U.S. Gov't Is Making a Vaccine for a Virus It Also Happens to Be Making More Deadly: Bird Flu
U.S. Gov't Is Making a Vaccine for a Virus It Also Happens to Be Making More Deadly: Bird Flu
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is developing a vaccine for a virus it's already making more infectious and deadly with gain-of-function experiments.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is spending $1 million of American taxpayer money to fund gain-of-function experiments on dangerous bird flu (avian influenza) viruses in collaboration with Chinese scientists, according to a new report.
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Documents obtained by watchdog group ‘The White Coat Waste Project’ confirm the research involves infecting birds with different strains of viruses to make them more infectious.
It also includes studying bird flu’s potential to “jump into mammalian hosts.”
The documents show funding for the avian virus research began in April 2021 and will continue through March 2026.
The USDA indicates the project was applied for in 2019 and approved in 2020.
Bird flu viruses that will be studied are “highly pathogenic” and able to cause neurological complications in humans.
Most of those infected with some of these strains “have become severely ill,” the report details.
Significantly, the main collaborators on the project are USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute, which is a Wuhan lab partner.
The Wuhan lab is argued to be ground zero for the COVID-19 pandemic.
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USDA Simultaneously Developing Bird Flu Vaccine
The report failed to mention that, meanwhile, as the USDA is souping up bird flu viruses, the agency is simultaneously developing a bird flu vaccine.
Researchers with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) started testing four vaccine candidates this April, according to a May 2023 press release.
However, the report did indicate the USDA is performing gain-of-function research on subtype group H5NX.
Of all the bird flu subtypes, the USDA just happens to be working on a vaccine for the H5N1 subtype, which belongs to H5NX.
The agency’s experimentation on bird flu viruses to make them more transmissible and deadly as it develops a vaccine for the virus is concerning, especially in light of recent warnings from the World Health Organization (WHO).
WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus issued a new warning this week about the likelihood of “Disease X”—a yet-unknown virus with the potential to cause a future pandemic—breaking out.
Tedros told world leaders it is “a matter of when, not if” a new pathogen and pandemic will strike.
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Former CDC Director Warns of Coming Bird Flu ‘Great Pandemic’
Former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Robert Redfield, has predicted that a coming bird flu pandemic will be much worse than COVID.
He expects the bird flu virus will “have significant mortality, in the ten to fifteen percent range.”
“I don’t believe [COVID] is the ‘great pandemic,’” he said. “I believe the great pandemic is still in the future. And that’s going to be a bird flu pandemic from man. It’s going to have significant mortality, in the ten to fifteen percent range. It’s going to be trouble. And we should get prepared for it.”
Dr. Redfield emphasized the danger of an imminent bird flu pandemic.
“I do believe that the pandemic risk is of greater risk to the national security of the United States than Korea, China, Russia, [and] Iran. And we ought to start investing proportional to that national security risk so we’re prepared. Unfortunately, we’re not more prepared today than we were when the [COVID] pandemic hit when I was CDC director. And we need to make that proportional investment so that we are prepared.”
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