https://xcancel.com/PeterHotez/status/1873162034201960946
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A Bluesky post
So we are screwed?
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It was ment as a fun post, but as some people are genuinely scared. H5N1 is nasty BUT human infection is EXTREMELY rare. There have been less than 1k cases in 20y. You are 80 times more likely to die from lightning strike. If you don't carry lightning rod around you should not worry.
https://subium.com/profile/volberg.bsky.social/post/3lf5uqfukze2u
Bluesky is funny. The libs are always so excited to shit on Trump - they didn't even shit on the OP and he really deserves it. He's impervious to knowledge and reason.
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Peter Jay Hotez (born May 5, 1958) is an American scientist, pediatrician, and advocate in the fields of global health, vaccinology, and neglected tropical disease control. He serves as founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also Director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and Endowed Chair in Tropical Pediatrics. He also serves as a University Professor of Biology at Baylor University.
been preparing 20 years (unlike when COVID began)
Motherfucker I lived through two global respiratory outbreaks brought on by coronavirii before COVID what the fuck do you mean you weren't preparing for another one
You are 80 times more likely to die from lightning strike. If you don’t carry lightning rod around you should not worry.
Yo dawg, lightning doesn't mutate to become better at hitting me.
I replied to him saying basically the same thing. Plus I linked to a Scientific American article on bird flu mutations. He quickly muted me.
Yeah and I was infinity times more likely to die of lightning than covid... before it started spreading amongst humans, what the fuck kind of logic is this bullshit?
Shut the fuck up and cope in private loser
good thing capitalist governments, especially far right ones like the trump admin, would never do those 3 things
thats not a how probability works there are other distributions not everything is uniform aaaaaaaa
It was ment as a fun post, but as some people are genuinely scared. H5N1 is nasty BUT human infection is EXTREMELY rare. There have been less than 1k cases in 20y. You are 80 times more likely to die from lightning strike. If you don't carry lightning rod around you should not worry.
The pinnacle of
There is reason to feel fucking anxiety about this. We will be LUCKY if the mild strain that passed through cows starts spreading and inoculating us against this virus as the strain that tends to infect directly from birds has a FIFTY PERCENT mortality rate. Five Zero Percent. Half of the people who got that shit fucking died and most of the rest had permanent debilitating long-term outcomes.
https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/cumulative-number-of-confirmed-human-cases-for-avian-influenza-a(h5n1)-reported-to-who--2003-2024--20-december-2024
When I think about what steps we would take in America to handle such a disease I get real goddamn nervous. I honestly don't think our government will do more for us than they did for COVID at a 3% mortality rate, which was damned near nothing.
That's also a 50% survival rate when cases are relatively rare, I don't know what the fatality rate would be if it's a widespread pandemic overloading hospitals and streaching resources.
YES! For the ones that survived they almost all, to the last, required weeks long medical care in a medical facility of some sort.
Worse case scenario for this is like COVID where 95% of people must be in hospital for weeks and only half survive.
The likelihood we get worse case scenario is very low, so please don't doom scroll on me. However, I think people saying, "oh, this is nothing to worry about," are really misleading. State the reality of the worst case scenario and then state why a mutation like that is extremely unlikely to be that virile while also being highly contagious at the same time. The two generally do not go hand in hand and experts on this particular virus know the details on why this or that mutation for acuteness of infection might inversely affect how contagious it is.
Strong feeling that number drops to 0% as the people saving lives start dropping like flies. I recommend everyone talk to their nurses about their feelings on PPE and how COVID was handled. You'll find a lot wte fucking insane and would cause the hospitals to collapse and die from something like this.
Imagine the US has a surprisingly large number of "isolated" cases of bird flu and the experts are still try to pacify us.
I had a iffy situation like I badly cut my hand slicing a bagel - I'd do self-diagnosis even though I have zero medical training. Instead of me just going to the ER - I'd do my best to answer the tricky question: "Can I avoid going to the ER?" It seems to me any hospital in the US from the smallest to the largest could potentially be ground zero for that plague. And anybody in that hospital from a clueless patient to a doctor who should really know better could be a carrier.
