The first of the 2024 emergency declarations on avian influenza appeared on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) website on July 18, 2024.1 There was no news release, nothing was posted on social media and no news outlet picked up the story. It was a stunning silence for such a significant development in public health policy.
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra had determined that the avian influenza A (H7N9) virus posed a “significant potential for a public health emergency” that could “affect national security or the health and security of United States citizens living abroad.” The declaration allowed for the emergency use authorization of diagnostic tests2 for detecting H7N9 in humans.
Other than the radio silence, the other thing that was odd about the July 18, 2024 post was that, instead of creating a new emergency, it resurrected a 2013 declaration for the last known human H7N9 outbreak3 that took place in China, where intermittent human infections occurred between 2013 and 2019. During that span of six years, there were a total of 1,568 human cases that claimed 616 lives. There was said to be at least one case of human-to-human H7N9 transmission.4
In July 2024, the only place in the world impacted by H7N9 was a single poultry farm in the Terang area of Victoria, Australia.5,6 No human cases had been reported there yet.
Does the emergency use authorization of an H7N9 test mean that is going to change? Will H5N1 and H7N9 be said to combine into a new pandemic virus, as a 2021 headline on Bill Gates’ GAVI.org, “The next pandemic: H5N1 and H7N9 influenza?”7 ominously suggested?
There had never been H5N1 in Australia before, but scientists were forecasting the arrival of the virus8 with migrating birds from Antarctica in the coming months and they were concerned that it could threaten the 40,000 little penguins on Phillip Island. Would the next images coming out of Australia be the tiny dead bodies of the world’s cutest penguins, followed by the frightening news of a new bird flu virus the world has never seen before?
In 2005, then-U.S. President George Bush and health officials warned about the possibility of a human bird flu pandemic, which could “kill 1.9 million people and hospitalize another 9.9 million.”9,10 Yet after nearly two decades, this prediction still has not materialized. No one in the U.S. has ever died from bird flu, and while there have been annual outbreaks in previous years, no human casualties have been reported.
In fact, every instance of fearmongering about a potential bird flu pandemic has turned out to be false. This is why I wrote my book, “The Great Bird Flu Hoax,” as I became so convinced by the evidence AGAINST the possibility of a bird flu pandemic.
So, with H7N9 now being declared a “public health emergency,” will the situation be different this time? I don’t think so.
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