If the aliens don't save us from Trump maybe the bird flu will, by Hal M. Brown

This is the CDC information about the bird flu.

At present the bird, or avain, flu is not highly effective at infecting humans. Read more from the Oregon Public Broadcasting article here. This is the concerning takeaway from the article:

There are two paths the virus could take to get better at infecting humans

Good news is, you’re not a duck or a cat. The bad news is, viruses evolve. 

Viruses accumulate mutations - little mistakes - when they copy themselves. Over time, those mistakes can add up to something that helps a virus gain entry into a new host’s cells. 

According to Messer, historically, it’s taken between three and five mutations of a flu virus’s hemagglutinin to allow it to shift from one animal host (birds, cows) to another (humans).

“We know from COVID-19, that’s not a huge number of mutations,” Messer said. 

And there’s a second path, a shortcut that bird flu could take to gain the ability to get into people and transmit between us.

But Messer says the question of how sick the virus could make us if it evolves is a profound unknown.

The virus may only be typically mild because it has to struggle to enter every human airway cell it infects. If it evolves to get better at binding to human lung cells, that could be enough to make it a more virulent infection. 

Messer said that just because the virus is mild in humans right now, that “does not in any way ensure that it will remain mild.” 

There are crucial unanswered medical questions about human to human contagion right now. From what I understand scientists are able to speculate about mutations but they can only go so far in making predictions. Consider: "Mutation is part of being a virus. Viruses mutate to adapt to their surroundings and more effectively move from host to host. Mutations can cause viruses to better evade our immune systems, treatments and vaccines. A mutation can help the virus gain traits that better help it reproduce quickly or adhere better to the surface of human cells." Reference.

What will happen if the bird flu mutates to become easily transmittable from person to person and we have a pandemic?

The U.S. has two vaccines ready should the strain of bird flu circulating in dairy cows begin spreading easily to people. They could begin shipping doses widely within weeks, if needed. Reference. 

With Trump as president and possibly, perhaps likely, RFK Jr. as the top health official, there is every reason to fear that the federal response to bird flu will be even more inept as the response to Covid was in Trump's first term.

Not only is RFK Jr. an anti-vaxxer but he advocates drinking raw milk. The science isn't in for sure whether drinking raw milk increases the risk of contracting bird flu, but there is a chance it does. Consider:

The health risks associated with unpasteurized milk are compounded with the advent of bird flu, which is increasingly spreading to non-avian farm animals. The HPAI H5N1 virus was first detected in American dairy cattle in March of this year, leading to increased monitoring by federal health agencies. 

The CDC still considers the risk posed by pasteurized milk to the general public to be very low. In a  statement of September 30 of this year, the FDA and USDA asserted that they "are confident that pasteurization is effective at inactivating H5N1 in raw milk as it is for the pathogens against which we began pasteurizing raw milk 100 years ago." The USDA began testing testing the nation’s milk supply for H5N1 on December 15 of this year.

Pasteurized milk remains safe to drink, but drinking raw milk significantly increases your risk of infection. "Since early December of this year, nearly 60 human cases [of avian flu] in the US had been confirmed, including several in children and teenagers," says Maddie Pasquariello, MS, RD. (Reference)

One of Trump's enemies, Gavin Newsom, was the first governor to take proactive action to minimize the risk to humans from bird flu (reference). Trump coined the nickname Governor Gavin 'NewSCUM' for him (reference). Merely hating him could lead Trump to dig in his heels to resist admitting bird flu is a risk and taking measures to mitigate the danger.

As more and more Democratic governors follow Newsom and initated action to slow down the spread of bird flu, including mandating vaccination for groups where it was possible to do so and strongly recommending it for others, this probably would lead to a red state vs blue state division. The red states are Trump's base so he'd pander to their governors. This would add impetus to his refusal to take federal action to slow down the spread of bird flu before it dangerously mutated. Thus it could become a pandemic. 

