Right-Wing Operatives, Anti-Vax Groups Already Working to Politicize Bird Flu

Many of the same people who successfully politicized COVID-19 are gearing up for round two.

Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency over the outbreak of avian flu in his state. Two days later, Kaiser Family Foundation Health News published an exposé on the state of the outbreak. Relying on interviews with “nearly 70 government officials, farmers and farmworkers, and researchers with expertise in virology, pandemics, veterinary medicine, and more,” the piece concluded that the U.S. had missed a critical window for action.

For years, the avian flu has been under surveillance by the World Health Organization thanks to its pandemic potential. Now, the disease, which has a high case fatality rate in humans, is spreading rapidly across the U.S., primarily among dairy cows and chickens though cases have been identified in other animals as well—even zoo animals. To date, there have been 61 identified human cases, including one requiring hospitalization. Although there is no evidence yet of person-to-person transmission, a recent study found that the virus could mutate to attach better to human cells.

The KFF report blamed the devolving situation on weak governmental responses. Federal authorities, it noted, have thus far treated H5N1 as an agricultural problem (as opposed to a public health issue) and given the uncooperative dairy industry wide latitude. Local officials, meanwhile, have been restrained in their dealings with dairy farmers, who have been withholding information and access to their facilities. That reluctance, KFF noted, has been rooted in fear of backlash like what followed COVID-19 mitigation measures.

Indeed, pushback against pandemic restrictions was loud and sometimes accompanied by the threat of violence. It was fueled and encouraged by well-funded, business-aligned right-wing dark money groups that saw efforts to contain the SARS-COV-2 virus as too economically disruptive and politically costly. These groups created wedges out of “lockdowns,” school closures, and COVID’s origins (evidence points to natural spillover), using misinformation and innuendo as weapons to undermine faith in government and science. They found natural allies in anti-vaccine groups, which eventually spawned the pro-Trump Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement.

As of today, the COVID pandemic has killed more than 1.2 million Americans and left millions more suffering lingering health issues. But the U.S. has made no major systemic changes. Although it is not clear if bird flu will actually become a pandemic, some experts fear the death toll could be even worse if it were to do so.

In anticipation of such an outcome, some of the prominent individuals and organizations involved in politicizing the COVID response are gearing up to deploy their playbook again. They are laying the foundations for sowing widespread mistrust of experts and government again.

Take Jeffrey Tucker, for example, an organizer of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration and founder of the Brownstone Institute, a conspiracy-fueled dark money group dedicated to fighting COVID mitigation measures. Tucker has been downplaying concerns about H5N1 for years, including amid the recent outbreaks.

In August 2021, the anarcho-capitalist and veteran political operative wrote a piece published through his institute titled, “‘Half the Population Could Die!’: The Great Disease Panic of 2005-06,” which cast COVID lockdowns as the latest example of governments overstating the threat of viruses. The other example he used was the Bush administration’s plans to combat a potential bird flu pandemic in the mid-aughts.

“By January 2006, H5N1 had been blamed for several child deaths in Turkey,” the piece read. “The alarm machine kicked in. The tone was perfectly set by a media apparatus that had only recently discovered the capacity for pandemic threats to drive ratings.”

Tucker has gotten new mileage out of his article with the recent U.S. bird flu outbreaks, sharing it several times over the last few months in an apparent effort to downplay the seriousness of the emerging situation.

“It's been now 20 years since Anthony Fauci warned that half the population could die from the bird flu!” Tucker tweeted earlier this month, sharing the piece. “And yet here we are still, with media freaking out about the same damn thing again!”

Brownstone has followed its founder’s lead. The group, which has become a player in the pro-Trump MAHA movement thanks to Tucker’s ties to multiple Trump public health appointees including Robert Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services), Dr. Jay Bhattacahrya (National Institutes of Health), and Dr. Marty Makary (Food and Drug Administration). It has published multiple dismissive and conspiratorial articles about the H5N1 outbreaks.

For example, “Is ‘Avian Flu’ Anything to Fear?” was published two months after the first detection of H5N1 in dairy cows in the U.S. and the first reported case of cow-to-human transmission. The article suggests the concern of public health experts is not merely unwarranted but nefarious. Written by philosophy researcher Bert Olivier of the University of the Free State, a South African public university, and published in May, the piece argued that the emergence of bird flu was a conspiracy by “those who would wield power over us to achieve their goals.”

“The growing hype around avian influenza (‘bird flu’) suggests that ‘they’ are priming the rest of us again for something unsettling, something they are probably planning to do – in this case, releasing a virus that is usually only found among animals, mainly (but not exclusively) birds; hence the name,” it claimed. “Remember how, in the months leading up to 2020, hints were dropped intermittently about a pandemic being in the offing, and how ‘Event 201,’ arranged by Bill Gates (in New York during October 2019) in the name of ‘pandemic preparedness,’ coincidentally adumbrated the actual ‘pandemic’ that materialised a few months later?”

Brownstone’s posture is unsurprising. The group has been trying to weaken global efforts to craft a pandemic preparedness plan with its “Re-Evaluating the Pandemic Preparedness And REsponse agenda” (REPPARE) project, which is a partnership with the University of Leeds in the UK.

In May, REPPARE published a paper, which was subsequently shared by Bhattacharya, arguing that the WHO and the World Bank were overstating the threat of future pandemics. It specifically noted that “mortality from highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) types H5 and H7 has greatly declined over the past century.”

Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, meanwhile, has been politicizing bird flu on his War Room broadcast on the right-wing Real America’s Voice television network. Early on in the pandemic, Bannon and his business partner, Chinese billionaire fraudster Guo Wengui, were critical in spreading the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Early on in the pandemic, the claim was used by right-wing media to provide cover for the flailing Trump White House.

With the bird flu outbreaks, War Room has engaged in similar activity, pushing conspiracy theories about the virus—its origins and the expert concern over its outbreaks. In July, War Room published a piece on its website tying bird flu to Hunter Biden, Ukrainian laboratories, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Obama’s Department of Defense.

“An investment firm directed by President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden was a leading financial backer of a pandemic tracking and response firm that collaborated on bird flu research in Ukrainian laboratories, receiving funds from the Obama administration’s Department of Defense in the process,” it read.

The piece was written by Natalie Winters, who was identified by Important Context as having been part of a reputation-laundering writing scheme for Guo organized by the fraudster billionaire’s operatives. Winters teased her article on the War Room podcast that day, suggesting that Fauci had been manipulating the bird flu virus through “gain-of-function” research, like he supposedly had with SARS-CoV-2.

“Anthony Fauci in concert with NGO organizations, oftentimes led by Bill Gates, have been funding bird flu research in the same vein, in the same style of COVID-19, the sort of gain of function manipulation, learning how to insert whether it's cleavage sites or certain proteins to make this virus more lethal to humans,” she said.

The following day’s podcast episode was titled, “Major Border Security Win; Bird Flu Is New Psychological War.” In it, Winters claimed “they are already pushing what seems to be another pandemic despite, what is it, less than like a dozen bird flu cases or something like that, despite the fact that Anthony Fauci had been manipulating that virus for years to become more lethal to humans.” The guest for the episode was prominent anti-vaxxer Dr. Robert Malone.

Malone made another appearance on the War Room pod this month to discuss “bird flu pandemic lies.” During the episode, Winters called bird flu “the next pandemic that they’re trying to push on us” and suggested vaccine scientist Dr. Peter Hotez, who developed a patent-free COVID vaccine and has been warning about the lack of U.S. preparedness in the face of H5N1, was promoting fear to help Pfizer—a company he is not affiliated with.

For his part, Malone said, “Peter never fails to buy into any alarmism that would promote the vaccine industry and promote sales of the vaccine industry,” adding that “this is another round of bird flu fear porn.” The anti-vaccine doctor then accused Hotez of “psychological bioterrorism.”

Days later, the podcast played host to another COVID conspiracy theorist, Naomi Wolf, who said bird flu was a “distraction.”

”Remember, we’ve been hearing about bird flu as the next big thing for a couple of years now,” she told Bannon, responding to a question about whether people should be worried. “And whenever they need a distraction or to scare people, they trot out bird flu and a couple of other things.”

Wolf claimed that the investigation into raw milk CEO Mark McAffee, whose products have been recalled for bird flu contamination, was politically motivated. She called it “the same kind of thing they did with the COVID scare,” and dismissed research linking raw milk and bird flu on the basis that it had been conducted by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, “who produced all of the fake data about COVID.”

Wolf went on to state that McAffee was being “targeted,” suggesting it may have had something to do with the fact that he claimed Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s former running mate, asked him to apply for a job overseeing raw milk under his potential administration. Kennedy, who allegedly drinks unpasteurized milk, which is notorious for containing high loads of bacteria and viruses, had promised to deregulate its sale.

“That last thing I want to tell people is that raw milk is a threat because it’s a threat to Giant Milk,” Wolf said.

Shanahan herself echoed this conspiracy theory about the alleged targeting of McAffee in a tweet over the weekend.

“The real crisis is fear-based narratives and billion-dollar Big Pharma deals for vaccine manufacturers making up fabricated threats,” she wrote. “Farmers like Mark are standing strong, and innovation is keeping shelves stocked, but it’s time to ask the question: Why suppress raw milk when science and history prove its safety?”

Predictably, Kennedy’s well-funded anti-vaccine dark money group Children’s Health Defense (CHD), which has worked to undermine public confidence in the COVID jabs, has also been pumping out content downplaying the bird flu threat—especially through its media outlet, The Defender.

One article, published last week, just one day before the CDC confirmed the first severe bird flu case, criticized Newsom’s state of emergency declaration. Titled, “Bird Flu Panic Ramps Up as California Declares State of Emergency,” the piece cited a Substack post by CHD contributor Dr. Meryl Nass, an anti-vaccine doctor who spoke at Brownstone’s 2024 annual conference, which noted there had been no identified cases of person-to-person transmission and downplayed the link between human cases and raw milk and eggs.

“Gruesome Newsom had to get into the act, despite no serious cases in CA, and no one who has caught bird flu from milk,” wrote Nass, whose medical license has been suspended since January 2022 for failing to meet standards of care in treating COVID patients. She claimed that the virus had lost virulence over the years.

The Defender piece also cited CHD senior research scientist Karl Jablonowski, a Ph.D. in biomedical and health informatics, who accused government officials of manipulating the public with fear to justify culling chickens. Jablonowski claimed the virus had been “a few mutations away from finding the right combination to become communicable between humans…for as long as there have been humans” and claimed that the cases in humans up to that point had been “mild.”

In an op-ed published weeks earlier, the CHD researcher blamed factory farming for the spread of the H5N1 virus, which he asserted “does exist in the wild,” because “a sick bird in that setting can spread it to a few others.” He then argued against vaccines, claiming the existing jabs were too few in number and too ineffective to make a difference while mRNA vaccines would be dangerous. He then warned against the potential for “gain-of-function” research.

Another group that spread misinformation about the COVID vaccines turning its focus to bird flu is Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), which Brownstone lists as a “friend” organization on its website. The group has long promoted ivermectin as a treatment for COVID despite the body of research indicating it is not effective against the disease. With H5N1, FLCCC has turned to hyping up fears about pharmaceutical products. For example, it has suggested that the government is using bird flu as cover to give more money for emergency mRNA vaccines and warned about “self-amplifying RNA-LNP-based products.”

“Currently, there have been 14 human cases [of bird flu]... the cases have been mild... there was no human-to-human transmission,” FLCCC Senior Fellow Dr. Kat Lindley said in a video the group shared on X this August. “The Health and Human Services Secretary, Xavier Becerra, has expanded the bird flu to be considered an emergency as well, which gives the US FDA commissioner authority to issue a potential EUA (emergency use authorization) for bird flu products and potential vaccines."

FLCCC has also begun promoting supplements and ivermectin for bird flu. The group’s website has an informational page about the disease with a section on “how to stay healthy,” that includes the FLCCC I-PREVENT protocol for COVID, RSV, and flu. Among other things, the protocol recommends vitamin C, vitamin D, melatonin, and the anti-parasitic, as daily prophylactics.

In July, Dr. Pierre Kory, who co-founded FLCCC but has since stepped down from his leadership role with the group, shared a Substack piece suggesting the focus on bird flu was driven by a desire to push vaccines.

“A common scam is creating a panic around a minor illness to attract investors and lying about how ‘safe and effective’ a new vaccine is so the public keeps taking it and the stock inflates,” he wrote. “This brilliant article describes the tragedy that always follows.“