Hello everyone and welcome to the latest edition of Bird Flu Digest, formerly known as OffGuardian.

The wall-to-wall coverage of Bird Flu is getting wallier-to-wallier with each passing week, to the point it’s almost hard to keep up with the waves of hot takes and chilling insights. But if you’re going to try, the best place to do it is right here, where I spend a good portion of my time reading very similar articles in very similar papers all about the danger of a pandemic they’re about to pretend is happening.

Not a dream of mine growing up, but life’s like that.

Anyway…bird flu.

In our last bird flu update, we pointed out that the “bird flu death” in Mexico was very likely no such thing, and that reporting it as such was right out of the Covid playbook.

Since then the head of Mexico’s Health Ministry has criticized the WHO for calling it a bird flu death at all.

But the big bird flu news is that former head of the US CDC Robert Redfield has gone hysterical, telling NewsNation:

I really do think it’s very likely that we will, at some time, it’s not a question of if, it’s more of a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic.”

This story was naturally picked up and spread everywhere, but Redfield is hardly alone in this hysterical panic-fueling nonsense.

Last week, The Conversation headlined:

An ounce of prevention: Now is the time to take action on H5N1 avian flu, because the stakes are enormous

USA Today echoes the tone:

Concerns grow as ‘gigantic’ bird flu outbreak runs rampant in US dairy herds

Apparently a new study has found something scary – Americans “have little to no pre-existing immunity to the H5N1 avian flu”. Frightening stuff.

Just a few hours ago the Daily Mail reported on yet another doctor doling out yet another dire warning. This time Dr Rick Bright, who told PBS that:

We’re being blindfolded in this battle right now, and I’m really concerned that the virus is winning the game and getting ahead of us.’

We’re flying blind and the disease is getting ahead of us! It’s running rampant and the stakes are enormous!

Even some channels that supposedly know better are spreading the fear.

CNN is frantic with worry – “We aren’t doing enough about the risk of bird flu – but we can”. Popular Science is relatively calm, asking “Can we prevent a bird flu pandemic in humans?”, before reassuring us that we can…as long as we all do as we’re told.

All of these stories talk about “gathering data”, “flying blind”, and the need for “prevention”. And all of that is really code for “testing”. Almost every article talks up the need to increase testing – both of humans and animals.

But anyone who’s been paying attention since 2020 knows PCR tests don’t gather data, they create data. They are machines for generating “cases”. Far from preventing a pandemic, they can be used to manufacture one.

There are even early signs of mandating tests going forward, such as this Politico article bemoaning the lack of farmers voluntarily signing up for government surveillance programs:

The federal response is largely focusing on voluntary efforts by farmers to help track and contain the outbreak. But many farms still have not signed up for USDA efforts to boost surveillance and testing for the virus.

And the solution to this is more money:

Although federal funds have been allocated, no farms have enrolled in voluntary on-site milk testing, according to the USDA. Fewer than a dozen farms have applied for separate financial aid in exchange for boosting biosecurity measures to help contain the virus.

Paying farmers to test their animals is another recycled Covid strategy. It will generate cases, which will generate culling, which links us up with the other aspect of “bird flu” – not “the next pandemic” but “the war on food”.

As the alleged disease allegedly spreads from poultry farm to dairy farm more and more chickens are being culled and cows slaughtered. This is going to escalate even further soon, when governments start paying farmers to destroy their cattle.

Again, from Politico:

…federal rulemaking is delaying the rollout of compensation for farmers who have lost or had to kill cows because of the disease.

Translation: They want to pay farmers to test their cows, then “financially compensate” them when they have to be destroyed. This is just like the UK’s “Environmental Land Management” schemes or the US “Conservation Reserve Program”, both of which pay farmers not to farm. The goal will be to make it more profitable for farmers to kill their cows than milk them.

Incentivizing testing, rewarding positive results. That’s how you make a pandemic out of nothing, and sabotage the food system in the process.

But there’s good news, after all the the EU is already procuring 40 million doses of vaccines, just in case. And the Moderna stock price keeps going up too. So there’s that.

Honestly, it’s like watching a movie where they signpost the “surprise” twist ending inside the first five minutes, and then you have to sit through two interminable hours of what the writers clearly consider to be subtle foreshadowing.

It’s getting to the point I just want them to do the bloody pandemic and get it over with.