Bird Flu ‘Fearmongering’ as CDC Finds ‘No Evidence’ of Human-to-Human Transmission

Lumen News

‘No evidence’ of human-to-human transmission of bird flu (H5N1) has been identified, says a new study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and published Tuesday at the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

The study concluded:

In the cases identified to date, A(H5N1) viruses generally caused mild illness, mostly conjunctivitis, of short duration, predominantly in U.S. adults exposed to infected animals; most patients received prompt antiviral treatment. No evidence of human-to-human A(H5N1) transmission was identified. PPE use among occupationally exposed persons was suboptimal, which suggests that additional strategies are needed to reduce exposure risk. (Funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

“All the case patients who were exposed to infected poultry were involved in depopulation activities,” CDC also reports.

Harvey Risch, M.D., professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine, told Lumen-News the CDC study “shows that the human bird flu cases that have occurred to date are essentially in people with workplace exposures to infected animals.”

Risch, the chief epidemiologist for The Wellness Company, also said:

These cases have generally been mild and treatable. There has been no secondary spread from them. Thus, the public fearmongering statements various people have been making must have some other motivation or incentive rather than pretending to be informative.

The “fearmongering” has indeed been ramping up.

On December 18, Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a State of Emergency over the H5N1 bird flu having been detected in dairy cows in southern California.

“[N]o person-to-person spread of Bird Flu has been detected in California and nearly all infected individuals had exposure to infected cattle,” the declaration also stated.

Since then, egg prices have soared to nearly $9.00 per dozen in the state, a 70% increase since November.

“According to the USDA, the sharp increase in price is due to nine confirmed cases of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) across the state in December 2024 alone, which led to the depopulation of almost six million layers,” reported WATTPoultry, which provides news and analysis for the global poultry industry.

In a recent Substack column, scientist, physician, and vaccine expert Robert Malone, M.D. laid out what may happen as the federal government gears up for a bird flu pandemic:

It seems pretty obvious that the government is gearing up to encourage or even mandate poultry, dairy farmers as well as their workers, and maybe even cattle ranchers to be vaccinated. Of course, all hospital and medical care professionals will be mandated to comply. The elderly and immunocompromised will also be encouraged to vaccinate against the HIGHLY PATHOGENIC (to birds…) avian flu.

Malone warns the federal government is likely to begin stockpiling its “vaccines” to be given free of charge to those who qualify.

“Next will be the requirement for all lactating cattle crossing state borders to be vaccinated,” he anticipates. “The USDA will track down as many small farmers and milk producers as possible so that the proper registration/ear tagging of cattle occurs.”

Malone urges Americans to prepare for mass vaccination of food animals:

If you don’t want to buy meat or drink milk from cattle vaccinated with an mRNA “vaccine,” it is prudent to locate a local supplier now. When the government rolls out these programs, you likely will be scrambling – if you don’t have clean sources for your food now.

“As the government throws money at these new vaccines, there is no evidence that it will stop the transmission or even spread of this virus in cattle or people,” he asserts, adding that Big Agriculture’s “factory farming” is the crux of the problem. Bird flu and the fearmongering that revs up hysteria actually benefits mega-farms:

As of July 2024, over 100 million chickens and turkeys have been culled in the United States alone since the outbreak began in 2022, estimates are that this has cost the US taxpayer almost one billion dollars. The problem is that modern chicken factories house 20,000 to 40,000 chickens each. They are little mutant virus factories.

“This all costs money, requires many bull sh*t jobs, and will make our milk, meat and eggs more expensive,” Malone warns. “Furthermore, locally sourced products will become more challenging to obtain. Maybe this is by design.”

Among those stoking fear of human bird flu cases is former Baltimore health official and ex-Planned Parenthood CEO Leana Wen, M.D., who frequently served as a COVID-19 “expert” in left-leaning news outlets.

Joe Biden should be rapidly instituting a testing protocol and getting a bird flu vaccine approved quickly before Donald Trump is inaugurated, Wen urged on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, citing an avian flu “mortality rate” of 52% based on historical data.

[Ed. The 52% mortality rate is misleading. It actually represents the death rate of European patients admitted to hospital for H5N1 pneumonia – not the death rate of patients infected with H5N1 – see https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(24)00460-2/fulltext. In the US the current death rate from H5N1 infection is 0%. See Dr Malone’s comment below]

“We should be having rapid tests, home tests, available to all farm workers, to their families, for the clinicians taking care of them, so that we aren’t waiting for public labs and CDC labs to tell us what’s bird flu or not,” Wen urged alarmingly.

“And the second very important thing is this is not like the beginning of COVID, where we were dealing with a new virus, we didn’t have a vaccine,” she added. “There actually is a vaccine developed already against H5N1. The Biden administration has contracted with manufacturers to make almost 5 million doses of the vaccine. However, they have not asked the FDA to authorize the vaccine.”

“They could get this authorized now, and also get the vaccine out so – and to farm workers and to vulnerable people,” she pressed. “I think that’s the right approach because we don’t know what the Trump administration is going to be doing around bird flu. If they have people coming in with anti-vaccine stances, could they hold up vaccine authorization?”

As Lumen-News reported in January 2023, Wen admitted in her column at the Washington Post that hospitals had been “overcounting COVID deaths and hospitalizations,” a statement to which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, responded on X, “A year ago, this was a conspiracy theory that would get you censored…”

Despite her very late admission, Wen still insisted there was “no truth to the conspiracy theory that hospitals are trying to exaggerate coronavirus numbers for some nefarious purpose.”

As the report observed, however, in May 2020, Fox News had already noted economic assessments revealed hospitals throughout the country had been receiving more federal funds to treat Medicare patients diagnosed with, or presumed to have become infected with, COVID-19. Additionally:

Dr. Summer McGee, dean of the School of Health Sciences at the University of New Haven, also told Fox News the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act “authorized a temporary 20 percent increase in reimbursements from Medicare for COVID-19 patients to account for both anticipated and unanticipated increases in the cost of care for these medically complex patients.”

In July 2021, Wen revealed her deep disdain for Americans who chose not to get the shots.

“Frankly, we know that we can’t trust the unvaccinated,” she told Democracy Now, accusing unvaxxed Americans of “walking around without masks and, in fact, that’s what led to the surge that we’re seeing.”

Of course, many studies had already been performed at that point that demonstrated masks were ineffective at preventing transmission of the virus.

Several months later, Wen’s full embrace of mandatory masks and COVID shots for all Americans drew a barrage of criticism.

“There are privileges associated with being an American,” she told CNN. “That if you wish to have these privileges, you need to get vaccinated. Travel, and having the right to travel in our state, it’s not a constitutional right as far as I know to board a plane.”

Wen even suggested life needs to be “hard” for Americans who refused the COVID shots:

“Generally, the currently circulating avian influenza strain in the US does not include any cases of human-to-human transmission,” Malone also affirmed Tuesday as he wrote about the “current bird flu ‘psyop.’”

“And the current mortality, with over 60 cases identified, is 0%. NOT 50%,” he asserted, adding:

“This “pandemic” is nothing more than an artifact of their newly developed protocols to test cattle, poultry, pets, people, and wildlife on a massive scale for avian influenza. In years past, this was not even considered. In the past, the USG did fund a massive testing and surveillance program called “Biowatch”. That program was a colossal failure and a massive waste of money. Billions of dollars.”

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Bird Flu ‘Fearmongering’ as CDC Finds ‘No Evidence’ of Human-to-Human Transmission