By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH
Please enjoy this edition of Securing America on Real America’s Voice hosted by Frank Gaffney who is the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy and Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Reagan administration. Gaffney asks Dr. McCullough about the potential consequences of a mass vaccination program for poultry, cattle, and humans for the widely prevalent H5N1 avian influenza.
This comes as a group of impatient scientists from CEPI have published a letter in the journal Science.
In a letter to the journal Science, CEPI’s Executive Director for Preparedness and Response Dr Nicole Lurie and six other experts said the bird flu virus – known as H5N1 and known to be very severe in some human cases—had in recent years crossed species from birds to mammals, including dairy cattle, and was now causing widespread exposure and sporadic human infections in the U.S. and beyond. At least one person has died from H5N1 infection in the U.S., and a teenager in Canada suffered critical illness before eventually recovering.
As a result of the viral spread, many scientists have warned of an increasing risk of H5N1 mutating and causing more severe human infections.
The letter’s authors also included Rebecca Katz, Lawrence Gostin and Jesse Goodman, all professors and global health specialists at Georgetown University in the United States, and Rick Bright, a current advisor to CEPI and member of CEPI’s Scientific Advisory Committee.
The authors cautioned that making a global supply of doses of effective H5N1 flu vaccines available in a short timeframe is extremely challenging and is hampered by manufacturers having to use currently-approved technologies such as egg-based vaccines, which are fraught with challenges and can take many months to produce at scale.
The process of developing new and updated H5N1 vaccines using rapid-response technologies is also slowed by the need for time-consuming efficacy trials, they wrote, and many national drug regulators are not able to conduct assessments of pandemic vaccines quickly enough for vaccination campaigns to get ahead of the threat.
“Immunization programs are complex and demand advance planning,” they wrote.
Since none of the candidate vaccines are sterilizing, the animals and potentially humans will be come reservoirs for resistant strains of H5N1 to breed and predominate. This invariably will make the problem worse. Our country farmers, BIG CATTLE, and BIG EGG will have to come to the reality that flocks must be allowed to acquire natural immunity. All reports indicate the H5N1 is not particularly deadly for animals, thus there is great hope that natural herd immunity will end this outbreak as it has in years past. Human intervention on healthy birds and humans will be unwise and worsen the problem.
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Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH
President, McCullough Foundation
www.mcculloughfnd.org
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