U.S. 'Relaxes' Biolab Regulations for Handling Deadly Pathogens Despite Ex-CDC Chief's Bird Flu Pandemic Warning
Reuters report raises possibility of "accidental spread of a deadly disease" and "deliberate attempts to use the pathogen as a bioweapon."
The United States has “temporarily relaxed strict guidelines” for handling, storing, and transporting dangerous H5N1 bird flu samples, following a request from the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL), a U.S. government-funded nonprofit membership organization.
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The move to loosen pathogen containment regulations even amid worries of a coming pandemic comes just after former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Dr. Robert Redfield’s latest bird flu pandemic warning.
Per Reuters:
U.S. government officials have temporarily relaxed strict guidelines on how public health laboratories and healthcare facilities handle, store and transport H5N1 bird flu samples, which are considered high-risk pathogens, in response to the recent spread of the virus to dairy cattle.
The revised guidance, which has not been previously reported, came at the request of the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL), which represents state and local labs that monitor and detect public health threats, according to interviews and correspondence seen by Reuters.
APHL’s executive director, Scott Becker, claims his group made the request in order to “prepare for the possibility that H5N1 avian influenza, or bird flu, acquires the ability to become easily transmitted among people.”
Reuters:
The U.S. government strictly regulates the handling of so-called select agents, which include H5N1, Ebola, ricin and anthrax. All select agent material typically must be destroyed, decontaminated or transferred to a registered select agent facility within seven days of notification.
Under the exemption, ordered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, labs handling samples identified as highly pathogenic avian influenza have a month to perform many of those tasks, reducing the bureaucratic burden and allowing lab staff to focus on testing, Becker said.
Effective since May 3, the U.S. government has temporarily modified H5N1 handling requirements for 180 days, affecting public health labs and wastewater testing facilities reportedly in order to aid in virus tracking.
The USDA—which has been performing gain-of-function research on H5N1 bird flu viruses and developing an H5N1 bird flu vaccine (here)—claims it had “determined that the public health labs and facilities established good cause for exemption from certain requirements.”
The Reuters report raises the possibility of “deliberate attempts to use the pathogen as a bioweapon”:
Safely handling dangerous pathogens presents a dual challenge for regulators, who want to respond to emerging outbreaks while preventing the accidental spread of a deadly disease and avert any deliberate attempts to use the pathogen as a bioweapon.
Other APHL leaders claim a staffing issue instigated the request:
Ewa King, former director of the State of Rhode Island’s public health lab who now oversees infectious diseases and other public health programs at the APHL, said the request was designed to cut bureaucracy and make the best use of laboratory resources in the event of an outbreak in people.
“If we had to be filling out these forms, we would be slowing down the testing, because there’s only so many people that we have to dedicate to these tasks,” she said.
The report noted the Biden administration’s promise to “provide nearly $200 million to fight the spread of the virus among dairy cows in an effort to contain outbreaks that have raised concerns about human H5N1 infections.”
In March, Congress passed legislation earmarking over $1 billion for a future pandemic involving a zoonic influenza virus, like H5N1 bird flu.
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Former CDC Director Warns of Coming Bird Flu Pandemic
Dr. Redfield, a virologist who served as CDC Director and the Administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry from 2018 to 2021, told NewsNation earlier this month he is “obviously most worried about bird flu.”
“Right now, it takes five amino acid changes for it to be effectively infecting humans. That’s a pretty heavy species barrier. But this virus is already now in 26 mammal species, as you most recently saw: cattle,” he said in the interview. “But in the laboratory, I could make it highly infectious for humans in just months.”
“That’s the real threat. That’s the real biosecurity threat that these university labs are doing bio-experiments that are intentionally modifying viruses—and I think bird flu is going to be the cause of the Great Pandemic—where they’re teaching these viruses to be more infectious for humans.”
You can watch the fuller NewsNation segment below:
In an earlier interview with Centerpoint TV, Redfield predicted the coming influenza pandemic would be much worse than COVID.
“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.”
Treatment for Bird Flu
Early in the pandemic, U.S. authorities allowed novel COVID-19 jabs to receive an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), allowing the drugs with no long-term safety data to be distributed to the public even though they hadn’t received full approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
But an EUA “can only be granted when no adequate, approved, available alternatives exist,” according to Yale Medicine.
Safe and effective drugs like Budesonide and Ivermectin have since been shown to be effective against COVID, raising questions about the EUA’s necessity.
As a result of the authorization, the COVID shots ended up killing about 17 million people worldwide, according to scientists representing the Canada-based nonprofit ‘CORRELATION Research in the Public Interest.’
In the face of a potential incoming bird flu pandemic, we already know antivirals like Xofluza and broad-spectrum anti-parasitics like Ivermectin—both fully FDA-approved—are safe and effective medicines against bird flu, removing the need for a novel vaccine treatment against the disease that might require an EUA.
Dr. Richard Bartlett, a 30-year Texas emergency room doctor, criticizes the U.S. government’s past handling of COVID measures.
“During COVID, hospital patients died alone after being denied family visits while fighting for their lives, scared and isolated,” Dr. Bartlett told this website.
“Nursing home residents were denied visits from loved ones, even if both they and their family members were healthy. Everyone was forced to wear flimsy masks made in China and maintain 6 feet of social distancing without scientific evidence. Some hospitals even placed plastic bags over the heads of patients who tested positive for COVID in the ER. Over a million American deaths were attributed to COVID. Many were coerced into receiving experimental shots to keep their jobs during the pandemic.”
Bartlett’s comment on social distancing comes the same day it was revealed that Dr. Francis Collins, who helped lead the government’s COVID-19 pandemic response as the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), confirmed the “6 feet apart” rule was “not based on science.”
Bartlett then took aim at the U.S. government’s decision to ease lab regulations just before a possible H5N1 influenza pandemic.
“Former CDC Director Redfield says bird flu could cause 30 times the death and destruction of COVID,” he said.
“Is this the time to ease lab safety measures by the USDA for a potential bird flu pandemic? Did the USDA receive a letter from Senator Ernst asking if they colluded with Chinese scientists to make bird flu vaccines with US taxpayer dollars? Did the letter from Senator Joni Ernst ask about gain-of-function research on bird flu to make it more contagious and dangerous to humans? Common sense would dictate increasing preventive public safety measures when a disaster is anticipated, not relaxing lab safety measures. Has anyone heard that the FBI says COVID may be the result of a lab leak or worse?”
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