HHS ‘Declaration of Emergency’ for Bird Flu Paves Way for PCR Testing and More EUA Vaccines, Critics Say

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) this month (Aug 2024) issued a declaration of emergency, announcing that some flu viruses, including H5N1 bird flu, could cause a pandemic and threaten national security. “This paves the way for more EUA vaccines, devices, and products to possibly be effective against these new and unknown viruses,” attorney Ray Flores told The Defender.

“Just as EUA PCR tests exaggerated the COVID-19 pandemic, the detection of avian influenza and influenza A viruses with pandemic potential via unlicensed PCR tests is destined to justify lockdowns, masking, invasive nasal swabs, and wide-scale vaccination with experimental mRNA technology. The stage is set for RT-PCR tests to take the pivotal role of determining false positives with amped-up cycle thresholds designed to declare asymptomatic, otherwise healthy people to be infected — just like last time.”

The currently circulating H5N1 virus is one in a series of bird flu viruses that pose such a threat, although the virus is not easily transmissible to humans and none of the human cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) involved severe disease, the announcement said. There have been a total of 14 reported human cases since 2022, and none have been serious.

The day after Becerra’s announcement, on July 19, the American Medical Association (AMA) announced an update to its Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes to include a new code for bird flu vaccines, should they receive EUA from the FDA. The creation of the codes also follows an agreement, announced May 30, between the U.S. government and CSL Seqirus — one of the largest vaccine producers in the world — to complete 4.8 million doses of a “pre-pandemic vaccine that is well-matched to the H5 of the currently circulating H5N1 strain,” as part of the U.S. National Pre-Pandemic Influenza Vaccine Stockpile program.

The World Health Organization (WHO) today announced a new project to speed up the “development and accessibility” of an mRNA bird flu vaccine for manufacturers in low- and middle-income countries as part of the mRNA Technology Transfer Programme.

Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker, Ph.D., said: “The people who make their money by warning us about pandemics, by selling pandemic products, people who get promotions because they have developed pandemic vaccines or been involved in some way in tests or other, the pandemic industry has been very interested for over 20 years in figuring out ways to give experimental vaccines that they develop very quickly to an entire population without having to test them. Because if you test them, it takes months longer before you can give them out, and your pandemic is likely to be over at that point.”

Nass reviewed the three currently approved bird flu vaccines, raising serious questions about the small size of the clinical trials and serious adverse events in the trials, including fatalities. For example, she said, Sanofi Pasteur’s bird flu vaccine was licensed in 2007 for the national stockpile based on a clinical trial of only 103 subjects. One of those subjects died and three others experienced a serious adverse event, including cancer. In trials for GSK’s vaccine, licensed in 2013, 0.5% of subjects experienced serious adverse events, including thyroid cancer and cerebral vascular events. In the trials for Audenz, CSL Seqirus’ H5N1 vaccine, serious adverse events occurred in all age groups, including deaths in older adults.

These vaccines, she said, are prototypes for vaccines that could be emergency authorized for the current virus.

by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.