Madison Area Lyme Support Group

https://theintercept.com/2022/11/01/biosafety-avian-flu/

HIGH CONTAINMENT

Lab That Created Risky Avian Flu Had “Unacceptable” Biosafety Protocols

Mara Hvistendahl

11/1/2022

Article Summary & other tidbits (See link for article)

“Someone finally convinced me to do something really, really stupid,” virologist Ron Fouchier.

• To find out if H5N1 could morph to be transmittable between humans, Foucher and his team “mutated the hell out of H5N1” and looked at how readily it would bind with cells in the respiratory tract. They found it only took 5 mutations to give it the ability to latch onto cells in the nasal and tracheal passageways.
• The “really, really stupid” part consisted of a high risk experiment letting the virus itself evolve to gain killer capacity. They put the mutated virus in the nose of a ferret and then put the infected material from the first ferret into the nose of the second ferret. After repeating this 10 times, H5N1 became as transmissible as the seasonal flu.  
• This means the virus is airborne and reassortment with mammalian viruses isn’t required for it to evolve to spread through the air. According to virology professor Ab Osterhaus, the mutations are out there but they haven’t gotten together yet.  He also flatly stated that eradicating the flu is impossible.
• Experts admit they are clueless on how viruses spread, although recently the worse purveyor of misinformation, the WHO, flip-flopped and is now admitting the COVID virus and other germs spread ‘through the air,” when in 2020 the agency tweeted: “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” There’s no definition of particle size and no cutoff for these supposed infectious respiratory droplets (IRPs) which is quite convenient for tyrants and mask lovers.  This article gives all the credit to the worthless measures that imposed and ignore the fact that the reason the flu, RSV and other respiratory infections disappeared during COVID is because they counted EVERYTHING as COVID!
• ‘Professor Lockdown,’ Neil Ferguson, the man behind the Imperial College model that erroneously predicted a tidal wave of COVID deaths in the US that allowed politicians to lock down the population, was also the man behind a number of similarly over-the-top mortality projections in previous public health scares, including wildly faulty death forecasts for the 2005 bird flu scare and the 2009 swine flu scamdemic test run. Ferguson is actually on record admitting that lingering immunity in older populations reduces the spread.
• The research making H5N1 airborne was so controversial that a Dutch court required Fouchier to secure an export permit before he could publish his findings. The permit was designed to prevent the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The rules include dangerous flu viruses and related technical data. At the time, the backlash for this research was so potent that Fouchier, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and other prominent flu scientists voluntarily agreed to pause the transmissibility work. NIAID funded both labs and Fouchier was also a sub-awardee on a grant to a U.S. institution.  
• After a biosafety staffer in Madison spoke to an audience to dispel what she called myths about safety, Kawaoka’s lab saw two accidents just a week apart involving lab-created flu viruses.  This caused a 6-week flurry of spats between high level administrators on both sides.
• It must be noted that The Intercept obtained over 5,500 pages covering 18 years detailing lab accidents reported to NIH that show various animal bites, escapes, needlesticks, equipment malfunctions, and even some human infections.
• The NIH’s reaction to the accidents was more extreme than in any other instance examined. After many other accidents, including for some involving potential pandemic pathogens, the same bureaucrats responded with brief thank-you emails. In a few cases, they asked for corrective actions. In no other instance did they threaten to withhold funding like they did with Kawaoka.