From the Brownstone Institute

By Clayton J. Baker, MD  

“Pandemic preparedness” is a gigantic, deadly protection racket. I have described it in the past as arsonists running the fire department. That is precisely what happened with Covid, and that is what is being attempted with H5N1 Bird flu.

On December 31, 2024, the world received a year-end parting gift from the good folks at NIAID, Anthony Fauci’s old fiefdom at the National Institutes of Health. NIAID – the same unaccountable and secretive agency that Fauci used to fund the gain-of-function research of Ralph Baric at UNC Chapel Hill and the Bat Lady in Wuhan that resulted in Covid – has a new director, one Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo.

Marrazzo and another NIAID colleague, Dr. Michael G. Ison, wrote a year-end editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine that accompanies a research paper on recent H5N1 Bird flu cases in the United States, as well as a case report of a lone case of severe illness associated with Bird flu in British Columbia.

Marrazzo and Ison summarize the findings of the research paper and case report as follows:

Investigators now report in the Journal a series of human cases from the United States and Canada. The former series involves 46 case patients with generally mild, self-limited infection with [Influenza type] A(H5N1): 20 with exposure to poultry, 25 with exposure to dairy cows, and 1 with undefined exposure.…Most case patients presented with conjunctivitis, almost half with fever, and a minority with mild respiratory symptoms, and all recovered. The only hospitalization occurred in the case patient with undefined exposure, although hospitalization was not for respiratory illness.

They elaborate on the single case of serious illness:

In Canada, a 13-year-old girl with mild asthma and obesity presented with conjunctivitis and fever and had progression to respiratory failure…After treatment that included oseltamivir, amantadine, and baloxavir, she recovered.

In other words:

• Over an eight-month period, from March to October 2024, 46 cases of human bird flu occurred in the United States, a country of 336 million people.
• There were zero deaths.
• 45 out of 46 infected persons had known exposure to animals.
• The majority of the cases consisted of conjunctivitis (commonly known as “pink eye”).
• Only one US patient was hospitalized, but this was not due to pneumonia – the principal life-threatening complication of influenza – and the patient recovered.
• One severe case was identified in Canada, a country of 40 million people, in an asthmatic, morbidly obese girl. She was treated successfully with respiratory support and existing antiviral medications, and she recovered.

Does this sound to you like a public health emergency worthy of the legacy media’s recent exhumation of discredited Covid-era fear-mongers like Dr. Leana Wen and Dr. Deborah “Scarf Lady” Birx? Does it justify their hair-on-fire pronouncements on cable news shows everywhere, pushing for indiscriminate PCR testing of animals and emergency authorization of more mRNA vaccines for humans?

Does this sound to you like justification to continue to kill and destroy (pro tip: “cull” means kill and destroy) millions upon millions of farm animals, when most animals who contract Bird flu survive, recover, and develop immunity?

Does this sound to you like justification for another Emergency Use Authorization of another mRNA vaccine?

No? Me neither.

But wait, there’s more.

In their editorial, NIAID experts Marrazzo and Ison fail to mention the following:

• There have been zero cases of human-to-human transmission of this virus.
• The current circulating clade of the virus has been determined by independent researchers to very likely have originated at a US Government gain-of-function laboratory, namely the USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL) in Athens, GA.
• Multiple bioweapons laboratories, including the Yoshihiro Kawaoka lab at the University of Wisconsin, and the Ron Fouchier lab in the Netherlands (both of which have been affiliated with NIAID and with work done at SEPRL) have been doing gain-of-function research on Bird flu for many years, including experiments so outrageously dangerous that their work prompted President Obama’s ultimately unsuccessful ban of gain-of-function research in 2014.
• In 2019, NIAID reapproved and resumed funding Kawaoka and Fouchier’s dangerous work at increasing human transmissibility of Bird flu – the very same gain-of-function research that had prompted Obama’s ban.
• According to its package insert, Audenz, the current Bird flu vaccine, was associated with death in 1 out of every 200 recipients, compared to 1 in 1,000 placebo recipients.
• According to openthebooks.com, and as reported in the New York Post, NIH scientists received royalties totaling $325 million from pharmaceutical companies and foreign entities over more than a decade.

So, what are our friends at NIAID’s recommendations?

For one, they stress the “urgent need for vigilant surveillance of emerging mutations and assessment of the threat of human-to-human transmission.”

Are they advocating for the willy-nilly testing of entire livestock herds, as promoted by Birx, which is sure to create a preponderance of false positives?

Are they calling for the continued mass killing and destruction of millions upon millions of farm animals, whenever a fraction of the animals test positive for the virus?

Instead of PCR-swabbing every cow, chicken, and farm worker on Earth, how about we stop creating new mutant variants of H5N1 in the labs, since that’s where the current problem originated? How about we stop funding such utter madness with our tax dollars, funneled through corrupt government agencies like NIAID?

After all, you don’t save Tokyo by creating Godzilla.

But Marrazzo and Ison make no mention of this common-sense, sane approach.
Instead, they also stress the need for more – you guessed it – vaccines. They write:

we must continue to pursue development and testing of medical countermeasures…Studies have shown the safety and immunogenicity of A(H5N1) vaccines…studies are ongoing to develop messenger RNA–based A(H5N1) vaccines and other novel vaccines that can provide protection against a broad range of influenza viruses, including A(H5N1).”

Aside from attesting to the “safety” of a product where 1 in 200 users die, the use of the word “countermeasures” is extremely telling. It is a military term, not a medical one. We have already seen this game played with Covid. The gain-of-function lab research is done to produce a lab-manipulated, weaponized version of a virus, a version that is transmissible among and toxic to humans – in other words, a bioweapon. The vaccine is the countermeasure to the bioweapon. The vaccine is the intellectual property of those who created the bioweapon, and it is worth a fortune once the weapon has been unleashed. It is as simple as that.

