In 2020, President Trump’s re-election campaign appeared poised for success. The economy was thriving, unemployment was low, and consumer confidence was high. However, when COVID-19 hit, it all came crashing down. The pandemic crippled the economy, and the resulting lockdowns, travel restrictions, and other measures presented Democrats with a unique opportunity to undermine Trump’s presidency and seize the election. It’s clear that the political and economic fallout from COVID-19, as well as other restrictions, were central factors in Biden winning that election.
Now, with Trump about to take office again, there’s an unsettling sense that we may be on the brink of another engineered crisis, and this time, it may be the bird flu. Over the past few weeks, reports of the reemergence of bird flu have become increasingly frequent, and it’s hard not to be suspicious. I sincerely hope we're not witnessing the early stages of a new narrative that could devastate the economy and thwart his second term.
A recent NBC News report highlighted a case in Canada. A 13-year-old girl from British Columbia was hospitalized after contracting a mutated strain of the H5N1 bird flu. This was Canada’s first human infection and it serves as a stark reminder that this virus has the potential to cause serious harm to human health. The girl spent several weeks in the hospital, suffering from severe respiratory failure, pneumonia, and kidney injury.
According to the report, “So far, nearly all of the cases of bird flu in North America have been mild, with symptoms including conjunctivitis, or pink eye, and runny nose, chills, cough and sore throat.”
“So far,” it said.
Since March, at least 66 bird flu infections have been reported in the U.S., including a severe case in Louisiana just last month.
For now, the Canadian teen and the patient in Louisiana are outliers, but the infections illustrate the virus’s ability to cause severe illness — and demonstrates how, during long illnesses, the virus has the chance to mutate to better infect humans.
In both of those cases, virus samples showed that once it was in the body, it mutated in ways that would allow it to stick to cells in the mucous membrane lining the upper respiratory tract.
The strain responsible for the Canadian teen’s illness was a mutated version of H5N1, which caused more severe symptoms. Mutations allowed the virus to better attach to human respiratory cells, raising the possibility that it could spread more easily.
“The average bird flu virus is not very good at all at sticking to the cells in our mucous membrane, which is what it needs to cause a human infection,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, told NBC News.
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In other words, the mutations could make it more effective in doing so, similar to how the spike protein of COVID-19 enabled the virus to spread rapidly, cause widespread panic, and shut down the economy.
“A lot of times worrying about whether a pandemic will emerge from this is like buying a lottery ticket," Angie Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, told NBC News. "Your odds are low, but if you buy enough tickets, you’ll eventually have a winner.”
Just in time. We're just weeks away from Trump taking office.
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