Even if the mutation was highly contagious and only made people very sick but was rarely fatal in otherwise healthy people, it would signficantly disrupt the economy and have a negative impact on people's lives.

Only Anthony Fauci's credibility saved the country from even more devasting loss of life and, despite Trump's stupid recommedations at press conferences, he saved Trump's reputation as well. Trump ended up claiming to have ended the pandemic. It's no wonder there is a move among hardcore MAGA to jail Fauci. He's the Covid hero. MAGA wants to discredit him. Trump says he personally is the Covid hero. It is another blatant example of gaslighting. We all saw the press conferences where Dr. Deborah Birx looked stunned when Trump asked her about injecting disinfectant. (See "Dr. Birx Wished She Was in 'Twilight Zone' When Trump Suggested Injecting Disinfectant to Treat COVID")

Regardless of the evidence to the contrary, Trump says he saved millions from dying (read article from PoliFact).

If Trump blunders in his response to a highly contagious mutation of bird flu, keep in mind he won't have objective experts to advise and save him. He will listen to people who are TV doctors or their equivalent who will tell him what he wants to hear. He will make decisions about a proactive federal response to bird flu is appropriate based on what he believes is politically expedient. 

In his own ignorance about science he will play to the scientific ignorance of his base the same way he did with Covid. Because the disease is a type of influenza it doesn't sound as dangerous as it is. The average person doesn't know that the Spanish Flu killed between 17 million and possibly as many as 100 million people worldwide. 

 This is what Trump said on Fox News:

Trump, March 24: I brought some numbers here. We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don’t turn the country off, I mean every year. Now when I heard the number — you know, we average 37,000 people a year. Can you believe that? And actually this year we’re having a bad flu season. But we lose thousands of people a year to the flu. We never turn the country off. We lose much more than that to automobile accidents. We didn’t call up the automobile companies, say, “Stop making cars. We don’t want any cars anymore.” We have to get back to work.

Bob Woodward documented in his book "Rage" how Trump knew how deadly Covid would be but tried to minimize the threat (read article).

In the worst case lacking a robust federal response to bird flu millions could die, in a less serious case, the economy could crash.

This could turn out to be similar in some ways to what would happen if Trump was told by military experts saying that the drones really were an advance force for an invasion by the aliens who have been monitoring the failure of humans to achive peaceful coexistence so they could enter the galatic community and he ignored it, and then it happened. To get our attention they might have to vaporize a few major cities.

If I had to choose between the alien invasion and a pandemic which might wipe out half the human race I would chose the former. At least it might be possible to negotiate with the aliens. 

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Musing On My Mortality: A scary dream and then scarier Covid news

Musing on my mortality:

A scary dream and then scarier Covid news

By Hal Brown

I woke from a scary dream this morning. 

I was sitting in the chair at my dentist's  office and he was about to work on a cavity in a molar and I saw that he was about to use the biggest dental drill I'd ever seen. It was about 3/8ths of an inch in diameter like this:

I said to him and his dental assistant "that's the biggest drill I've ever seen." I was girding myself for the inevitable. I was apprehensive but not terrified. I tried to relax and then I woke up before he began to drill.

Then I got up and made a cup of coffee thinking about the dream. I had no idea what I would blog about until I read an article about emerging Covid subvariants.

My morning online ritual is to first look at my email. This trending alert from Medscape jumped out at me:

Click above to enlarge to see what it looked like

It linked to:

So far I've avoided Covid although I have friends and acquaintances who have had it. Except for one who was hospitalized their cases were fairly mild. 

I did have pneumonia last month though. More than 40,000 people die of pneumonia a year in the United States. 

Mine was so severe that my doctor considered having me hospitalized. Instead he decided to treat at home with a strong antibiotic and prednisone. I was bedridden for three weeks with a vaporizer blowing mist at me and coughing up disgusting sputum which I won't describe here. 

