The Avian Influenza Trilogy

The threat

By now, you will have gathered that we are even more worried about the direction of UKHSA, its actions, its secrecy, and its complete lack of accountability.

We focused on the difficult job of understanding the whys and wherefores of the UKHSA’s purchase of more than 5 million doses of an Influenza H5 pandemic vaccine.

Is an influenza H5N1 pandemic on its way?

There are many uncertainties, starting from which vaccine and its content, the effects, the apparent absence of an open competitive tendering process and the UKHSA’s refusal to disclose the cost and any risk-benefit analysis they may have carried out.

Even more worrying is the fact that TTE had sight of a response from the UKHSA indicating that the purchased vaccines are “expected” to diminish mortality.

The series relating our efforts to get more information from the UKHSA and MHRA is currently running on TTE. As we promised, we are updating the documents we receive from both the MHRA and UKHSA under FOIA. Our readers who are working with us have provided other sources of documentation. It’s all a big puzzle, with pieces coming from various sources. 

The fragmentation of documents and persistent stonewalling are not good signs. It might turn some people off, but we are old dogs, and it is time to gather everything in three posts to facilitate comprehension. 

This post describes current evidence of the threat of avian influenza to humans. The second looks at the contract the UKHSA eventually directed us to and what they bought with our money.

In February and March 2023, we warned readers that underemployed modellers were again being directed to give us their predictions on avian influenza 20 years after their disastrous stargazing. The forecasts of 200 million deaths signalled the slide for stockpiling of useless antivirals and experimental vaccines, a movie which we have watched several times.

But what does the latest threat look like? Let’s start with a case definition. The ECDC made an effort specifically adding the concept of viral load to symptoms. The higher the load the higher the likelihood of being infectious. We do not agree with the load cutoff and single observation window, but we appreciate the effort.

UKHSA has no idea about what a ”case” means so here’s the first problem. Tom, ever the diplomat, put it gently:

Next, we look at the UKHSA’s assessment of the threat.

In December 2024 we analysed the UKHSA’s own review of the threat and found it to be of poor quality

It’s low from seals to humans with poor quality evidence. But what about avian influenza from birds to humans? That is very low but you can check the latest situation here.

A reader pointed out this report of one case in the UK in January 2022. But

A high PCR cycle threshold persistent despite several observations, could mean contamination but it almost certainly means non infectiousness, as we have explained in our Riddles series.

The SARS-CoV-2 transmission riddle - Part 3

The ECDC reports this:

“Despite the high number of exposure events due to the large outbreaks in poultry and wild birds since 2020, no symptomatic human infection due to avian influenza A(H5Nx) has been reported from EU/EEA countries. In Spain, two detections of viral RNA of A(H5N1) in specimens from poultry workers involved in outbreak response and culling activities have been considered contaminations. Currently, avian influenza virus transmission to humans remains a rare event.  Only sporadic human infections have been reported globally over the last few years, and no clusters with limited transmission between humans have been observed.”

So what conclusion can we draw from this first part?

In a moment of great social and financial stress around the world should governments spend taxpayers’ money on this kind of interventions on what looks like a “just in case” basis?

This post was written by two old geezers who do not keep sick chickens under their beds nor seals in their bathtubs.