Disaster
‘It’s Going to Be Catastrophic’: Why the Next Pandemic Will Be Worse Than COVID
From Heartland Daily News
By Rob Bluey of the Daily Signal
The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning Americans to prepare for the next pandemic, which he fears will be more catastrophic than COVID-19.
Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist who continues to treat patients suffering from COVID, oversaw the CDC’s initial response to the pandemic and served as a member of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force under former President Donald Trump.
“We are going to have another pandemic,” Redfield told The Daily Signal. “I do believe it’s going to be much more catastrophic than the COVID pandemic.”
Redfield predicted the next pandemic would be the bird flu, also known as H5N1. Its mortality rate is significantly higher than COVID: 52% of the 888 infected patients with H5N1 have died since 2003.
“COVID’s mortality was about 0.6%,” Redfield said. “Bird flu’s mortality is going to be north of 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%. It’s going to be catastrophic.”
With more than 100 million chickens and turkeys already infected in the United States, Redfield said bird flu has also been found in 27 different mammals. And while there remains a low risk of infecting humans right now, another mishap like the COVID lab leak could quickly expedite bird flu’s transmission.
“This is why I’ve called for a moratorium on gain-of-function research until we can have a broader public debate about it,” he said. “I’m not convinced it needs to be done. I don’t think there’s really any benefit from it. Some of my colleagues disagree with me, but I think we shouldn’t do it until we know how we do it in a safe, responsible, and effective way and we clearly can’t do that at the present time.”
Redfield served on a nonpartisan commission convened by The Heritage Foundation, which issued a blistering critique of China’s COVID-19 cover-up. The commission, which released its report Monday, blamed the communist government in Beijing for obfuscating the truth about the pandemic’s origin and causing widespread damage and death as a result.
Americans can take an important step now to prevent such a disaster from happening in the future, Redfield said.
“COVID is a test case for why we don’t want to do gain-of-function research. I don’t think it was worth 28 million lives. I don’t think it was worth the trillion dollars of cost and the disruption that we had,” he said. “The COVID pandemic was a direct consequence of science and the arrogance that science had that nothing could go wrong. And, in fact, something went terribly wrong.”
The former CDC director, who served under Trump from 2018 to 2021, said biosecurity is the most important national security threat facing America today.
“It’s a time for our nation to step back and realize that the playing field has changed, similar to what happened when the atomic bomb came into the theater,” Redfield said.
Redfield spoke with The Daily Signal following the release of the commission’s report, “Holding China Accountable for Its Role in the Most Catastrophic Pandemic of Our Time: COVID-19.” Commissioners spoke at a Heritage Foundation event Monday.
Redfield criticized the Chinese government for failing to alert others to the threat posed by COVID when it was first discovered in the summer of 2019. The consequences, he said, were deadly. More than 28 million people worldwide have died from COVID-19, including 1.1 million in the United States.
The commission calculated the U.S. economic damages at a staggering $18 trillion.
What can policymakers do to hold China accountable?
The commission recommends a national security review of U.S.-China scientific collaborations and a deeper investigation into COVID-19’s origins. It also recommended that Congress amend the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act to grant U.S. courts jurisdiction over cases brought by American citizens who are seeking monetary damages from China.
In addition to Redfield, other members of the nonpartisan commission included:
- John Ratcliffe, former director of national intelligence (commission chairman)
- Robert C. O’Brien, chairman of American Global Strategies and former U.S. national security adviser
- Heidi Heitkamp, director of the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and former U.S. senator from North Dakota
- Matthew Pottinger, chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies China Program and former U.S. deputy national security adviser
- Jamie Metzl, founder and chair of OneShared.World, former NSC and State Department official and member of WHO expert advisory committee on human genome editing
- John Yoo, Emanuel S. Heller professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley
- Dr. Robert Kadlec, physician and former assistant secretary of health and human services
- David Feith, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs
Rob Bluey ([email protected]) is the executive editor of The Daily Signal. This article appeared in The Daily Signal on July 8, 2024. Reprinted with permission
By Josh Andrus
Originally posted in the Western Standard
Parks Canada officials admit they failed to conduct controlled burns of dead pine trees, which now pose a significant fire risk.
While Ottawa fixates on climate change rhetoric, their neglect of forest fire prevention has left Alberta’s landscapes vulnerable to devastation.
Last week, a shining beacon of the beauty of our province was partially destroyed as a wildfire burned through the picturesque town of Jasper. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims.
Thankfully there has been no reported loss of life. But many people’s livelihoods have been wiped out. The question is how did this happen, and what could have been done to prevent it?
Smokey Bear’s famous saying was: “Only you can prevent forest fires.” And, in this case, proactive measures certainly could have made a difference.
Unfortunately, the entire federal government seems to have forgotten Smokey’s key point. Fire prevention on national park land is federal jurisdiction.
In 2022, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault was informed that Parks Canada managers had not taken adequate precautions to protect the Town of Jasper from wildfires, according to documents obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter. At that time, Parks Canada officials admitted they had failed to conduct controlled burns of dead pine trees, which posed a significant fire risk.
“A mountain pine beetle infestation has brought significant changes to forests in Alberta, including Jasper National Park, with consequences for wildfire risk,” Guilbeault was informed.
