Cleaning up Biden’s bird flu mess falls to Trump

The Biden administration’s brilliant plan to address avian flu involved using a non-sterilizing, leaky vaccine on chickens — two years into the pandemic, when most live chickens have already been exposed to the virus. Where have we heard that idea before, and how did it end again?

Over the past four years, I’ve examined numerous studies and firsthand accounts showing how imperfect vaccines, notably the COVID shots, can lead to negative efficacy. The problem with a leaky vaccine is that it allows the most resilient mutations to thrive and become dominant strains. This doesn’t mean the vaccines cause these mutations, but they do foster natural selection that favors the worst variants.

This administration urgently needs to signal a shift away from Biden’s disastrous biosecurity policies, especially concerning avian flu.

The mass vaccination of chickens against Marek’s disease in the 1970s is a stark example of this problem. The use of a leaky vaccine in that case led to the emergence of more virulent strains, making the disease far deadlier for unvaccinated chickens.

As Quanta magazine warned in 2018:

The problem with leaky vaccines, Read says, is that they enable pathogens to replicate unchecked while also protecting hosts from illness and death, thereby removing the costs associated with increased virulence. Over time, then, in a world of leaky vaccinations, a pathogen might evolve to become deadlier to unvaccinated hosts because it can reap the benefits of virulence without the costs — much as Marek’s disease has slowly become more lethal to unvaccinated chickens. This virulence can also cause the vaccine to start failing by causing illness in vaccinated hosts.

History not only repeats itself but also rhymes. Last weekend, South Dakota-based veterinary biologics company Medgene announced that the USDA was nearing conditional approval for its H5N1 vaccine for dairy cattle. What happens if this vaccine spreads to the animal kingdom and eventually reaches humans?

The risks of non-sterilizing, leaky vaccines are well documented. Despite the disastrous outcomes linked to the COVID vaccines, the government has not paused its push for respiratory viral vaccines. Instead, it is actively promoting the new RSV shots, ignoring the potential dangers.

Even Anthony Fauci acknowledged these risks in a 2023 academic paper, co-authored with David Morens, then a senior scientific adviser at NIAID. The paper, published in the journal Cell in January 2023, admitted that flu-like vaccines are non-sterilizing and have significant shortcomings.

“Deficiencies in these vaccines reminiscent of influenza vaccines have become apparent,” Fauci conceded, adding that “they elicit incomplete and short-lived protection.” This admission underscores the need for a more cautious approach to vaccine approval and distribution.

Why are we still allowing the flu vaccine to continue, and why are we even calling it a vaccine? Flu shots do not sterilize the virus. In fact, Fauci expressed concerns about “disease tolerance” and “immune tolerance,” which result from “immune defense mechanisms that allow hosts to ‘accept’ infection and other antigenic stimuli to optimize survival.”

In other words, leaky, waning vaccines that rely on suboptimal antibodies against rapidly mutating viruses can lead to immune tolerance and imprinting. This can cause the immune system to misfire, resulting in negative efficacy. Any short-term protection against severe disease often comes at a long-term cost as the viruses adapt and grow stronger.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Australia and New Zealand saw almost no fatalities in 2020, before vaccines were introduced. However, deaths surged only after vaccination campaigns began. Renowned cardiologist and epidemiologist Dr. Peter McCullough warns that we may be repeating the same mistakes with avian flu vaccines.

“Remember, when we have bird flu, it’s always a mixture of strains, not a single strain,” McCullough said on my podcast last week. “It’s going to nudge the overall population to more virulent strains. The southeast Asians have now been vaccinating poultry for several decades, and there’s tons of information that it’s backfiring.”

What’s worse is that human vaccines are also in the works. “We’re even more concerned about the human bird flu vaccines,” McCullough said. “We have a CSL Seqirus vaccine that was FDA-cleared in 2021. It’s an antigen-based vaccine; in the randomized trials of normal human volunteers, they died with this vaccine. So it frankly looks dangerous from the onset.”

Fortunately, this vaccine was not made commercially available. But why should we think that future efforts would succeed when we have failed to concoct safe and effective respiratory viral vaccines?

This administration urgently needs to signal a shift away from Biden’s disastrous biosecurity policies, especially concerning avian flu. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins outlined a five-part plan with $1 billion in subsidies but did not suggest pausing the vaccination campaign or halting the harmful culling of chickens.

She might be reconsidering. This week, Rollins acknowledged that “not enough research has been done” and emphasized the need to ensure that a vaccine would help contain the virus rather than strengthen it or cause it to spread to other species.

Now it’s up to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to scrap this plan entirely. RFK was made for a moment like this. His first major test began the moment he took office, and the clock is ticking.