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Nat Oleander @nat@partyon.xyz

Please read this entire series (multiple posts). It is ESSENTIAL.

It is NOT random that "another" pandemic is hitting so soon.

Read, share, mask, get your booster, get your flu shot, and get good air filtration.

I love you and I want you to survive.

https://www.facebook.com/share/18XoiY3ruB

The media has finally picked up the fact that we face an near-term bird flu pandemic, and is getting worried. And overwhelmingly, the narrative from popular medical folk on tv (most of whom are long term covid minimizers and got their roles for taking the Biden administration's "covid is nbd" position) and media outlets is "This pandemic will be much worse, it will make covid look like nothing."

And I understand why they are saying this, and I don't want to pick too hard on these folks, even though a lot them deserve it for their enthusiastic encouragement of mass infection and mass disability from a severe vascular pathogen. But they aren't wrong that H5N1 will almost certainly cause a much higher mortality, and that its larger range of animal transmission routes and fomites will create some challenges. But they are fundamentally and deeply wrong that this is really a fully separate, second pandemic. Pandemic two is actually part two or maybe five (depending on how you think about it) of the covid pandemic. And it is yet again covid running the show.

What do I mean? I mean H5N1 has been around for 30+ years, and has been a major concern on the global pandemic landscape forever, right? How could this be a continuation of covid. Well, let me count the ways. There are a lot of them - covid and H5N1 are working together in really important ways.

1. The first one, and one of the most important is something I warned you all about this summer - covid is providing enormous cover for cases of H5N1 to pass undetected in the general population.

This summer I was very (rightly, I fear) worried about the ways in which a massive summer wave, combined with emergent bird flu in farmworkers, and potential community spread might conceal H5N1 and allow it to mutate. When everyone has covid, respiratory and eye symptoms (which covid also causes) can pass undetected.

Moreover, when excess deaths are high, well above the expected rate, small clusters of even deaths are likely to pass undetected, attributed to covid, or other causes exacerbated by the pandemic. The rise in excess deaths from covid related causes, including strokes, heart attacks, brain bleeds, etc... and the chronic over extension of health care systems that often don't test means that we are missing a lot more Flu A cases that might have been bird flu.

How many did we miss? No clue. Remember, we cancelled all the covid reporting, and only have wastewater data right now, so there isn't even a good way to estimate what would be expected FROM COVID in the absence of public health interventions, and establish was was excess. I expect some good data on this in 2026 or 2027, but for now, we are flying blind.

This is really important because the CDC explicitly says that what they are looking for is unusual ER use and clusters of respiratory illness - but in an unchecked respiratory pandemic, that's very hard to identify. Remember, most cases of H5N1 are almost certainly going undetected both among farmworkers (we know there were clusters of farmworker and farmworker family illness that were never tested) and in the community.

2. Covid is an immune damaging illness. Almost everyone in the world has now had covid at least once, and a majority of people in most of the world have had it multiple times (we know this from immune assays, and most people who think they've never had covid are wrong - remember, 40% of infections are asymptomatic, and that's not a good thing, because often asymptomatic infections are a sign your immune system isn't responding appropriately and will not clear the virus.)

We have known since 2020 when China reported immune damaging properties from covid that covid damages Tcell response, and lowers CD8 counts. Eventually, your immune system does seem to recover in many people (not all) after 6-8 months without reinfection. However, most people who are not masking will not have six to eight months without reinfection, and we know that some of the damage is cumulative from multiple infections. Most people who get long covid don't seem to have the same recovery of immune properties.

So yes, covid is why you get sick all the time now. It makes you more vulnerable to other pathogens. And we also have evidence from animal studies that it does cause immune damage in some other species. Do you see where I'm heading with this?

One of the things that immunologists and virologists keep saying is that historically speaking, H5N1 is behaving in ways it has not in the past. For example, the virus has mutated in both wild and domestic cats and several other mammal species to infect mostly the brain, not the respiratory tract - it is now a neurotropic virus. Cats are having seizures, difficulty walking, blindness and death.

