Harold Reich is the Chief Epidemiologist at The Wellness Company and a Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of Public Health. He's also the author of the book, "Vaccine Junkie: How to Survive the Next Pandemic," and co-host of the radio show, "The Great America Show." He joins us to talk about the new bird flu pandemic, H5N1, and why we should be worried about it.
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00:00:33.860Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Great America Show.
00:00:57.780A lot of rhetoric now flying through media, at least, and, of course, the corridors of power in Washington, about bird flu, about what we can expect.
00:01:11.500And all of it is dire, and it sounds like all too familiar, fear-mongering on the part of many of the agencies.
00:01:21.600Your thoughts about right now, how big a deal, in your judgment, is bird flu?
00:01:28.080Well, it's trying to tell the difference between zero and infinity.
00:01:35.120But, you know, there's no way of saying anything that either makes you feel calm or feel, you know, very fearful.
00:01:43.560Interestingly, today I discovered an article written by Tom Inglesby and Don Henderson,
00:01:49.160who were, Don was instrumental in eradicating smallpox from the planet.
00:01:54.600Inglesby is head of infectious diseases and institute at Johns Hopkins.
00:01:58.380And they wrote this in 2012 saying that there should be no gain-of-function research on H5N1 bird flu,
00:02:05.260that one does not need to have gain-of-function research to make it infectious.
00:02:09.860In humans, in order to make a vaccine, in order to develop medications, in order to study it and learn about it,
00:02:16.380you don't have to make it so that it can transmit between people and have such a really severe,
00:02:22.740potentially severe virulence in this organism.
00:02:28.200However, nobody seems to have been listening to them from that in 2012 because we have these grants,
00:02:35.240I think, at the USDA laboratory facilities in Athens, Georgia, where they are doing exactly that.
00:02:42.040They're studying the transmission of H5N1 bird flu in mallard ducks.
00:02:48.760Mallard ducks are, you know, birds that fly all over the world.
00:02:53.120And that means that if one of them were to get a strain, a mutation of this virus that could infect humans and human-to-human spread,
00:03:04.240it would be all over the world in almost no time.
00:03:07.980And so it's a dangerous thing to be doing.
00:03:10.140It has no real medical, biological rationale.
00:03:13.180And you wonder why our government is funding these two NIH-funded studies at that facility in coordination with Chinese researchers to look at H5N1.
00:03:27.620You know, it's absurd that we're doing this and putting the country, if not the world, at risk.
00:03:32.080Nevertheless, in the 12 years since Inglesby and Henderson wrote that editorial,
00:03:41.380there hasn't been an escape from a lab of a virulent form of H5N1 that infects people.
00:03:47.880It's encroaching on dairy herds and has infected one caretaker, one worker in managing those herds,
00:03:58.300and with a very mild case of pink eye and nothing more severe.
00:04:03.840So it's very difficult to know, you know, between zero and infinity what to think about this.