The Gears Turn Again
The Pandemic Threat Machine
On Wednesday, the CDC announced the arrival of severe H5N1 bird flu in a US patient.
December 18, 2024-- A patient has been hospitalized with a severe case of avian influenza A(H5N1) virus ("H5N1 bird flu") infection in Louisiana. This marks the first instance of severe illness linked to the virus in the United States. The case was confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday, December 13. Since April 2024, there have been a total of 61 reported human cases of H5 bird flu reported in the United States.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/m1218-h5n1-flu.html
The Guardian reported:
The first person in the US to develop severe illness from H5N1 bird flu has been hospitalized in Louisiana, officials at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed on Wednesday.
Predictably, alongside this reportage was paired an opinion piece, entitled: “Bird flu is a real pandemic threat. Are we prepared for the worst?”
Meryl Nass quickly posted a commentary, as did several other Substack writers.
Nass points out that the purported genome of the virus that supposedly infected the patient is attributed to a genotype detected only in wild birds, highlighting the needless culling of hundreds of thousands of chickens.
Nass observes: “For unknown reasons, the US government treats it [bird flu] as if it is still a dire threat.”
And yet, the reasons aren’t an unknown at all. There’s an agenda at play.
Indeed, Gavin Newsome’s administration has taken the opportunity to sound the alarm, and feed the needless hysteria, declaring a state of emergency driven by purported cases in California dairy cows. This also comes on the heels of increasing hysteria around the exaggerated risks of raw milk.
What this represents, is the control grid attempting to tighten its grip on food. Beyond that, these ‘crises’ inevitably become economic opportunities, as there is always profit to be made through the economy of pandemic threat. Surveillance, testing, research, vaccines. Rinse. Repeat.
It’s a mechanized behemoth, steered by the wealthiest ‘elites’, armored in propaganda, rolling forward, like a juggernaut: the Pandemic Threat Machine.
There’s certainly a lot of alarmism and money flowing now around bird flu. It’s like watching sharks gather as chum is tossed into the water. There’s so much hoopla, it’s like everyone is waiting for the drop of the golden viral ball on New Year’s Eve in Times Square.
Maybe that’s why Peter Hotez is so giddy.
Parse the language
Let’s step back and examine the CDC’s December 18th announcement. Consider this sentence. It’s very carefully worded, and telling.
“This marks the first instance of severe illness LINKED TO the virus in the United States.”
The first instance of severe disease LINKED TO the virus.
The phrasing isn’t CAUSED BY, it’s LINKED TO. That’s purposeful, because it happens to be accurate.
Read: it’s just an association. That’s it.
The public health narrative here holds that the hospitalized patient was sick because of the H5N1 virus. How did they know? Because the patient is ill and allegedly tested positive for a genomic signal that is attributed to the virus. There is no demonstration of disease causation at all. It’s purely an association.
More specifically, it is a positive PCR test accompanied by non-specific symptoms. The narrative wants you to conflate an association with pandemic threat.
The public is supposed to accept that a test that they largely do not understand is to be trusted because ‘the experts say so’. The black-box PCR assay is absolutely sufficient to attribute disease causation. Stop asking questions.
You’re not supposed to ask specifics about the assay, you’re just supposed to accept the results: positive or negative. What exactly does the result mean? Positive for what? Negative for what? They want you to think it works like a pregnancy test, or a breathalyzer at a traffic stop. You’re not supposed to ask if the assay has been evaluated and validated by third parties. You’re not supposed to ask about the amplicons selected or primers that are being used. You’re not supposed to ask if there are proper controls, both negative and positive. You’re not supposed to ask about primer drop-out. You’re not supposed to ask if proper calibration of equipment and risk of sample contamination has been adequately addressed. Forget about just the cycle threshold—the issues with PCR go way beyond that simple metric.
Remind you of anything in the recent past? Haven’t we seen this before?
Data doesn’t prove on its own
Basing conclusions (or policy) on unfounded associations is flatly misleading.
Consider the following scenario as a thought experiment: imagine you are a young forensics expert working on an investigation.
You are charged with surveying the cars in a large parking structure. You’re assisting in a search for a bank robber that reportedly used a silvery getaway vehicle that is reported to have parked in the lot. The exact make and model are unknown. You decide that you want to isolate the silvery cars in the lot. Problem is, you don’t have much in the way of evidence to go on, and you can’t shut down the lot, so you cleverly develop a drive-by test that scans for certain reflective qualities in car finishes. If your test is a good one, you hope to be able to identify all the silvery cars, old or new, including the vaguely rose and champagne colored ones. A poorly performing test, however, might flag anything silvery, including chrome; or worse, anything with a certain reflective or glossy finish. Unfortunately, because of the nature of your test, unwashed silvery cars don’t get flagged at all.
How useful do you think your results are going to be?
The problems with this sifting method are obvious: identifying cars that test positive might hone in on a subset of suspect vehicles, but on their own, the results tell you nothing about which car was involved in the crime. More importantly, no matter the results, all of your efforts hinge on a foundational assumption: that the witness account of a silvery getaway car is accurate to begin with. What if the witness saw the reflection of a metallic finish, and it wasn’t silvery at all? Worse, what if the witness is lying?
The testing data, by itself, proves nothing. The silvery attribute is just an unverified association.
The real threat
And so it is with bird flu. All of the so-called ‘cases’ of bird flu in humans (or any animals, for that matter) are equally problematic. They are just an association between supposed detection of a genomic signal and non-specific symptoms. That is not the same thing as demonstrating disease causation or proof of any potential, looming pandemic.
The predictable progression from here will be convincing the public that only the test matters—symptoms will not be required. That’s part of the premise of asymptomatic spread. How does this make sense? It doesn’t. But if you believe the initial fallacy, the subsequent one is just a small slide further down the slope that you’ve already descended.
Conducting more tests doesn’t make the association stronger, and it certainly still fails to demonstrate cause. Claiming that it does is intentional distortion. Promoting conflation has a lot in common with lying. And that is what is being foisted on the public mind by organizations and individuals that should be seen by now as untrustworthy.
In the context of bird flu and drumming up fear of Disease X, what this really amounts to is sleight of hand in the guise of public health. After what we’ve seen with COVID, one can imagine that a bird flu pandemic (if this is even really possible) would be an extraordinary thing with extraordinary costs, impact, and damage.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
What we have here is anything but that.
The deep problem is the pandemic threat itself.
Ironically, the threat is indeed dire, but it’s not because of a virus. The true threat isn’t a disease at all. It’s the Pandemic Threat Machine, churning, rolling forward.
Can you see it?
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