ANALYSIS
BEIJING, China, June 2, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – Some 18 months after COVID-19 began spreading through the world after originating in Wuhan, China recently announced the first human case of a rare form of bird flu.
On June 1, the Associated Press reported that Chinese authorities announced a 41-year-old man had been hospitalized on April 28 and was now in a stable condition. The outbreak occurred in the Jiangsu province, northwest of Shangai, when the man developed a fever some days before he was hospitalized.
An entire month later, May 28, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention finalized genome sequence testing and discovered that the sample was positive for the H10N3 variant of the bird flu virus. The patient is now reportedly recovered and ready to be discharged.
In its statement, Beijing’s National Health Commission (NHC) declared that “this infection is an accidental cross-species transmission. The risk of large-scale transmission is low.”
Authorities ordered medical observation of all the patient’s close contacts as well as contact tracing, but did not detect any cases of transmission, and so far no other cases have been detected globally.
China’s state-sponsored media, the Global Times, reported that NHC summoned experts, who did not believe that the strain of the virus had the ability to effectively infect humans, and was of a low pathogenic nature.
No details are known, or have been released, on how the man became infected with the virus.
However, Yang Zhanqiu, a deputy director of the Pathogen Biology Department at Wuhan University, suggested to the Global Times that the patient had contracted the virus from having contact with sick poultry.
Speaking to Reuters, the World Health Organization gave this statement: “The source of the patient’s exposure to the H10N3 virus is not known at this time, and no other cases were found in emergency surveillance among the local population. At this time, there is no indication of human-to-human transmission. As long as avian influenza viruses circulate in poultry, sporadic infection of avian influenza in humans is not surprising, which is a vivid reminder that the threat of an influenza pandemic is persistent.”
The genetic sequence of the virus has yet to be published, meaning that information about the strain of bird flu is yet to be fully disseminated amongst the scientific community.
Reuters noted that there had been “no significant numbers of human infections with bird flu since the H7N9 strain killed around 300 people during 2016-2017.” However, amongst the larger family of avian influenza, a different strand named H5N1 is highly pathogenic, with a mortality rate of around 60%.
It remains to be seen what the long-term implications are of the Chinese government’s announcement, and the trajectory the strain of the virus could take.
A familiar situation
Given the Chinese origins of COVID-19, many commentators are suggesting, even warning, that H10N3 could develop into a similar situation. Jürgen Richt, a professor at Kansas State University and director of the Center on Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said: “If they were to transmit human to human, then we would be at a worse situation than COVID-19 in terms of case fatality rates.”
Such musings are of a similar vein to comments made by globalist billionaire and population control advocate Bill Gates. “This pandemic is bad, but a future pandemic could be 10 times more serious,” declared Gates in January of this year.
This tone was echoed in an annual letter sent out by Bill and Melinda Gates also in January 2021.
“We all saw firsthand how quickly a disease you’ve never heard of in a place you may have never been can become a public health emergency right in your own backyard…The unfortunate reality is that COVID-19 might not be the last pandemic. We don’t know when the next one will strike, or whether it will be a flu, a coronavirus, or some new disease we’ve never seen before. But what we do know is that we can’t afford to be caught flat-footed again. The threat of the next pandemic will always be hanging over our heads—unless the world takes steps to prevent it.”
In comments to the Science Media Center, Dr. John W McCauley, WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza, The Francis Crick Institute did not rule out the possibility of human-to-human transmission as blithely as the Chinese “experts” did. Instead he answered that such an event had “not been clearly documented.”
Meanwhile, political commentator and journalist Jack Posobiec highlighted the thoughts of many on social media, by merely writing: “Here we go again.”
Here we go again
China reports human case of H10N3 bird flu, a possible first https://t.co/zmZ3ODrnio
— AntifaBook.com (@JackPosobiec) June 1, 2021
“Modern genetics has shown that most of the plagues in human history – the bubonic plague, smallpox, the Spanish Flu, the Hong Kong flu of 1968-70 – originated in China,” Population Research Institute president and China expert Steven Mosher told LifeSiteNews. “The difference now is that we have to worry about viruses and bacteria from China that have been genetically engineered by the Chinese military for use as a bioweapon. Just as the China Virus – COVID-19 – was.”
Indeed, the situation presents many similarities to the origins of COVID-19. On that occasion it was the WHO, who wrote early on in January 2020, that “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus.”
In fact, recently surfaced emails have revealed that the WHO, the NIH, and Dr. Anthony Fauci all adopted a China-centric attitude in the early months of COVID-19. The emails document that investigating WHO and NIH teams signed Chinese-designed confidentiality forms when looking into the origins of the virus, and waited for Chinese approval before making public announcements.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton pointed to a style of subservience to China, accusing Fauci and the WHO of colluding with the Chinese in a cover-up attempt: “These new emails show WHO and Fauci’s NIH special accommodations to Chinese communist efforts to control information about COVID-19.”
The world now awaits the next updates with regards to H10N3, looking to see whether China has been honest in its revelations about the virus, or if a similar situation to the origins of COVID-19 is currently developing, whether public health bureaucrats will use the opportunity to attempt to introduce more lockdowns, and whether the media will distort the dangers of the virus to stoke fear in the public.