Remember, this is a virus that has been around for 30+ years and has infected a number of species before, but has mostly been a problem in industrial agriculture. It has now entered more than 50 mammal species populations, and a much wider range of birds than ever before (small songbirds for example, were previously rarely infected, as were corvids.)

There are birds falling out of the sky dead, seal populations losing more than 90% of their offspring, and we are vaccinating endangered birds so we don't lose them entirely (one of the things that I don't understand is how relaxed everyone was about mass extinction from bird flu - even if it never affected humans.)

#covid #covid19 #flu

Nat Oleander @nat@partyon.xyz

2/n

Now I am not a virologist or an immunologist, and this is speculation on my part, but the timing matches, and my suspicion is that I'll be shown to be right later, sadly. It was in the autumn of 2021 that we really began to see H5N1 moving into animal populations it had not been in, and showing major changes in its effects in seals, mink, additional speciese of wild birds, and mammals.

What happened in 2020 and 2021 - well, we know that in 2020 and 2021, besides mass infection of HUMANS with the SARS2 virus, we also had widespread infection of wild animal populations. We know it was found in deer, in big cats in zoos, and in many species. And we know that it has immune suppressing and damaging qualities.

So when we ask, "Why is this virus behaving differently, particularly in mammals" we need to recognize that covid, unchecked, spreading through animal reservoirs, may well have affected its impact on those populations, and enabled the virus to spread into mammalian hosts and pick up some of the adaptations needed to infect mammals (btw, we are mammals) widely.

3. Another way this is an extension of our covid pandemic is our social response. The general public believes that we OVER-REACTED to covid. And they don't believe that by accident. That was a concrete, clear and intended message from a wide range of political actors from both parties.

3. Another way this is an extension of our covid pandemic is our social response. The general public believes that we OVER-REACTED to covid. And they don't believe that by accident. That was a concrete, clear and intended message from a wide range of political actors from both parties.

The Republicans pretty consistently believe that we over-reacted to covid PERIOD - that it was an unserious disease that mostly infected people they thought deserved it, and that vaccination, social distancing, masking, etc... was always used for political power grabs.

But the Democrats believe similarly ridiculous things - despite the fact that we've known that long covid is a possible outcome from the very beginning, and that covid is vascular, neurotropic, raises your risk of cardiac and neurological problems, diabetes, autoimmune disease, cancer, cognitive decline, alzheimers, parkinsons, brain damage, kidney failure, hearing loss, eye problems, bone and hip joint problems and is immune damaging like HIV etc... etc... with each infection, they endorsed a "let it rip" position and removed masking in health care, on public transport, while telling people the disease was mild (coined for the omicron variant which was the MOST deadly one we had, look it up.)

By implying that school children were invulnerable because they were short (I'm not kidding) and that kids wouldn't transmit, rather than make schools safer by cleaning air and reducing class sizes, they engaged in a mass infection policy that is deeply damaging to the health of billions. Particularly horrific was the claim that the disease was inevitably mild in children, just because the acute phase was - leading to gaslighting families who couldn't understand why their children weren't the same, and also to reduced vaccination rates in kids, because why vaccinate for a mild illness?

Hospital acquired covid infections have a very high mortality rate, and yet, we removed masking in health care. Imagine saying "everyone should get the HIV virus, to build up immunity to HIV" - and that's pretty much what happened.

In order to explain why people were dying of heart attacks and strokes at younger ages, why cancer was striking younger and more severely, why diabetes rates were spiking, both parties came up with several implausible answers. The first was to leverage anti-vaccine sentiment and blame the vaccine. In order to do so, they had to create some really interesting new ideas, including the idea that you could "shed" the spike protein on to others.

The Democrats ALSO leaned heavily on anti-vaccine sentiment as I've written before - yes, they promoted the covid vaccine, and made ridiculous claims for it, calling those who died a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" even though vaccinated patients made up a majority of all deaths as early as 2021 (and yes, I know more people were vaccinated, but that doesn't change the claim.)

