What's More Deadly -- A New H5N1 'Bird Flu' or The GOP?
Alternet, May 5, 2024, by Thom Hartmann. -Ed.
The H5N1 “bird flu” is ripping across America, decimating bird flocks and even infecting a few humans and other mammals. Should we be concerned? Particularly since Trump is polling so well after he totally botched our response to Covid? Keep in mind, Trump shut down the offices of pandemic preparedness in the White House and NSC in 2017, leaving America vulnerable to Covid. In this week’s TIME magazine interview he says if he becomes president again he’ll repeat that performance by shutting down the new Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR) that Congress authorized in 2022.
https://time.com/6972973/biden-trump-bird-flu-covid/
When Covid first hit the world 4 years ago, its fatality rate among unvaccinated people (all of us, back then) was estimated at 1.4 % (it was 20% among hospitalized patients). By August of 2023, when it had killed over 1.1 million Americans, it had declined to an estimated 0.3 percent, in part because of vaccination, herd immunity, and an apparent diminution of the virulence of the disease as it mutated across those years.
By comparison, the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920 had a fatality rate of 2.5 %.
And Ebola, the disease that caused Republicans to fall into hysterics when President Obama let a physician infected with the disease back into America for treatment, has a fatality rate of an estimated 50 %, although it’s mostly hit poor people in Africa with little access to modern medicine. Estimates among healthy people with access to modern medicine put the fatality rate closer to 25 %.
But none of them can hold a candle to the bird flu..The good news is that pasteurization entirely kills the virus; the bad news is that it’s already made the jump from birds to cows, cats, dogs, and even a dolphin. How, you may wonder, did such a deadly pathogen find its way into our milk cow herd?... More,
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/h1n1/