So many people made bank (both power and money) during the last pandemic that they’re already preparing for a new one. The bit about monkeypox (remember that health emergency only a year ago?) didn’t really go well, so they’re reverting to the fear of infectious disease, this time the old standby H5N1: the dreaded bird flu.
The disease panickers can rely on all their favored institutions to join them in this panic parade. The World Health Organization (WHO) is already preparing a global freak-out, having released a report on H5N1 in January. And get this: The disease modelers are hard at work explaining how lockdowns can prevent half of humanity from dying.
“It comes as a dozen people in Cambodia are suspected of being infected with H5N1 in the same province where an 11-year-old girl died on Wednesday—raising fears the virus may even be spreading from human to human.”
In the big picture, there’s something utterly insane about this whole focus on infectious disease. Compared with the whole history of humanity, it has never been less of a problem than it is today. We’re great at therapeutics, so long as government allows us to have access. This is excellent because goodness knows that the vaccines haven’t lived up to their promise.
Sanitation systems are vastly improved and so too have our systems for hygiene and diet. We’re vastly more protected than we were two centuries ago. Small things such as getting rid of horse waste in cities have made a massive difference.
Most of all, our immune systems have never been better, thanks to global exposure. It began about a century ago with improved travel technology and immigration. The whole of humanity began to upgrade and scale its resistance. The immune system truly does have magical powers to build protection against trillions of pathogens, and it has worked magnificently.
And yet at this very moment in history, what do people fear the most? Infectious disease. This is because the industry has become so lucrative for powerful people. Governments love it now that they’ve experimented with lockdowns, which allow them to invoke emergency powers to get rid of all law and liberty and better control the population.
This is the real reason for the relentless focus on infectious disease. Meanwhile, the actual problem of chronic disease—which lasts and lasts and eschews easy cures—has never vexed humanity more. The amount of ill health all around us owing to poor diet and sedentary lifestyles, combined with substance abuse, is easily on display in any public gathering.
You might think that a serious focus on public health would take on obesity, drug abuse, and lack of exercise and sunlight—actual crisis-level problems that are driving lifespans lower and lower. But no: Government wants us locked in our homes and masked up in fear of something external to us! It’s all bonkers.
- Boston Globe: “Is the bird flu the next pandemic?”
- New Republic: “When to Panic about the Bird Flu?”
- The Atlantic: “Bird Flu Leaves the World With an Existential Choice”
- The Wall Street Journal: “America Is Losing the Epic Battle Against the Bird Flu”
Did you know that fear of the bird flu dates back many decades? In 2005 and 2006, another attempt was made to drum up panic about this.
George W. Bush was president. After 9/11, he lived in panic of anything and everything. In the spring of 2005, an unusual number of bird deaths were reported in Vietnam. The strain was a new form of the endlessly mutating H5N1 bird flu. The great unknown was whether and to what extent it would affect the human population. To be safe, the government of Vietnam ordered the killing of 1.2 million birds, and over time, 140 million birds in the region were either killed or died from the disease.
It was nowhere near reaching the United States or the human population generally (and it never did), but Bush was in no mood to ignore the precautionary principle. Imaginations ran wild since birds can fly anywhere they want, ignoring all travel restrictions and controls, potentially infecting the entire world in completely uncontrollable ways. Then as now, officials were absolutely rocked by the possibility of invasion by an enemy that they could neither see nor control.
The White House got busy with plans, holding meetings, and soliciting advice from all departments in the government along with many private experts, including traditional public health specialists and also the new form of disease modelers now competing for attention.
On Nov. 5, 2005, Bush gave a press conference in which he released the pandemic plan to deal with an “unprecedented outbreak.”
By January 2006, H5N1 had been blamed for several child deaths in Turkey. The alarm machine kicked in. The tone was perfectly set by a media apparatus that had only recently discovered the capacity for pandemic threats to drive ratings.
“Society just can’t accept the idea that 50 percent of the population could die,” he said. “And I think we have to face that possibility.”
Hey, the world’s leading expert says so! He further noted that he has started storing a three-month supply of food and water in his home.
“Well, Americans need to know that it is a threat, a real threat. It is an unpredictable infection, a pandemic flu, which really means a kind of flu to which the American public or the whole world, the global population has not been exposed to before. It is very different from the seasonal flu. ... Right now, there have been 112 cases in people with 57 deaths. So that’s about a 50 percent mortality.”
Again, half of humanity could die!
In the end, nothing happened. The grand plan for national power was never deployed because there never emerged a plausible rationale for doing so. H5N1 even dropped off the list of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) threats. Now, however, it’s back!
This new song and dance might not catch on. In fact, it’s possible that Americans will see straight through this baloney and not comply. But one never knows for sure. The infectious-disease ploy has been the greatest success for governments in many generations. They aren’t going to let go of it anytime soon.
What should you do about the bird flu? Do like the Amish: Turn off the TV, eat fresh meat and vegetables (perhaps even raised on local farms), get outdoors, and get some exercise. That’s your best protection against pandemics real and imagined.
