Wait a Minute. Do They Actually Want a Bird Flu Pandemic? A Look at the Preparations.

The bird flu crisis continues to evolve, and it feels like we’re now getting slightly more urgent updates from the media. There’s several reasons for this shift, one being that we’ve crossed a threshold where official agencies like the CDC can no longer deny we’re facing a serious problem.

In many ways, it has become too late to stop.

But they’re still failing.

For example: Researchers could have an actual bronze bullet against H5N1 bird flu. (We’ll talk about that in a minute.) I don’t believe in silver bullets, but this drug would make a real difference. Despite that, governments are giving an overwhelming share of resources to vaccines, replicating previous oversights. Of course, silver bullet or not, governments should be racing to make up for the last five years of inaction to put clean air and sensible mask policies in place.

(Spoiler alert, they’re not.)

There’s a recent psychological concept that’s been getting more and more attention over the last few years, something called weaponized incompetence. It happens when someone intentionally acts incapable because they simply don’t want to do something. Time and again, our governments demonstrate this tendency when they can choose to act, but simply don’t. As one person recently put it:

Please stop assuming our government is incompetent. You have to operate as if their choices are intentional.

They are.

Meanwhile:

A child in San Francisco has become the 67th human case of bird flu since last April. Once again, they don’t know how the infection happened—which suggests much more transmission is going under the radar. The CDC has finally started “urging” hospitals to run more precise tests to tell H5N1 apart from other strains of flu, and to do it faster. Georgia recently suspended the sale of poultry after confirming bird flu in a commercial egg farm. More and more outlets are putting pressure on the incoming Trump administration to prepare for the problem, minimizing the role the outgoing one played in letting it spiral out of control in the first place. Still, it’s worth taking a look at who, exactly, is doing what.

Despite the total failure of U.S. politicians to get a handle on the problem, it actually looks like they are planning for an H5N1 bird flu pandemic—just not in a way that would meaningfully serve the public. As Sarah Kendzior and others have pointed out, the Trump mafia absolutely intends to tank the economy at some point. They love tanking the economy, because they always benefit from the volatility. They’re chaos agents. Look no further than the latest TikTok crisis for proof. They don’t care what it does to the millions of influencers and businesses who rely on social media to boost their products and incomes. They’ll shut it all down, simply because they want to be the sole merchants of our private data. They also want a western billionaire in charge of TikTok because it remains the only platform where you won’t get silenced for talking about real political or public health issues. As Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell pointed out nearly three years ago, the bipartisan crusade against TikTok originated with a smear campaign engineered by Meta. Who has been the worst about censoring information regarding Long Covid?

Why, that would be Meta.

Western billionaires want to control our data. They also want to control the information we consume about looming threats to our health. Until then, they’ll join Chuck Schumer in wringing their hands, acting as if they didn’t engineer the very crisis from which they now seek salvation.

It’s really that simple.

So, don’t be surprised if Trump and his rich friends court raw milk and magical thinking precisely because they want another major pandemic to sneak up on us. More than anyone, they’ve gone out of their way to make sure they have the tools, while the rest of us don’t. When it comes to the new administration:

That feels… intentional.