https://michaeltsnyder.substack.com/p/a-plague-that-could-kill-a-billion?
If you thought that what we have been through the past few years was bad, just wait until you see what happens when a truly deadly virus starts spreading like wildfire all over the planet. For example, scientists have been warning for years that the H5N1 strain of the bird flu has the potential to rapidly kill vast numbers of people. The good news is that H5N1 does not naturally spread easily among mammals, but more than a decade ago scientists in the United States and the Netherlands were conducting “gain of function” research on H5N1 in order to create a version that could spread easily among mammals. And as you will see below, some very familiar names funded that research.
Thankfully, H5N1 was off the radar for a long time, but then about a year ago a massive outbreak suddenly erupted among birds all over the world and it has been “wiping out everything in numbers we’ve never seen before”…
The US is currently experiencing its worst-ever outbreak of bird flu, also known as avian influenza — and a new study has found that the strain could become endemic in the country.
The outbreak is “wiping out everything in numbers we’ve never seen before,” Jennifer Mullinax, an assistant professor of environmental science and technology at the University of Maryland, told Sky News.
Even though millions upon millions of chickens, turkeys and other birds are now dead, most people in the general population have not been too alarmed by this outbreak.
But in recent months, H5N1 has started killing mammals such as foxes, minks, raccoons and bears.
And now researchers in Canada have proven that one strain of H5N1 that is currently circulating can spread “efficiently” among ferrets…
The bird flu virus that is killing millions of animals around the world has been found to “efficiently” spread between ferrets in a laboratory, raising concerns about the potential for the virus to jump to humans.
In a new preprint, scientists in Canada demonstrated that H5N1 samples taken from a red tailed hawk spread efficiently between ferrets – the main “animal model” used by scientists in experiments to analyse how respiratory viruses may impact people.
This is not good.
Ferrets were used in this research because they have “a similar respiratory makeup to humans”…
Ferrets were chosen for the study as they a similar respiratory makeup to humans, providing experts with an idea of how a virus would interact in people.
They found that ‘direct contact’ with one strain of H5N1 isolated from an infected bird, resulted ‘in lethal outcomes’, the paper added.