As detailed by the bio-historical article material below from ZeroHedge.com, there is something very odd, indeed suspicious, about the bird flu outbreaks witnessed this year. Bird flu has been long known to infect birds, but not be prone to species jumping. Infections of mammals was once rare. But 2023-2024 saw the virus move up the great chain of being to various species of mammals in the wild, then to horses, and cows. There was agreat controversy about the safety of the US milk supply. Then there were some human infections from the US, where contact with infected cows occurred, and in Asia. Australia even had one case. So, in principle, H5N1 can presently infect humans, but it is notevolved to be transmissible enough to create a pandemic … yet.
While this supposed "natural" evolution has been occurring, something rarely seen in nature, it has been revealed that both US and communist Chinese labs, which may be no more than bioweapons centres, have been busy at work on gain-of-function genetic engineering to create very lethal forms of H5N1. The US and communist China are collaborating on this program, which led to several members of the US Congress writing in an April 12 letter: "We are disturbed by recent reports about the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-linked Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on bird flu research."
"This research, funded by American taxpayers, could potentially generate dangerous new lab-created virus strains that threaten our national security and public health."
Former CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, has recently stated, "Bird flu, I think, is going to be the cause of a great pandemic—where they are teaching these viruses how to be more infectious for humans." My guess is that bird flu is the next plandemic to be unleashed upon us by the globalists, just in time for the usual US election fraud. We need to get ready for this assault which will be worse than Covid, preparing, mentally, physically, and spiritually.
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/gain-function-may-explain-bird-flu-jump-cows-and-humans
"In the past six months, bird flu has surprised scientists at least twice.
Bird flu viruses have circulated mainly in birds for a long time. However, in early December 2023, an outbreak occurred in U.S. dairy cows, even though cattle are not typically susceptible to avian influenza A, the bird flu virus.
In late March, a U.S. dairy farm worker was infected by a H5N1 virus from a cow.
On May 22, a second human case of H5N1 infection was reported with prior exposure to infected dairy cows in Michigan.
On the same day in May, an Australian child was infected by an H7 strain, another subtype of influenza A known to cause human infections.
Since bird flu infections in humans are rare, these incidents have raised significant concern among scientists.
Why is this happening, and how concerned should we be?
This article aims to avoid unnecessary fear about a potential future pandemic. Instead, we encourage people to think rationally and make appropriate adjustments for the future.
Rapid Spread in Birds
The history of the H5N1 virus family can be traced back to 1996 when it was first discovered in a sick goose in the Guangdong province of China.
H5N1 has evolved, resulting in different genetic lineages (clades) as they mutate, similar to a typical pattern of behavior for RNA viruses such as the ever-emerging COVID-19 variants. In 2013, the H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b emerged. Since then, it has spread rapidly to nearly 100 countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, and America, becoming the most dominant clade and causing significant losses to the poultry industry.
In December 2021, this particular clade 2.3.4.4b, was first identified in wild birds in the United States.
The clade quickly mixed with other circulating influenza A viruses in wild birds in North America. This resulted in viral reassortment and recombination of genes and exhibiting diverse characteristics. Many of these variants cause severe illnesses in mammals, significantly affecting their nervous system.
The Jump to Cows
The avian influenza virus, commonly called the bird flu virus, belongs to the flu virus family. Flu viruses have many natural hosts, including ducks, geese, swans, gulls, terns, waders, pigs, and horses.
Certain types of flu viruses typically infect specific hosts and do not usually jump from one host to another.
There is a wide variety of bird flu viruses, ranging from H1 to H19, but they have mostly remained in birds and animals, rarely affecting humans.
This changed with the H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b.
This clade became concerning because of their frequent spillover events. A spillover event occurs when a virus from one normal host reservoir jumps into a new or different host species, for example, jumping from a bird to horse or cattle.
Since December 2023, the highly pathogenic H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b viruses have been reported to spread in dairy cows in multiple U.S. states, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Centers for Disease Control.
From early this year, some cows have been producing less milk and eating less. It was later confirmed that the H5Nx clade 2.3.4.4b viruses were present in both the cows' milk and nasal samples. The USDA reported an outbreak in this clade in cows for the first time.
The December USDA preprint reveals that the same viral strain was found in dairy cows that have no known connection to the infected herds. This suggests that the transmission in cows has already started quietly, and asymptomatic cows likely contributed to the rapid spread of the virus.
As of May 28, there were 67 herds infected by the H5N1 virus in nine states. Despite the low number of infected herds, this could indicate that it is no longer just a spillover event, but rather a significant expansion of host tropism. The concern is when a large-scale outbreak might occur.
Furthermore, as dairy cows often live in close proximity to humans, infections in cows may also impact human health.
The Likely Jump to Humans
Although bird flu infections in humans have been rare, they can happen.
In the past 20 years, there have been sporadic human infections with the H5N1 virus. There have been 888 infected patients, resulting in 463 deaths reported across 23 countries. The majority of cases have occurred in Egypt, Indonesia, and Vietnam. These cases have resulted in a cumulative case fatality rate of more than 50 percent, based on data collected by the World Health Organization.
Since these cases are mostly scattered throughout Asia, they haven't received much public attention in Western countries until recently.
In April 2022, a case was confirmed in a Colorado poultry worker who has since recovered. This was the first known case of H5N1 infection transmitted from poultry to a human in the United States.
The second human case in the United States didn't occur until late March. A dairy farm worker in Texas showed symptoms of hemorrhagic conjunctivitis in both eyes and was confirmed to be infected by the H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b. He had no respiratory symptoms and fully recovered within a few days.
However, this person reported no contact with sick or dead birds but had close exposure to sick dairy cows. The cows showed decreased milk production, reduced appetite, fever, and dehydration, suggesting H5N1 infection.
This was the first report in the United States of the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 virus suspected of transmitting from a mammalian animal species to a human.
These cases have alerted scientists, as they suggest that the virus may have acquired the ability to spread between mammals and potentially infect humans.
If a highly pathogenic H5N1 virus were to develop the ability to spread easily among humans, including through human-to-human transmission, it could have a significant impact on the human population, given the high mortality rate observed in previous cases.
Since these are the only two confirmed U.S. cases of cow-to-human transmission, the full extent of similar infections and the mortality rate remain unknown.
The spillover from one species to another typically happens naturally through the food chain. For instance, it can happen when infected birds are eaten by another species. These events generally occur on a small scale, unlike the widespread occurrences seen in U.S. cattle.
What caused the recent jump to cows from another species? Was it a natural, random event as in the past, or were other factors involved?
Gained the Ability to Spread via Aerosols
The original avian H5N1 viruses were not easily transmissible between mammals.
About a decade ago, two virologists, Yoshihiro Kawaoka from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, alarmed the world by conducting high-risk gain-of-function studies on H5N1.
The process was complex. For example, a mutant H5N1 virus was created carrying the specific gene mutation PB2 E627K. It was then passed through ferrets 10 times. After gaining a total of five mutations, the mutant H5N1 virus gained the ability to be transmitted via aerosols or respiratory droplets.
These mutations had only been found in nature, but never all within the same strain. Moreover, their lab manipulation and enhanced ability to transmit via aerosol has resulted in pandemic potential.
In 2011, Paul Keim, a microbial geneticist who chaired the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), expressed concern after reviewing their publications. "I can't think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one," he told Science. Having worked on anthrax for many years, he added, "I don't think that anthrax is scary at all compared to this."
Publishing these key mutations enables others to replicate the work in their own labs and marks the beginning of the unsettling H5N1 narrative.
The H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b was first detected in 2013.
Further Manipulation in a Chinese Lab
On April 1, 2021, a three-party project was initiated between the United States, the UK, and China that included the USDA, the U.S. National Poultry Research Center, the Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL) in Georgia, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and the Roslin Institute in the UK.
The USDA is sponsoring a grant of $1 million for this project. The SEPRL and Roslin Institute provide expertise in avian immunology genomics and viral transcriptomics analysis.
The actual experiments are conducted in China's CAS lab. There might be a specific reason for choosing this location.
The project, as we'll explain later, is also a gain-of-function (GOF) study.
GOF studies on the bird flu virus have triggered broad criticism by the U.S. scientific community since 2011. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, also told Science, "This work should never have been done." From a biosafety perspective, scientists have expressed concern that a new virus generated through research could escape from the lab or that bioterrorists could leverage the published results into a bioweapon for malignant purposes.
In the United States, gain-of-function experiments involving influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus were banned from October 2014 through December 2017. The moratorium was lifted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Dec. 19, 2017.
Chinese labs often have sufficient technical capacity but face a major challenge due to relatively loose biosecurity regulations.
Former CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, recently stated, "Bird flu, I think, is going to be the cause of a great pandemic—where they are teaching these viruses how to be more infectious for humans."
A Severe, Rapidly Spreading Virus
Chinese scientists are not opposed to doing risky gain-of-function studies on bird flu viruses.
For example, in a study published in Science in May 2013, scientists led by Chen Hualan at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute in Harbin, China, combined the highly lethal but not easily transmissible H5N1 virus with the highly contagious H1N1 swine flu strain, which infected millions of people in 2009.
At least three aspects of the three-party collaborative project study design strongly indicate its gain-of-function nature. However, these may be difficult to discern without reading between the lines.
One significant issue is the experimental approach known as "serial passage." The process of serial passage research is widely acknowledged by scientists as a tool for gain-of-function studies.
Serial passage involves growing and reproducing the virus from one cell to another or from one animal to another. These studies have high risks of generating mutations that can lead to greater transmissibility, pathogenicity, and zoonotic transmission. The more potent mutants can be selected for the next passage.
As written in their proposal, CAS scientists are responsible for measuring "fitness," which indicates the outcome of a viral infection—whether it develops faster or slower and whether it results in a severe or mild illness. Samples are collected before and after each round of passages to identify patterns of transmission and pathogenicity. This increases the likelihood of creating mutant H5N1 strains that can cause more severe diseases with faster transmission.
The second clue is linked to the animal models they carefully selected to reproduce the virus—mallard ducks, Chinese geese, and Japanese quail.
The mallard duck is the most abundant migratory and wide-ranging duck on Earth and can crossbreed with 63 other species. It is an asymptomatic carrier harboring many bird flu viruses, potentially allowing more mutated viruses to recombine.
Flu viruses are large, single-stranded RNA viruses comprising an eight-segmented genome. This unique feature of the virus genome implies that it is easy to reassort to one another, resulting in different combinations of genomes, especially when given a perfect condition of many different types of viruses residing in one host.
Furthermore, the Japanese quail has a dual expression of two bird flu virus receptors on both avian and mammalian species. It is such an ideal host that after a series of passage trials, people can identify those strains that are more adaptive to mammalian receptors but not bird receptors.
Therefore, this study design favors the selection of a mutated H5N1 virus that has enhanced tropism for mammalian hosts with a higher pathogenicity or transmissibility.
This is a technologically well-designed study setting to achieve the gain-of-function purpose, in which the study objective appears to be about enhanced surveillance, monitoring, fitness, and vaccine studies.
In addition, this study plans to use live viruses to challenge mallard ducks with low-pathogenic bird flu viruses first, followed by a high-pathogenic virus.
Because the bird flu virus is highly prone to recombination, a genome reassortment among high- and low-pathogenic bird flu viruses could generate new recombinant influenza viruses with unpredictable host tropism or pathogenicity.
Therefore, this creates an even higher potential of generating new gain-of-function mutants.
Since 2021, the bird flu virus H5N1 of clade 2.3.4.4b has had an explosive geographic expansion among wild birds and domestic poultry across Asia, Europe, and Africa, and spread to America at the end of 2021.