They allowed the anti-vax movement to carry a lot of water in explaining the even though we knew perfectly well that the things they were noticing were caused mostly by covid, they never acknowledged that, implicitly giving credence to the anti-vax movement.

They also came up with immunity debt, whereupon people who stayed home for six months in 2020 had to get really, really sick a lot, even though that doesn't happen to astronauts on space stations or Antarctic researchers because reasons. Immunity debt has been debunked many times, it is not a real concept, and did not exist before we needed an explanation for why covid was not the thing making you sick. I won't bother with it here.

They also claimed educational debt from the period where schools were online (not closed) was the cause of an increasing level of behavioral, health and intellectual problems CAUSED by a neurotropic, brain damaging virus.

Nat Oleander @nat@partyon.xyz

3/n

Moreover, because they did not want to continue pandemic economic supports (which were good for people - half of American kids came out of poverty, premature births plummeted, an entire variety of flu went extinct, suicides among kids and teens dropped dramatically, wages rose, discretionary income rose, housing access was vastly improved, etc....) we were told over and over that covid was the worst time in our lives until we believed it, and that staying home had been a horror show. Now that does not make 2020 fun, and the casting of social supports back on families was a high cost, but this lie didn't serve families, it served people who wanted to make money.

The problem is that the general public who didn't have time for deep dives because life, BELIEVES all these things, because propaganda works. Which is why vaccination rates overall have tanked, because the anti-vaccine movement is still carrying a ton of the weight of explanation for covid (even though we long since disproved any additional risk), and immunity debt. Which is why people are still blaming the "lockdowns" for the fact their kids are struggling in school, and for food price inflation linked to bird flu and global warming.

SO YOU NOW HAVE A GENERAL AMERICAN PUBLIC WHO BELIEVES THE BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH ILLNESS IS TO GET SICK AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE AND THAT VACCINES ARE DEADLY. They also believe that masks are unnecessary, that public health measures do more harm than good, and were an over reaction. They believe that patriotism + good citizenship consists of going out to brunch + concerts and sporting events unmasked. They believe that teenagers were killing themselves because they couldn't go to school (I truly cannot believe anyone believes that last sentence who has met a teenager.) They believe controlling infection is not only unnecessary but harmful, and that social controls of disease are evil and bad. So what do you think is going to happen when a high mortality flu pandemic hits the US, and public officials try and tell people that they need to isolate, stay home, reduce exposure, wear masks, take a vaccine + close schools + public venues? The Democrats and Republicans who promulgated all these insane lies for their own + their rich benefactor's benefit are going to try + overturn them, but the problem is that it isn't as easy to UNTEACH things as it is to teach them. since they STILL have a huge investment in denying that those things were necessary for covid, they are going to be selling a dual message—covid is cool, but bird flu is bad so mask and vaccinate and stay home for one but not the other—most people can't tell them apart, because one of the central messages was covid = flu.

Folks, flus, like covid, mutate far too fast to provide a sterilizing vaccine. A sterilizing vaccine is one like measles where you can basically stop the disease entirely by vaccinating enough people (no vaccine is 100% sterilizing so this is a functional category, rather than a precise one.) BTW, we ALWAYS knew that coronaviruses and flus don't provide sterilizing immunity, which is why you sometimes get flu even if you get the flu vaccine. That will not change with an H5N1 vaccine.

Even ignoring the fact that flu vaccines are mostly made in eggs, and that's going to be an issue too - so even if we have a vaccine made rapidly that applies to the strain that is circulating, it will do what the covid vaccine does - reduce severe illness and death in many people. It will NOT prevent you from being infected, and its protection will gradually wane as the virus mutates and changes its structure. And some people will still get severe illness and still die.

