public sentiment instead of preparing. As historian Guy Beiner notes in Pandemic Re-Awakenings, the 1918 flu caused more devastation than currently understood, with higher mortality and disability tolls than reported, and it likely altered the course of human history, beginning with the rise of fascism.

It might be about to happen again.

This time, a bird flu will ignite a pandemic in a global population whose immune systems are already beaten down by another disease.

As this virus continues to make headlines, we’re all left wondering what’s going to happen, whether it will become airborne, whether it’s safe to consume meat or dairy products, and what we should do to prepare.

We’re not getting clear answers.

So, here they are: