The bird flu pandemic response is already repeating the Covid pandemic response in alarming ways

A scientific explainer

As I mentioned earlier, this week the New York Post published my latest opinion piece.

In it, I argue that the government's potential response to bird flu is a much larger threat to America than bird flu itself.

In this post, I will explain some of the science behind my piece in more detail.

The first issue is the massive overinflation of risk. The expert class did this with swine flu and Covid. And they're doing this with bird flu.

And in the process, they're working up a frenzy--a frenzy that could end up doing a lot of harm--and making a lot of money.

As I wrote about swine flu:

"During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, for instance, health officials predicted as many as 120 million people would die. Governments stockpiled vaccines. But just as soon as the pandemic began, it ended. Vaccines expired. The death count was that of mild seasonal influenza."

How soon we forget.

During Covid it was even worse. By March, Americans believed that the death rate was 1-in-4 from Covid.

That's at the lower end of some Ebola outbreaks.

Americans in 2020 were so pumped up by media fear, they believed that Covid was airborne Ebola!

And as you can see, Americans believed the mortality rate was more than 10% even as late as June of 2021. (Source.)

The World Health Organization was not much better: it reported the case fatality rate as 3.4%.

While technically true at the time, scientists at WHO knew that this figure dramatically overstated the actual death rate.

They knew it was a lie at the time, but they did it anyway.

The death rate was widely known to be between 1 and 2% or even below 1% in the scientific community.

In February 2020, Fauci and Redfield estimated that it was as low as less than 1%.

Ioannidis put the figure at around 0.3% in March 2020.

There was, in other words, a large contingent of prominent scientists who believed that the mortality rate was below 1%. And they were right. (Ioannidis was the most right.)

The final figure ended up being around 0.5%.

But again, contrast this with what the average American believed: 25%, or 50-times higher than it actually was. And contrast this with the WHO's figure: 3.4%, or 7-times higher.

When Trump tried to point this out, he was dogpiled by the media and the medical establishment--as shown in this brilliant video by Matt Orfalea.

Trump was right. As funny as it might sound, Trump was doing authentic science communication while our trusted authorities were lying relentlessly.

The public health authorities were 100% behind these lies in the media. They knew that only if the public believed that the threat of the virus was extremely high--far higher than it really was--would they support the draconian measures that gave these officials so much power.

In this remarkable passage from Scott Atlas's book, Atlas highlights Fauci's deranged perspective:

“As often happened, Fauci spoke up to support Dr. Birx’s concerns, saying people need to be warned even more strongly about the dangers of the virus spreading, about wearing masks and distancing. He claimed Americans didn’t think the virus was serious, and that was the reason cases spread. I was honestly surprised. I thought people were already panic-stricken. Normal life had virtually ceased to exist, even eliminating serious medical care or last visits with dying family. Meanwhile the media were on-message 24/7, instructing the public about masks and social distancing; there were signs and announcements demanding masks and diagrams about distancing everywhere; healthy young people were outside riding bicycles or driving their cars alone, wearing masks. Indeed, surveys showed that most adults perceived grossly exaggerated risks, particularly but not only younger people; and yes, a high percentage were obeying the edicts, distancing and wearing masks, according to virtually every published survey.

“I challenged him to clarify his point, because I couldn’t believe my ears. “So you think people aren’t frightened enough?” He said, “Yes, they need to be more afraid.” To me, this was another moment of Kafkaesque absurdity. I replied, “I totally disagree. People are paralyzed with fear. Fear is one of the main problems at this point.” Inside, I was also shocked at his thought process, as such an influential face of the pandemic. Instilling fear in the public is absolutely counter to what a leader in public health should do. To me, it is frankly immoral, although I kept that to myself.”

Fauci thought that Americans were "not afraid enough", despite believing that Covid was tantamount to airborne Ebola. Unbelievable.

And as per usual, Deborah Birx herself said the quiet part out loud when, in public in August of 2020, she said: "When people start to realize that 99% of us are going to be fine, it becomes more and more difficult [to get people to comply]."

Their amplification of the mortality rate was meant to increase fear in ordinary Americans and terrify them into compliance with measures that they would otherwise have never accepted.

These lies were meant to take away our freedom.

This is why in the recent Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing, Democratic Congressmen could be embarrassingly heard to thank Fauci for saving millions of lives.

Sorry, but there were not millions of lives to save, since Covid's death rate was not even high enough to kill 2 million.

Due to the misinformation by officials like Fauci and Birx and their media minions, most people, not even most politicians, still don't understand the basics of Covid pandemic science.

