There’s been a lot of talk about the conflict in Ukraine causing the release of dangerous pathogens, including highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1), from U.S. funded biolabs.
This isn’t the first time that H5N1 bioweapons fears have gripped Ukraine. In 2009, when a flu broke out in Ukraine (the official story is that it was H1N1), rumors circulated that it was H5N1, spread via vaccines or aerial spraying.
Making the whole H5N1 saga even sketchier is its origin story in the late 1990s. The emergence of the virus in 1997 in Hong Kong was eerily predicted by Kennedy Shortridge, the scientist who would discover it. H5N1 didn’t infect humans until Shortridge and his colleagues had been studying its human infection potential in their labs for several years. At the time, the natural leap of a flu directly from poultry to humans was so improbable that scientists first suspected that it was the result of contamination from Shortridge’s lab. The 1997 H5N1 outbreak in Hong Kong was the first flu to be diagnosed by PCR test.
Does this scenario sound familiar?
OCA’s Political Director, Alexis Baden-Mayer documents all of that and more in her new broadcast.
Listen to the broadcast “Is Bird Flu Being Weaponized?” by Alexis Baden-Mayer below.