Now recovered I feel healthy. I appreciate every day when I feel good knowing that the current triple disease threat is out there: germs to the north of me, germs to the south of me, germs to the east of me, and I have no idea what potential threat is to the west of me that will put me in the hospital or the grave.

Being fully vaccinated from Covid and having had my flu shot, and hoping I have some pneumonia antibodies, I was resting easy enough to figure I was as protected as I could be, at least from debilitating or fatal viral illnesses. 

I don't want to live my life in fear. I am prudent about mask wearing and have a stock of N95's. I still go out to eat, and did throughout the pandemic once restaurants reopened. 

Knowing I was vaccinated was the key to enabling me to going to favorite restaurants like The Colony Pub in the lovely little town of Aurora, Oregon and Wild Fin on the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington.

I missed this article on Medscape when it first was published on Dec. 22 but got it in the email this morning when it trended:

This is how the article begins:

It's a story perhaps more appropriate for Halloween than for the festive holiday season, given its scary implications. Four Omicron subvariants of the virus that causes COVID-19 will be the most common strains going from person to person this winter, new research predicts.

Not too dire so far, until you consider what else the researchers found.

The BQ.1, BQ1.1, XBB, and XBB.1 subvariants are the most resistant to neutralizing antibodies, researcher Qian Wang, PhD, and colleagues report. This means you have no or "markedly reduced" protection against infection from these four strains, even if you've already had COVID-19 or are vaccinated and boosted multiple times, including with a bivalent vaccine.

On top of that, all available monoclonal antibody treatments are mostly or completely ineffective against these subvariants.

But evidence from other countries, specifically Singapore and France, show that at least two of these variants turned out not to be as damaging as expected, likely because of high numbers of people vaccinated or who survived pervious infections, he said.

Still, there is little to celebrate in the new findings, except that COVID-19 vaccinations and prior infections can still reduce the risk for serious outcomes such as hospitalization and death, the researchers write.

The rest of the article is largely technical but you get the idea. 

The title is interesting in the inclusion of two contrasting words, alarming vs. worrisome. It begins with this sentence:

It's a story perhaps more appropriate for Halloween than for the festive holiday season, given its scary implications

Halloween, lest we forget, was mostly cancelled as a fun holiday  during the height of the pandemic.

The writer seems to be ambivalent and not sure about how loud to sound an alarm due to the scientific findings. Consider:

Not too dire so far, until you consider what else the researchers found.

All this tends to make this almost 79 year old think of his own mortality. 

There's a grave in the new portion of the historic Cemetery at the Green waiting for me in Massachusetts. My late wife grew up in a house which had its backyard adjacent to the cemetery so whenever we from from Michigan to visit my in-laws we'd walk though it looking at the colonial tombstones in the old part of the cemetery..

Click above to enlarge

No remains of me will ever be buried there. I don't particularly care where my ashes go. 100 years from now somebody may notice why there's no date of death for me on my late wife's family monument:

Something is going to get me in the end. To quote Albert Camus:

"Once one's up against it, the precise manner of one's death has obviously small importance.... 

Despite this ultimate truism, the precise (using the word literally) manner of one's death is generally unknowable, even for someone who has a terminal illness.  Only those about to commit suicide know exactly how they will die.

Some people, perhaps most people, think they know what will happen after they die. In fact, nobody knows, or at least there is no proof of an afterlife that hold up to rigorous scientific proof.

I believe with absolute certainty that in no way, shape, or form is there any life after death. This puts me among the 7% of the world population who are atheists. Others find great solace in believing with the conviction of unshakable faith that there is. 

Well meaning people sometimes tell those who are beset with grief that their loved one "is in a better place" without realizing the person beginning the process of mourning, and the person who died, were atheists. Such is the way of the world. 

So there we go... from a dream about a terrifyingly large dental drill to "worrisome" news about Covid subvarients... to my writing a non-political, dare I say philosophical, blog.