There was some sad and potentially alarming news coming out of Mexico this week, where an unnamed 59-year-old man passed away in a hospital. After an investigation, doctors announced that the patient had died from a type of bird flu (H5N2) that had not previously been seen in humans. Unlike the more frequently discussed H5N1 strain that shows up in cows, H5N2 is most commonly seen in poultry populations. However, the patient in question did not work in the poultry industry and had no known connections to the birds according to his family. This news reached us during the same week that the sainted Anthony Fauci has been providing testimony about his involvement with the laboratory in Wuhan and the true origins of the COVID-19 virus. The two stories may be related in ways that are not immediately obvious to everyone. (Associated Press)
A man’s death in Mexico was caused by a strain of bird flu called H5N2 that has never before been found in a human, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.
The WHO said it wasn’t clear how the man became infected, although H5N2 has been reported in poultry in Mexico.
There are numerous types of bird flu. H5N2 is not the same strain that has infected multiple dairy cow herds in the U.S. That strain is called H5N1 and three farmworkers have gotten mild infections.
Before anyone begins raising concerns about the possibility of a new, deadly pandemic, there are a few details about the death of the man in Mexico that are notable. Doctors are attributing his death to H5N2 and it appears that he had definitely contracted it. But it seems like a bit of a stretch to say that the bird flu killed him. The man had reportedly been bedridden for weeks and was in very poor health for quite a while. He was suffering from chronic kidney failure, diabetes, and high blood pressure. Had he been in more robust health typical of a man of his age, he might have shrugged off the bird flu as most people do when they contract any species of the flu. In his case, the bird flu may have simply pushed him over the edge.
So how does this story relate to Fauci and Wuhan? Before beginning, I will remind everyone that I am not a doctor and have had no formal training in this field, so take this with an appropriate grain of salt. But I cover this story frequently and have had to do a lot of research. I believe that the history of the bird flu should tell us something important about the origins of COVID and the gain of function research that was clearly taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded by Fauci’s office.
First, consider the fact that doctors and researchers have known about the bird flu in its various forms for quite a while. H5N1 was first detected in the 90s and scientists have been tracking and monitoring it closely ever since. Its true origins will likely never be known beyond the belief that it first showed up in avian species as the name suggests. At some point, it made the jump from birds to cows, taking decades before it became a widespread problem. That process of migration is known as zoonotic spillover. It happens slowly because every virus evolves over time to use all of the available resources it finds in the host. Random mutations produce increasingly well-adapted variations that are more successful, reproduce more readily, and become more powerful and sometimes deadly as a result. But it takes time. In the decades that we’ve known about the H5N1 bird flu virus, it has infected just three dairy farm workers in the United States, none of whom died.
But that’s not what happened with SARS-CoV-2. If patient zero had contracted COVID after eating a pangolin or a bat, the virus should have been struggling just to survive in its new human host. The person probably wouldn’t have even become ill enough to bother seeing a doctor. Yet it wasn’t. One person was infected in the vicinity of Wuhan followed by another and then dozens and hundreds more. In almost no time at all it was aboard planes headed for North America and the rest of the world. COVID came out of the gate locked and loaded and ready to run wild in the human body. People were dying, though it was thankfully only a relatively tiny percentage of patients with underlying conditions. How does that not speak to gain of function meddling?
Yet the government, at the direction of Dr. Fauci, did its level best to shut down any mention of the lab leak theory. Prominent virologists had their social media accounts shut down after studying the virus and saying that it demonstrated the hallmarks of being modified. Citizens who brought up the possibility were hounded and accused of being conspiracy theorists who were spreading misinformation. Pointing to evidence of the lab leak theory made you a racist with a hatred of the Chinese. To what purpose? Was it all just to prevent Anthony Fauci from having to admit what he’d been up to? Were they afraid of angering the Chinese by suggesting they had been messing around with potentially lethal, biological weapons of mass destruction? Were we afraid that people might find out that we’ve been working on the same type of things ourselves? I have the feeling that this story is far from over, and it’s not going to end well for anyone. But the one thing I’ve become increasingly sure of is that Dr. Fauci needs to be held accountable and his lies given to Congress under oath should not be allowed to stand.