Antivirals, too, have limited use and at least one of the mutations that is already showing up in H5N1 reduces its sensitivity to some of the most common ones. So while anti-virals will help, they will not solve the problem or save everyone - even if they are available, and we are likely to have a severe shortage.

Which means that what will be needed are NPIs - Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions like handwashing, surface cleaning, masking, air cleaning, closing crowded venues like schools and theaters, reduced exposure. And those are things we just spent four years demonizing as unnecessary.

4. At the beginning of 2024, H5N1 still needed three mutations in order to be fully human to human transmissible. Two of them showed up during the cow flu segment in both birds and mammals. A third one, one of the things that made the 1918 "Spanish" flu so deadly, E190D, has shown up twice in humans - in both the teen in British Columbia who had severe illness lasting months, and the LA patient who had severe illness as well.

In both cases, the birds they likely contracted it from (in the BC teen, possibly through a pet mammal intermediary) the birds didn't have this mutation, suggesting it emerged in situ in the patients. That's a really concerning thing - twice now, H5N1 has developed the main mutation needed to make it transmissible to humans in a human patient, both with severe illness.

Nat Oleander @nat@partyon.xyz

4/n

This is a HUGE jump. And an important one. Which makes my point #1 really critical - because we have no idea how many human cases of bird flu there have been/are currently. We know it is extremely hard to get your flu typed, that local labs still can't do it, although Labcorp is reportedly working on it, and that there are certainly undetected cases. IT ONLY TAKES ONE PERSON OR ONE ANIMAL MIXING VESSEL and flus are extremely good at mixing (which is why it is also a concern that several nations seem to be having an extremely severe and atypical flu season, because the severe elements of H5N1 or other potential pandemic flus including H3N3 and various H9s can also recombine with a seasonal flu already adapted to humans and make it more severe and dangerous.)

But what does that have to do with covid? Well, if I'm right about point #2, that the immune damaging factors of covid spreading through wild animal populations may have encouraged H5N1's mutations and mammal host adaptation (and again, I'm only speculating), it is also the case that a huge population of immune damaged HUMANS is now being regularly exposed (we know from wastewater that bird flu is showing up in urban populations with no farms) and that immune damaged people have a hard time fighting off viruses (that's why you get sick all the time again.)

And if your body is slow at clearing a virus, because your immune system isn't working particularly well, you are very likely to find yourself in a situation where you might have more than one virus at the same time (one of the characteristics of the covid era is coinfection with multiple viruses, much more than previously seen), including multiple flu viruses. And your body might allow mutations to occur more easily, because you can't fight it off.

We only know about 60-odd human infections this year, the majority of them in the US among farmworkers. The fact that TWO of them had the E190D mutation, out of 60something is really pretty stunning, since both patients formed it spontaneously. That suggests that something really is going on with human immune systems, and as happens, we know what that is.

The logical conclusion, which I cannot prove, but feel comfortable speculating about here - is that both mammalian mutations and human mutations are made more likely by covid infection related immune damage. That is, the likely reason we are about to have an H5N1 pandemic, and the reason it is going to be really unpleasant, much more than if we hadn't already convinced ourselves that the normal things humans do to stop diseases are all bad, is that we had a covid pandemic - or rather we HAVE a covid pandemic.

That is, we have a single pandemic with multiple sources, about to hit us with its second, much more severe wave. And it is going to be a doozy. If we had chosen to control covid, we might be in a very different place.

Nat Oleander @nat@partyon.xyz

Sources:

https://www.wapt.com/article/h5n1-bird-flu-mutation-louisiana/63291457

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt0180

https://libguides.mskcc.org/CovidImpacts/Immune

https://x.com/DaniBeckman/status/1872372010137092357/photo/1

https://x.com/RajlabN/status/1784413073228325226

https://x.com/LazarusLong13/status/1820144027221496253

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01885-6

Ari No Spoons Jackson @arisummerland@beige.party

@nat thank you also for posting alt text for all of these!

Jan 02, 2025, 07:00 PM··IceCubesApp

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