On February 3, 2023, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Zeynep Tufekci titled, “An Even Deadlier Pandemic Could Soon Be Here.”
Here is the nutshell version of her article: Avian flu has been around for years and “hasn’t often infected humans,” but the H5N1 strain (which has been in circulation since 2014) could become deadly dangerous, so we need lots of testing, new mRNA shots, and global surveillance – right now! Ramp up the testing! Increase the government’s H5N1 stockpile! “Mass vaccination of poultry and pigs should begin quickly!” along with “voluntary vaccination”…of “poultry workers and health care workers.”
Tufekci is a sociologist, a professor at Columbia University’s Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security, and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. What Tufekci is not, is a medical doctor, scientist, biologist, vaccinologist, epidemiologist, disease expert, or public health expert.
To be fair, as Dr. Scott Atlas states, “You don’t have to be a medical scientist to understand the data. You just have to be a critical thinker.” However, we must fault Tufekci on both counts – the data and critical thinking. In what can only be considered a hit piece on the world, Tufekci makes broad scientific and medical claims about viruses, citing inaccurate data and making mostly vague references to “experts.”
Tufekci writes, “The world needs to act now, before H5N1 has any chance of becoming a devastating pandemic.”
She cites a 56 percent fatality rate in those who have contracted H5N1. Apparently she is referring to a January 2023 World Health Organization publication that reports 870 cases of bird flu in humans over the past 20 years, of which 457 were fatal. Stop and think about that for a minute. The most significant part of the WHO report is not the more than 50 percent mortality rate, but that the data spans 20 years. As the WHO report states, “The likelihood of sustained human-to-human transmission of these viruses remains low.”
In an avian flu article updated January 27, 2023, the CDC reports that fewer than 10 cases of humans infected with H5N1 bird flu virus have been reported globally since December 2021. The CDC notes that H5N1 is “primarily an animal health issue,” and explains, “Human infections with bird flu viruses have most often occurred after close or lengthy unprotected contact with infected birds.” The CDC states, “The spread of bird flu viruses from one infected person to a close contact is very rare, and when it has happened, it has not led to continued spread among people.”
But it appears someone wants the public to panic.
On February 8, 2023, just five days after Tufekci’s article was published, the WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that, because the H5N1 has jumped from birds to mammals, “the world must prepare for a potential human bird flu pandemic.”
Did Tufekci and The Times get a heads up? It’s hard to say, but on the day of the WHO’s press conference, the Daily Mail in the UK wrote an article quite similar to Tufekci’s opinion piece. It would appear both writers got their talking points from the same source, which would mean there wasn’t a lot of objective investigative journalism going on.
No comments:
Post a Comment