'Professor Lockdown' is back to try again.
Architects of Britain's Covid lockdowns, are modelling how many Britons could die in a bird flu outbreak amid 'growing fears' that the virus may soon jump to humans. UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) officials are now developing 'scenarios of early human transmission' to 'facilitate preparedness'. The panic has started because one person allegedly died from the virus in Cambodia last month.
The one death, out of a world population of 7.8 Billion people, is enough for Health experts to dust off their 'fear porn' files on avian flu from 2005 when Ferguson, then in the pay of the Pharmaceutical giants, predicted Bird flu would kill 65,000 Britons, panicking the UK government into purchasing millions of doses of Tamiflu and other antivirals. The pandemic never happened of course, but Ferguson's predictions helped the drugs companies make millions in profits.
Ferguson went on to further success with Covid-19. His predictions of half a million dead in the UK panicked the UK government into the first Lockdown and go banging on drug company doors for a cure.
In an update today, the UKHSA confirmed that its Avian Influenza Technical Group – which includes Professor Ferguson and around two dozen other experts – calculated how an outbreak could sweep the UK. Under a 'mild scenario', the scientists estimated that one in 400 people who caught bird flu would die due to the virus. This infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.25 per cent is similar to Covid's in mid-2021 and the 2009 bird flu outbreak.
But under a 'more severe scenario', the virus would be fatal among one in 40 people who became infected (an IFR of 2.5 per cent). However, the World Health Organization warns that of the 868 human H5N1 cases reported to it over the last two decades, 456 - just over half - have been fatal.
H5N1 avian flu was first detected in chickens in Scotland in 1959, and again in China and Hong Kong in 1996. It first was detected in humans in 1997, but it has never been fully proven it is directly transmissible in humans. Claims that the '97 outbreak in Hong Kong was spreading without bird contact were later thought to be incorrect. Many scientists, especially those not in the pay of pharmaceutical companies, say that the risk of it suddenly mutating into a virus that could spread easily from human-to-human is so vanishingly small as not to be worth the attention now spent on it. But they would, they don't have a cure to sell.
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