Around here when swine flu went through the country we basically lost the whole pork industry because the first priority was to eliminate the disease. Does the US want a pandemic to be named after them? Because it seems to head in that direction. I think Freedom Flu is a pretty catchy name personally.
Early COVID variants were more fatal than later ones even before accounting for resistances; we might reasonably expect that the variant that does breakthrough will be less deadly, if only because an extremely deadly virus tends to incapacitate the people who would otherwise be spreading it
As likely as any other flu, which is basically guaranteed. I doubt it will become a 2020-style shutdown though, purely because that would be unpopular
It's not "basically guaranteed". H5N1 has been around for a while and was never really considered a serious threat before.
And a 2020-style shutdown would be the least of everyone's worries if this thing does blow up. The fatality rates in humans is around 40% or so. At that rate, you're talking about at the very least a complete breakdown of society as we know it, if not a full-blown extinction-level event.
This erroneously assumes that practitioners of woo like raw milk drinking are all on the right. This is most certainly not true. And it's kind of weird to make it political.
Can you imagine something like human-to-human bird flu being "managed" by Ronald McDonald and his cronies?
He couldn't even do the very least thing right for Covid and that is far less dangerous. Instead, spreading nonsense about horse dewormer, bleach and sunlight...and early on, more concerned with "his" stock market numbers than anything else.
Human-to-human bird flu would be terrible under any circumstances; under Spanky it'd be far, far worse.
It can only be a pandemic if there is a human to human transfer. Virologists say it isn't likely to mutate enough to do that. Still, if you can get it from a cow, will your pet dog be next?
