All the usual suspects and their business interest backers are gearing up for a big push to oppose any public health deployment against the threats of avian influenza. These covid deniers and anti-vaxxers have never actually been satisfied with having successfully manufactured mild and The Great Barrington Declaration becoming public health policy all over the place (minus protecting the vulnerable part of course). Various right-wing covid minimizers are pushing all sorts of misleading things about the very real threats of H5N1.
Important Context Right-Wing Operatives, Anti-Vax Groups Already Working to Politicize Bird Flu Many of the same people who successfully politicized COVID-19 are gearing up for round two. Walker Bragman Dec 26, 2024 In May, REPPARE published a paper, which was subsequently shared by Bhattacharya, arguing that the WHO and the World Bank were overstating the threat of future pandemics. It specifically noted that “mortality from highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) types H5 and H7 has greatly declined over the past century.” Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, meanwhile, has been politicizing bird flu on his War Room broadcast on the right-wing Real America’s Voice television network. Early on in the pandemic, Bannon and his business partner, Chinese billionaire fraudster Guo Wengui, were critical in spreading the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Early on in the pandemic, the claim was used by right-wing media to provide cover for the flailing Trump White House. With the bird flu outbreaks, War Room has engaged in similar activity, pushing conspiracy theories about the virus—its origins and the expert concern over its outbreaks.
On the podcast Knowledge Fight which reviews what Alex Jones, the hosts often remarks that Alex Jones works for Big Covid, in that he promotes the spread. On the show they’ve played several clips in the month of December 2024 where Alex Jones wrongly claims that Peter Hotez is responsible for bird flu or other things, and that the avian flu news is some kind of plot against Trump. Many clips they’ve played you can hear him demonize doctors and healthcare workers in a way that’s very disturbing because historically these types of accusations have led to people being induced into violence against those with such accusations against them, indeed it’s a known social engineering tactic, one that appears to have been used in the covid pandemic by covid contrarians and monied interests. Back in July 2024 he played a disturbingly lengthy wildlife-killing-prey video for his audience and likened it to supposedly the hospitals doing this to patients, clearly he meant on purpose. In the December 24, 2024 episode of Knowledge Fight they play a clip where Alex Jones describes animal experiments not unusual in medical training. He doesn’t seem to be that concerned with animal rights, he merely uses the emotional disgust to stoke people to believe that doctors are being made to do this as part of their training as a type of hazing ritual, to weed out anyone who will be unwilling to commit atrocities on behalf of… “they”. The “they” is described as a mafia-like organization of some type using doctors to hurt people who won’t pay protection money. His description was a ham handed mobster movie narrative that reminded me of the comedy movie Nuns on the Run with Robbie Coltrane and Eric Idle. I don’t mean to make light of this because though it does seem comical, I think this type of rhetoric is actually quite serious, and that at least some in the right-wing audience do take it seriously.