“Pandemic preparedness” is a gigantic, deadly protection racket. I have described it in the past as arsonists running the fire department. That is precisely what happened with Covid, and that is what is being attempted with H5N1 Bird flu.

Moving forward to a new administration that has expressed a commitment to rooting out corruption in the pharmaceutical/medical/public health realm, improving the health of citizens, and restoring trustworthiness in medicine, I recommend the following steps to combat the H5N1 Bird flu, and to end the “pandemic preparedness” racket that threatens to hold the world hostage again and again, as it did during Covid.

• Immediately end and outlaw all gain-of-function and other bioweapons research in and funded by the United States, and apply all possible diplomatic pressure to eradicate it from the Earth.
• Eliminate all special protections from liability for vaccines, including the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and the PREP Act.
• Refocus Infectious Disease research on new therapeutics, rather than power-seeking and profit-driven vaccine development.
• Completely reform the National Institutes of Health, and close the incorrigibly corrupt NIAID altogether.

The fear pornographers must be discredited. We must make realistic and sensible decisions about our food supply.

We must learn the lessons of Covid, and live in knowledge rather than in fear.

We must end the protection rackets, confidence games, and shakedowns that government insiders impose on us like mafiosi.

Happy New Year!

Author

Clayton J. Baker, MD

C.J. Baker, M.D. is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

From the Brownstone Institute

By  Laura Rosen Cohen 

President Trump has been very busy lately, driving leftist and Liberal Canadians utterly out of their minds by wickedly and hilariously trolling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau while simultaneously threatening a massive 25% tariff on the Canadian auto industry. With a solitary few taps of fingers on his phone, Trump cornered Canada by brewing an artisan Trumpian “threat to start some conversation” online. It went something like this: “Nice auto industry you got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it!”

This “conversation starter,” which could also be rightly characterized as an existential death blow to the Canadian auto industry, forced Prime Minister Trudeau to hastily jet down to Mar-a-Lago. There, he unceremoniously flopped in his mission to mitigate damages, which has since been followed by the pilgrimage of several other notable Trudeau lightweights to continue the conversation. Maybe Mr. Wonderful will have better luck. 

You could be forgiven if you thought the main lessons learned from this episode are that Canadians have a very fragile sense of humor, and that they bristle at being reminded how fully dependent the Canadian economy is on America. All of that is, of course, true. But if you thought that was the main event, you’d be wrong. The two main takeaways are that any industry that is being protected will, at some point, have an economic and policy moment of reckoning, along the lines of Herbert Stein: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. And the second lesson is that it will likely play out in part, in real time on X. The Trump-Trudeau show, however, is just a shiny bauble. The real policy landmine in America is immigration, both legal and illegal.

This brings us to the H-1B visa issue in America, which is currently being “debated,” right in front of our eyes on X. On the surface, it seems to be a relatively simple philosophical debate; are you in favor of bringing in foreign workers for the jobs that Americans allegedly cannot do? Or do you favor policies that incentivize hiring Americans? Battle lines are even being drawn among conservative thought leaders and MAGA-adjacent personalities like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and others.

The public divide seems to be about being in favour of skilled immigration, or being anti-immigrant. But this framing is a distraction. The real issue, of course, is how writer Lee Smith puts it, which is that “…H-1B matters because it’s an effect of the core issue — indeed the reason DJT is POTUS — a political and corporate establishment that has waged a half-century long campaign to destroy the American middle class.”

Bingo. And this is where it behooves the Trump administration to learn from the failed Canadian experience with our H-1B visa equivalent: the Temporary Resident Permit or TRP.

Officially, the TRP gives status to non-citizens or permanent residents (the last step before citizenship) to be legally in Canada for a temporary purpose. This can include international students, tourists, or foreign workers. (The TRP does not apply to visa-exempt countries.)

Unofficially, the TRP is a literal cash cow for Canadian universities, and a veritable backdoor to get into Canada via an increasingly shifty diploma mill industry which contains a possible human trafficking element. There are also endless social media accounts that shamelessly explain how to game the system and remain in Canada. Plenty of Canadian corporations have benefitted from the influx of cheap labour, so much so that the Trudeau government has been forced to eat its hat on the TPR program and put new limitations in place, and not just on the TPR program but immigration in general. But the “temporary” population of Canada is now close to 10% of the Canadian population, and Canada has no real plan to get TPR permit holders to go home or to dissuade them from seeking asylum.  Unsurprisingly, the temporary population simply doesn’t want to leave.

The final, glaring issue with both the H-1B and TRP is the undeniable fact that they are gateways to North America’s robust anchor baby (“birth tourism”) industry. In Canada, birth tourism, aided and abetted by almost nonexistent enforcement has added extra layers of stress to Canada’s already fiscally unsustainable socialized medical system.

“Temporary” programs in both Canada and America rarely benefit their existing populaces. More often than not, they habitually displace and punish the middle class. That’s a feature and not a bug. The H-1B acts in a similar fashion for skilled, white-collar workers. Moreover, as Milton Friedman famously said, “There is nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.” Here’s hoping the incoming Trump administration takes heed of Canada’s abject failure to rein in its permanent “temporary” population and reigns in the policies that more often than not, discriminate, decimate, and impoverish the native citizenry.

Author

Laura Rosen Cohen

Laura Rosen Cohen is a Toronto writer. Her work has been featured in The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, National Post, The Jerusalem Post, The Jerusalem Report, The Canadian Jewish News and Newsweek among others. She is a special needs parent and also a columnist and the official In House Jewish Mother of internationally best-selling author Mark Steyn at SteynOnline.com