Strangely reassured by statistic that over two in five Usians don't believe our SARS pandemic is over.

Strangely reassured by statistic that two in five Usians recognize that life will never get "back to normal".

Less reassured that near three in ten Usians believe they haven't been infected. Nowhere near that many are taking precautions, so belief is just that.

Still less reassured that none of these statistics in any way reflect preparedness for our pending H5N1 pandemic.

So glad we don't use chicken eggs to produce annual flu vaccines.

Oh, wait.

Genotype map of HPAI #H5N1, via GISAID.

"Showing 137 of 137 genomes collected between Dec 2020 and Feb 2025, last updated 2025-02-23"

To be clear, GISAID originally stood for "Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data".

Also, as a reminder, there was a different Usian president in office for the period from late January 2021 to early Jan 2025.

Took four years for the global initiative for sharing avian influenza data to collect 137 North American #BirdFlu samples, include dairy cow, avian, human, guineafowl, other mammals, chicken and pheasant.

By comparison, #CDC has tested ~136,000 specimens (about 800 of those humans). Sounds like a lot, right?

That's across 166 Million affected poultry and near a thousand dairy herds. (Current cattle herd numbers reflect anywhere from 1 to 30 cases in three states.)

Pathetic.

Without sequence data, there's no way to reliably track evolution of the virus. Statistical samples don't work from happenstance.

"The data suggests an infected cat might have spread the virus to a human adolescent."

*stares in what-have-I-been-warning-for-the-better-part-of-a-year*

Of course, a muzzle defied doesn't necessarily stop at the agency.

Nothing any government agency has to say gets anywhere without cooperation of news media or media platforms.

"No communication with the public" may be acceptably interpreted to carve-out certain categories of alerts.

(Carve-outs that wouldn't have been readily apparent until lawyers got a chance to ponder them in the days after the moratorium.)

But as soon as it becomes clear that communication with the public is happening beyond tolerated boundary conditions, a quiet word to a sympathetic media owner, or else a subtle message to someone in middle management about their future prospects in the job market, would be all it would take.

Nor does it even need start with the political chief. If we know anything, it is that heads of petty fiefdoms will readily, over-enthusiastically and without explicit direction, enforce what they believe the will of the sovereign to be.

Sitting with the uncomfortable certainty that most health supremacist Usians may never notice that federal public health officials aren't communicating with the public.

Given that our health supremacist society had already become accustomed to, scratch that, come to rely upon, near four years of public health agencies only communicating purposeful nonsense—and the same culture has been further stubbornly ignoring any genuine information that somehow slipped through the mass apologetics—silence ain't gonna likely get the typical health supremacist's attention.

Not until it's bewilderingly too late.

"As an avian influenza virus (AIV) panzootic is underway, the threat of a human pandemic is emerging. Infections among mammalian species in frequent contact with humans should be closely monitored. One mammalian family, the Felidae, is of particular concern. Domestic cats are susceptible to AIV infection and provide a potential pathway for zoonotic spillover to humans. Here, we provide a systematic review of the scientific literature to describe the epidemiology and global distribution of AIV infections in felines reported from 2004 – 2024."

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.30.24306585v2

HT Daniele Focosi on X

"#H5N1, a disease typically only found in wild birds, has been killed seals and sea lions in the tens of thousands. Dairy cattle have been seeing lying dead in the sun in California. AND we know that the strain this person was infected with was the same strain as the teenager hospitalized in British Columbia— and that one has the gene necessary for human to human transmission. Even so, the rhetoric of the CBS newscast sampled here said the danger to the general public is very low. I would laugh if this wasn’t such a disaster."

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DDx0V3HvmYb/?igsh=MTV3enVkNDk0cWRnaw==

Was watching some old popular audience wish fulfillment television the other day. The story was about a group of unlikely heroes who foil a plot to release an aerosol pandemic virus into the general population.

The villain-of-the-week started by trying to kill heads of institutions that would be tasked with responding to such an outbreak.

Later that day, saw this news: "Ghebreyesus said he and other WHO colleagues were preparing to board a flight just "meters" away from the area Israel hit."

Ghebreyesus is head of the World Health Organization. Israel, who received arms supplies from the U.S., bombed the airport he was preparing to depart from.

National voluntary recall of cat foods because #BirdFluBegins.

As influenza surge making news in various Usian cities.

Of course, #H5N1 is an influenza.

At some point, #BirdFlu is gonna make the leap to full adaptation for inter-human transmission.

If it happens during a post-holiday winter surge, we might not even know we're dealing with zoonotic spillover, because flu looks like flu until you bother to sequence.

Unless you bother to sequence.

(Also, lots of other things look like flu, but we can at least tell covid and RSV, when we bother to test, from flu.)

As of December, two in five Usians have been vaccinated for seasonal flu. The lowest uptake in the past six years.

Meanwhile, our government continues to arm a rogue national government that bombs an airport while the head of the world's global health agency is on the tarmac.

If we can count on anything in 2025, it's that Usian Democratic voters will pay a lot more attention to #BirdFlu once they can pin it on the guy they don't like.

If the world suffers a #BirdFlu pandemic in the years immediately following this coming #Jan20...

Please remember that the previous administration had more than enough opportunities to address the #H5N1 threat on the horizon, long before even the absurdly drawn-out U.S. electoneering cycle began.

Usian partisans will want ya'll to blame global mortality of a pandemic in the second half of this decade on the person then in office...

Rather than on the naked emperor, who ensured that there be no serious interventions to stop spread and mutation in U.S. livestock—lest attention to such distract from boasting about ending a pandemic, from the first half of this decade, that still has yet to end.

Nero doesn't get to blame Galba, just because the second conflagration was slow to start.

At the rate our #PublicHealth communications are going, there will be a day when "mild" can't even be counted on to mean "low in capsaicin".

[Thought prompted by wording of a #CDC notice that a child has been diagnosed with "an H5 #BirdFlu".]