What worries me is viral recombination.
The mild strain and the more severe strain can infect the same animal and recombine into a totally new strain with traits from both of its components. The flu is especially notworthy for being a virus that uses recombination to evolve. And why stop there? An animal infected with bird flu and the current dominant seasonal flu strain can also produce a new strain from their recombination!
Maybe, maybe not. We'd need a virologist who has studied this virus to be able to determine if that is possible. The two mutations may be in regards to the same protein, for instance, in such a way that they may not be able to recombine in such a way that they both work.
Not a virologist or immunologist, but I work in a related field and closely with immunologists who work directly on flu, including H5N1. We discuss this stuff regularly. Not comfortable giving specifics because a relatively small number of people work in it.
You're both right, but it just comes down to chance. The amount of evolution the flu can go through in 6 months is equivalent to billions of years for animals simply because of its high rate of replication. Lots of viral replication within a single organism, lots of opportunities to evolve.
I doubt that any strain that became a human epidemic would maintain a 50% survival rate for long as the more virulent strains tend to be more virulent partially because they are more survivable, but it's not as simple as that and it could happen if the virus can shed and spread to others much faster than it kills (more likely in covid due to shedding in the incubation period). You don't need a 50% survival rate to make a disease devastating to a population though. We've definitely seen this before. Also, your point about long-term effects despite survival is also a valid concern.
This shit is always brewing largely because of industrial animal farming and we know it. We teach it in undergraduate evolution virology courses. No reason we can't take additional steps to prevent it. The typical flu vaccine should provide some level of protection, but a single seasonal flue vaccine is not super effective on its own, particularly against strains not included in that year. This is why it's vital to get the flu shot every year so you can boost the efficacy through cross-protection (kind of a contentious statement within immunology). This can greatly increase the efficacy of the vaccine by combining your immunological memory of all these different flu vaccines, even if the protection of one of those single vaccines is not particularly high. Note that the current flu vaccine you can get doesn't prevent infection or spread, it only lessens the symptoms.
Additionally, there is an adjuvanted H5N1-specific vaccine that is not given to the public. This should provide better protection, but it's held in reserves and only deployed in the case of a pandemic. I haven't seen the data on its protection profile (they say 91%), it was before more time, but I'm familiar with the adjuvant AS03 and know that NIAID has been providing grants to research groups to further improve upon this vaccine for H5N1 specifically. Not sure if any new versions have reached clinical trials.
Some other factors to consider: Do enough people in the US consistently get the flu shot? (Lol, get real.) What about the rest of the world population? Is the virus different enough from the H5N1 species covered in the previous vaccines? There are a lot of unknowable factors influencing a potential outbreak and making a better vaccine specific to each flu strain is very difficult due to its crazy ability to evolve and the difficulties of vaccine development.
All that said, I'll take precautions to avoid catching this and I think taking the threat more seriously than the US government is currently is justified. If they aren't deploying the 2013 H5N1 vaccine to at-risk populations like industrial animal workers, they've already dropped the ball imo.
Wait does that mean I should be drinking the raw milk to inoculate myself?
It's actually recommended that you use a syringe to inject the milk up your urethra.
make a five-year plan to leave, figure out what it takes. imagine what this nation of treat demons will do after three days of empty grocery shelves
imagine what this nation of treat demons will do after three days of empty grocery shelves
That reminds me of a scene from "Three Days Of The Condor". I'm using the spoiler tag because the spoiler total ruins the movie. The movie is fantastic and if you haven't seen it - you should. You = Anybody
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Three Days of the Condor (1975)
A bookish CIA researcher in Manhattan finds all his co-workers dead, and must outwit those responsible until he figures out who he can really trust.
Director: Sydney Pollack
Stars: Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff RobertsonI found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Carnists will turn to justifying cannibalism the moment the steaks run out
In 2019 “Coronavirus infection is extremely rare in humans, you are more likely to die from a lightning strike!”
(It’s worth noting the doctor was not the one with this dumbass take)
well it's a good thing those 3 things are unlikely to happen and esp so given we don't have a pandemic in recent memory where all 3 of those were an issue!
