H5N1 isn't exclusively avian flu, and the current receptors for the strain circulating in the U.S. have much more affinity for binding sites found in human eyes (hence conjunctivitis being one of the most common symptoms) and bovine mammary tissue.

"H5N1" is a crude description of a wide variety of strains, some more amenable to avian hosts, some not.

As for why milk is being dumped into the wastewater system? Because that's where it goes.

https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-informatio...

One of the other things is the very high fatality rate from H5N1 generally has come, previous to this current strain, from primary cases with very intensive exposure to the avian-adapted strain, which is much more fond of receptors in the lower respiratory tract.

Those types of cases for many infectious diseases (i.e. MERS) are much more lethal than subsequent human-to-human infections.

I'm well aware, and tomorrow it will be even more advanced. That only reinforces my point.

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Your partner is the one with the biased view, not the general public.

Only sick people go to urgent care, so your partner saw a very biased sample. The rest of us saw something much closer to reality.

Or, “these people were going to die anyways”. I know someone whose father died and rather than admit that he exposed his own dad to something that may have killed him, he took this really odd position.

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> Masking and unnecessary quarantining was foisted on us, and did nothing to help anyone

This is factually untrue. Lives were saved--excess mortality . But it's fair to debate whether they were worth it. In my opinion, masking made sense. Quarantine did not. (Private places should have had the right to conduct business without masks. Just as private business should have had the right to include or exclude the unvaccinated.)

All indications are we are on the verge of systematically dismantling the last 74 years of public health institutional capability in the United States. So, perhaps, not even that.

> the medical system learned a lot.

You sure about that?

Seems more like "the anti-maskers are inside the house." https://old.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/1gsgjdz...

> the general public has gotten more ignorant, more conspiratorial, more belligerent, and more defiant

If the response to COVID was more appropriate we wouldn't be in this situation.

Which - by the way - was predicted countless times early on in the pandemic. That, if the public health response was too overboard, people will just ignore it the next time around. Crying wolf and all that.

So like, congratulations.

IMO, a new lockdown isn't possible but also would not be necessary if people were willing to behave rationally (I know, I know...). We know influenza viruses far better than we know covid. Masks would be extremely efficient at limiting droplet transmission.

I think the biggest fuckup last time was the government taking a paternalistic controlling approach instead of an advisory one.

Clear, correct, and unbiased information is what is needed. The CDC failed when they said it wasn’t airborne despite the evidence, they failed when they said masks were not needed initially, because they were afraid of panic buying.

The FDA screwed the pooch with testing. Many institutions could do tests, but the FDA wanted to maintain control and there process was flawed.

Operation Warp speed got a vaccine, but it went from Sterilizing vaccine, to lessen symptoms and hospitalization.

They failed to explain the difference between vaccine side effects and disease effects. Myocarditis? Could be a side effect of either. Perhaps they should have developed a test to determine which?

They let an idiot spout nonsense on TV and no one on stage correct him or clarified, letting the issue become political.

And have they really clarified what we are dealing with. A supposed respiratory virus that causes, myocarditis, neurological issues, stroke , blood clots , and multiple organ failures - is that really a respiratory virus.

Then we’ve declared victory too soon. And everything has left a bad taste in our mouths, such that no one will accept a lockdown again unless the disease has a 20% mortality rate. Ebola could break out and some people would compare the bleeding to lots of paper cuts.

> the intelligent thing to do is to be prudent until you know what you're dealing with

Right. Which the general public figured out - accurately - about a month into the lockdowns.

People will self-isolate for a week or two the next time around, but it's going to have to be a very different disease before we permit ridiculous extended lockdowns again.

Usually, the rational thing to in situations where you have unknowns is to act as though those unknowns are unknown, and not alter your behavior.

We knew a few weeks in what the transmission rate and mortality numbers were, before it was even spreading widely in the US.

Yeah, but economic damage is still what many people and countries feel from the event and maybe for years to come.

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Mortality isn't the only measure of danger.

Like 80% of COVID deaths were over age 65. For young people with no comorbidities, COVID was mostly benign. Magnitude aside, that's more or less a normal disease.

Polio was paralyzing thousands of healthy children every year with no end in sight. People freak out way more about something like that.