These basics are required to make a proper risk-benefit calculation for interventions. If the virus is incredibly deadly, then more intensive interventions become potentially justified. But if it isn't, then it makes less sense to implement such interventions, since the harms may exceed the benefits.

This consideration is at the very heart of Western medicine in the form of the Hippocratic precept "Do no harm". "Do no harm" is the ethical precept that DIRECTLY addresses this problem.

By exaggerating the mortality rate of Covid, our expert class violated the core ethical precept of Western medicine.

And that ethical precept is there for a reason: there is always an "action bias" in medicine (even if such action is harmful), and this ethical precept directly addresses this bias.

In other words, through their exaggerations, Fauci and Birx and the expert class more broadly encouraged the most fundamental medical ethical error that one can make--the fundamental medical ethical error that lies at the very heart of Western medical ethics.

The media is making the same exact error with bird flu. For example, Celine Grounder commits this error in a recent StatNews piece when she writes: "Based on prior human infections, it’s estimated that the mortality rate for H5N1 avian flu among humans may be above 50%."

And she is not alone. A recent Newsweek piece poses the ridiculous question: “Could Bird Flu Kill One in Four Americans?” (Fortunately, it seriously problematizes the assumptions underlying the question.)

Every infectious disease expert knows that initial estimates of a pandemic virus are always much higher than what they turn out to be, because at the beginning of a pandemic, it is usually only the most severe cases that get attention, and many more mild cases are not counted.

Again, this happened with swine flu, where the initial estimates of the mortality rate were as high as 5.1%. Yet that mortality rate ended up being just 0.02%, less severe than seasonal influenza.

And as we know it happened with Covid.

As one July 2020 paper put things:

"The trend in mortality reporting for COVID-19 has been typical for emerging infectious diseases. The case fatality rate (CFR) was reported to be 15% (six of 41 patients) in the initial period, but this estimate was calculated from a small cohort of hospitalised patients. Subsequently, with more data emerging, the CFR decreased to between 4·3% and 11·0%, and later to 3·4%. The rate reported outside China in February was even lower (0·4%; two of 464)."

And a number of papers suggest that this is also happening with bird flu, with many asymptomatic and mild cases not being reported and therefore not being incorporated into the mortality rate.

In other words, the 50% figure being reported without context is a form of de facto misinformation.

The risk becomes therefore that when risk is projected catastrophically higher than it really is, we will do much more harmful things than are necessary or desirable.

With Covid, this took the form of school closures, lockdowns, mask mandates, etc. that did untold harm to society and to the political body.

The media is again abdicating its responsibility in being HONEST about what we know about bird flu, instead preferring to put out the most alarming figures possible--just as occurred with swine flu and Covid.

This is, again, an incredibly dangerous practice because it could lead to hysteria and harm in the form of excessive intervention.

And what happened when we implemented those excessive interventions? The interventions, too, were promoted with an efficacy out of proportion to the evidence. And their harms were similarly downplayed.

We heard that lockdowns would allow us to return to normal, that masks would allow us to return to normal, that vaccines would allow us to return to normal, that vaccines had no downsides (hello myocarditis in young men), that children would easily bounce back from school closures, etc.

None of this was true.

They were just as distorted as the risk was distorted.

In fact, everything was distorted to maximum effect--apparently with the goal of propagandizing in favor of maximum intervention.

The structure of government disinformation that occurred during Covid took a very easily discernible form:

1. Maximize perception of virus risk;
2. Maximize perception of intervention benefit;
3. Minimize perception of intervention risk.

This is, once again, very harmful because interventions themselves have associated harms! And using excessive interventions with associated harms violates the central ethical principle of "do no harm"!

To be clear, I don't think that we should not be prepared for a pandemic.

It's just that, I only see a systemic bias in favor of exaggerated risk--and with it, us heading down the same old path.

This is not surprising, since the media and government still cannot admit that it catastrophically fumbled the Covid pandemic response.

Thus, it will certainly repeat the same performance if a bird flu pandemic happens--and it is repeating that performance right now.

We should be incredibly alarmed about the path that is being taken with bird flu--not just with the virus but with the communication about that virus. We seem to be headed down the same exact path--having learned nothing--that we headed down during Covid.

Everyone should be alarmed.

Everyone, that is, except investors in mRNA vaccine makers--whose profits will come at the great expense of the public and the public health, as they did just a few years ago.

Everyone, that is, except for the doctors and public health bureaucrats that are salivating to wield the same power that they did during the Covid pandemic.

We need to be seriously alarmed at the recent turn of events with bird flu and on our guard--and ready to fight a replay of events from 2020-22.

Because what the government and media are showing us is that they are READY TO DO THE SAME THING AGAIN.