Almost half of Jasper’s Whitebark Pine forest, 44%, was infected by beetles. However, few steps were taken to reduce the risk to the Town of Jasper with controlled burns of the surrounding forest, records show.
“Fire has not yet been applied for Whitebark Pine restoration,” stated a 2022 implementation report. “Mechanical thinning has been completed in 1.6 hectares, which is a small area relative to the amount of Whitebark Pine habitat.”
No reason was given for failing to take precautions. Since the fire, Guilbeault has made no public mention of the management reports.
Even though federal officials, including his department, knew the raging pine beetle was a serious hazard, Guilbeault blamed climate change: “As we are seeing in Canada and all around the world, we are seeing more and more aggressive forest fires,” he said on a media call on Monday.
Landon Shepherd, Incident Commander for Parks Canada, also attributed the intensity of the blazes to climate change: “This isn’t meant to be a discussion about climate change, but anyone who’s involved in fire management can tell you that things have become more difficult, especially in the last five years, to manage impacts.”
The 2022 warnings were not the first time concerns about a lack of fire prevention in national parks have been raised.
In 2018, CBC reported concerns from experts. Emile Begin and Ken Hodges, foresters for 40 years who had been studying Jasper National Park, found multiple issues with the forest that make it susceptible to a fire.
“You have fire suppression that has occurred for many years — therefore, you get a lot of dead fuel that would have been consumed by a natural process,” Hodges said. “The mountain pine beetle adds even more fuel to the situation.”
“You’ve got a major catastrophe on your hands if you get a match thrown into that.”
When pressed about the concerns, Alan Fehr, a superintendent for Jasper National Park, said: “We’re quite comfortable with where we are with our own emergency planning and evacuation planning.”
Hodges disagreed: “The potential that’s out there is actually scary. Hopefully, we’re wrong.”
Despite the repeated warnings of potential devastation due to forest management practices, Ottawa continues to point to climate change as the cause of the fires.
The Alberta government has been preparing, and increased its firefighting budget by more than 50% to $155.4 million this year. Alberta’s firefighting budget is now the highest it has ever been (despite misinformation about cuts.)
However, without proper fire prevention on national park land, blazes can become out of control quickly — as the warnings indicated.
Smokey Bear would be horrified. Clearly, Ottawa needs to spend less time interfering in provincial jurisdiction and more time focusing on things that actually are federal jurisdiction, like fire prevention in national parks.
Their inability to see the forest through the trees and take legitimate action to protect our national parks from the fury of an out-of-control wildfire demonstrates a degree of ineptitude that is, quite frankly, shocking.
Ottawa needs to stay in its lane and focus on its own jurisdiction, and they need to stop blaming climate change for their own ineptitude.
From the Fraser Institute
Was the very specific area around Jasper—not the entire forested lands of Alberta—managed aggressively enough?
With the picturesque town of Jasper badly damaged by fire, Albertans and Canadians across the country are wondering how such destruction was allowed to happen.
Much of the public debate assumes that the disaster, in some way, was human-caused or aggravated by governmental negligence or incompetence. Some argue that government policies to suppress natural wildfires, which were widely implemented across North America after the Second World War, allowed the build-up of massive amounts of fuel for potential mega-blazes. Others argue that governments have been negligent by failing to allow aggressive logging of dead trees and by using insufficient controlled burns to manage fuel loads of underbrush. Some, of course, blame climate change—specifically human-caused climate change. And yes, the climate has changed, warming about 1.2 degrees Celsius since 1850, which may contribute to a heightened risk of forest fires (although there’s no ability to attribute any single climatic event to climate change).
But focusing on these issues misses the forest for the trees and raises philosophical questions about humanity’s relationship with nature, specifically, whether or not it’s desirable—much less feasible—for humanity to think we can control nature at large scales and turn the world into a giant tame botanical garden. Further, focusing on these questions of “too much” or “too little” intervention mostly serves political interests trying to beat each other over the head about climate policies, which are at best capable of only slightly—very slightly—affecting the risk of future forest fires.
Rather, having studied environmental, health and safety policy for several decades, I believe we should focus on very different specific questions about how the fire was allowed to ravage Jasper. These questions cut through the foggier questions of how we manage nature and instead focus on how we manage human risks.
So, was the very specific area around Jasper—not the entire forested lands of Alberta—managed aggressively enough? In 2018, 350 hectares of trees around Jasper were removed. Apparently, that was not enough to protect the human-built environment. Parks Canada will have to answer that question in time.
Did the provincial and federal governments fall short in maintaining sufficient fire-fighting capabilities to protect Jasper? According to some reports, this was a significant source of failure, where the federal government, which maintains no ability to fight fires at night, failed to coordinate with Alberta’s provincial government, which does have night-fighting capabilities.
Did the town of Jasper take enough precautions to protect itself from the risk of conflagration? Are building codes in Jasper sufficiently stringent at fire-proofing human structures? Is the fuel burden within the township itself sufficiently controlled? More broadly, how much are we willing to spend to reduce risks? And how far should we aim to reduce those risks?
The answers to these questions could help produce tangible policies that may help reduce the risk of fire damage in the future.
There’s a lot of finger-pointing right now. Political point-scoring is the order of the day, particularly in the realm of climate policies. But using the Jasper fire for political ends distracts from the important questions about whether or not anybody or any level of government should try to tame nature outside of human-built environments. And about what policies will work best to protect towns like Jasper.
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