It might be that visible and permanent disability from polio was actually scarier than abstract death, simply because the former is a lot easier to visualize and generates a larger set of hypothetical "what would I do next" challenges.

Marty Makary is neither anti-vaccine nor a conspiracy theorist. He's a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, author of the paper that turned into the "checklist manifesto", as well as multiple NY Times best-selling books on medicine. Please stop.

Citation needed, but of course you can’t provide those numbers. Did the republicans also have higher birth rates, and managed to grow a new batch in time to win the 2024 election?

What low turnout? Both presidential candidates received more votes than anyone had ever received prior to that.

Mail in ballots were discarded by liberal Personal Representatives!!1!i!!

I meant things like Tamiflu, but good.

I struggled with similar feelings to the parent commentator during the pandemic. This is me processing it, because your comment reminded me of that feeling.

I realized I wasn’t hoping death on the people who gleefully refused to comply with basic pandemic presentation measures. That was a sort of sick dark humor to help with the fact they were exhibiting anti-social behavior but we live in a a non-just world and so they would go unpunished. The only punishment coming their way was from nature, and I didn’t celebrate it so much as not find it in myself to care.

On reflection I was just angry they were violating the social compact and wished somehow not to have them in my tribe. I think that’s very human, we don’t tolerate society members that endanger the society especially in extreme moments. We were at war, I was sacrificing to fight, and they were effectively treasonous in that fight.

The biggest help was realizing they lived in effectively an alternative world with alternative fake facts.

I’ve mostly overcome that anger now that I’m not actively in a pandemic but it’s really hard to feel good about people that willingly endangered my grandma. I don’t know how society would fare in a more serious pandemic and that scares me. My trust in society has been permanently broken.

I don’t find it sick at all. Do you know how grateful people in bubonic plague times would be for a solution? And they would damn sure take it. I’m done reasoning with unreasonable people or being upset or worrying about what will happen to them. Nature doesn’t respect alternate facts.

>> who isn't as politically inflamed as you are

Saying that it’s okay for bonafide anti-intellectuals to meet the fate they’ve crafted for themselves despite all evidence is no sign of political inflammation. Be serious.

The incoming administration notwithstanding, I'd expect it to go faster than the COVID vaccine.

First, mRNA technology has now been proven for multiple vaccine types, and I think hundreds of millions of people have gotten the COVID mRNA vaccine, so the general safety profile of mRNA is fairly well understood.

Second, Moderna has already done a Phase 3 trial of a combination COVID/Flu mRNA vaccine, with supposedly positive results, although I don't think they have been formally published yet. For other types of flu vaccines, the FDA does not require a new clinical trial for the antigen update for the circulating strain.

Third, the infrastructure for producing mRNA vaccines at scale exists now, which it didn't in 2020.

You could travel to Canada or Mexico and get it there.

Wasn't the COVID mRNA vaccine done in a remarkably short amount of time as well, and the vast majority of the development time was spent on testing?

Why wouldn’t the same speed of vaccine development be possible with protein vaccines?

> Can you tell me

Anthony Fauci, the entire CDC, and even the White House presented that as an initial timeline. When "the lockdowns" started that was the official position. After they were in place it quickly slipped to three weeks, then we don't know, then "long enough to flatten the curve" or maybe "until everyone gets a booster."

> specifically which experts

Let's not devolve to senseless parsimony over this topic again. All of this is well documented and if you actually wanted to know you could have easily found it yourself.

That specific duration, two weeks, was an official policy from the CDC and the White House https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/15-days-slow-s.... Here's the US Surgeon General talking about it: https://youtu.be/HK2ypT2xweA?t=129

As we can see in the video, the experts knew from the get-go that 15 days wouldn't be enough. But they named the policy/slogan that way anyway in the hope that it would improve cooperation "oh it's just 15 days, we can all do it!".

I think it's fair to say that the population shouldn't take such slogan as being absolute during an evolving unprecedented situation. But it's also fair to say that the experts (or at least the politicians) were being deliberately misleading and, rightly or wrongly, some people felt duped/lied to once they realized that.

Calling them dumb for feeling duped by an official slogan isn't helping anyone. Let's agree that things could/should have been communicated better and let's all learn from it so that history doesn't repeat itself.

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