➡ The CDC found a new mutation of the virus in a patient from Louisiana, which could make the virus more transmissible to humans. This could lead to severe illness and rapid death even in young, healthy people, causing significant societal impacts. An infectious disease epidemiologist, Robert Nezgoda, shared his knowledge on the topic, discussing the potential threat of bird flu and the importance of disease surveillance. He emphasized that while the virus can evolve and infect different species, it can also hit dead ends and stop spreading.
➡ The text discusses the potential for a pandemic from viruses like H1N1 and bird flu. It explains that a pandemic can occur when a virus changes within a human host and becomes efficient at spreading from person to person. The text also highlights the importance of disease monitoring and the risks associated with increased prevalence of the virus in animals. It suggests that while a pandemic is possible, it’s not guaranteed and depends on various factors, including the virus’s ability to adapt to humans and spread among them.
➡ Viruses can change and spread from person to person, potentially without the initial carrier realizing it. This happens when the virus has the genetic changes that make it easier to spread. When a virus jumps from an animal to a human, it needs to attach to receptors in humans and overcome immune functions. This process can lead to more cells getting infected. Influenza is an RNA virus, which means it changes a lot because it’s “sloppy” when it replicates. There’s concern about the presence of H5N1 in wastewater, which could indicate person to person transmission. The CDC has asked for more influenza A samples for subtyping, possibly in response to this concern.
➡ The text discusses the potential risks of a virus adapting to humans and spreading from person to person. It emphasizes the importance of understanding who the virus affects most and making decisions based on data, not politics. The text also suggests that a severe influenza pandemic could be worse than COVID-19, affecting different age groups differently. Lastly, it discusses the possibility of COVID-19 originating from a lab and the need for careful handling and monitoring of viruses to prevent future outbreaks.
➡ The text discusses the potential dangers and benefits of virus studies, particularly those involving the replication of pandemic strains like the 1918 influenza. It highlights the need for careful regulation and the risk of weaponization, especially in the context of bioterrorism. The text also explores the challenges of creating viral-based biological weapons and the importance of preparedness for bioterrorism threats. Lastly, it raises questions about the nature of laboratories in Ukraine and the potential for them to be used for bioweapon production.
➡ The text discusses the potential risks of biological weapons and pandemics, highlighting the impact of COVID-19 and the possibility of future, more lethal viruses. It emphasizes the importance of understanding and monitoring these threats, as well as the need for preparedness and response strategies. The text also explores the potential societal and economic impacts of severe pandemics, including supply chain disruptions and increased fear among the population.
➡ The text discusses the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, expressing concern about the initial lockdown’s timing and the potential loss of public trust due to perceived government overreach. It suggests that future pandemics may be harder to manage due to this loss of trust and the public’s resistance to lockdowns. The text also emphasizes the importance of a balanced approach, considering both public health and individual liberties, and the need for local-level decision-making. Lastly, it criticizes vaccine mandates for healthcare providers as morally wrong, fearing it could lead to job loss and poverty.
➡ During the early stages of COVID-19, many people risked their lives by continuing to work, potentially gaining natural immunity. However, this was overlooked in the rush to respond to the pandemic. The speaker expresses concern that lessons learned from previous health crises, like H1N1, were not applied to the COVID-19 response, particularly in terms of communication and vaccine distribution. They also worry that the loss of experienced public health workers and the failure to learn from past mistakes will hinder responses to future pandemics.
➡ After a natural disaster, it’s crucial to protect yourself from potential contaminants in the environment, such as chemicals and raw sewage in floodwater. Getting a tetanus shot is also important due to the risk of injury from rusty metal and debris. Keeping sturdy shoes or boots in your safe area can protect your feet from debris, especially after events like tornadoes. Lastly, it’s beneficial to learn from past disaster responses and apply those lessons to your own family’s preparedness plan.
➡ It’s important to stay aware of potential health threats like pandemics, but not to panic. Maintaining good physical and mental health can help us respond better to emergencies. While there are many potential threats in the world, having a positive mindset and being prepared can reduce panic. Remember, being concerned is okay, but don’t let it turn into fear.

The CDC says a genetic analysis indicated that a mutation of the virus was discovered inside a Louisiana patient. People are not going to be locked down again. The government was so heavy handed, you know, individual liberty was just completely ignored. And that’s going to be very detrimental because you lost the trust in public health. Health experts say the genetic analysis from the Louisiana patient indicates the virus evolved in a way that can make it more transmissible to humans. And this is why it’s so concerning, because it’s gonna be a scenario that will make Covid look like a cakewalk.

But what happens when we start seeing young, healthy people have very severe illness, very rapid death? It’s gonna have significant impacts to our society. World War three is already happening. This is a house of cards and it is in the process of collapsing right now. You’re gonna see an economic crash the likes of which we’ hi folks, Canadian prepper. Here today on the channel, we have Robert Nezgoda, who’s a infectious disease epidemiologist with 14 years of public health experience. Currently a PhD candidate at the University of Iowa. He’s done pandemic and emergency response planning, done community health assessments, program evaluation, epidemiological design and analysis, and all other kinds of words that I have trouble pronouncing and as well as emergency exercise planning, and has partook in numerous exercises and real world disaster scenarios.

And he’s here to share his knowledge with us today. Thanks for coming on. Thank you very much for having me. So is the zombie apocalypse, Is that something we need to worry about? I would say maybe not, but if you’re prepared for zombies, you can handle pretty much anything else. Yeah, I would agree. Is there any virus that, you know, we see these things in the movies, like 28 Days later, like rabies virus. Could a rabies virus go airborne or become so viral that it turns people into ravenous cannibals, or is that just science fiction? Probably science fiction mostly, but Mother Nature is a mad scientist and who knows what she’ll cook up for us down the road.

Well, I figured I’d open with the outlandish question like that and everything will be far more serious from here on in. Maybe you could start off by telling us you consider yourself an epidemiologist. What’s the difference between epidemiology and virology? Epidemiology is going to be the study of the distribution and determinants of disease in populations, health events, as well as how diseases are transmitted and how you can prevent disease. With neurology. They’re Focused on viruses, of course, and they’re studying those genetic components of the viruses and how those viruses characteristics could then change, evolve into potentially infecting humans, other species.

So you’re as an epidemiologist, looking at the social effects of viral outbreaks. Yeah, so I look at social terms of health, looking at potential social vulnerability and how that’s going to play a role in not just disease transmission, but health disparities, health outcomes. I look at issues of race, ethnicity, other distributions in population, like age, geographic distribution of those diseases, and how they differ between populations. And from that, we’ll understand not just how viruses or bacteria, but other pathogens or other health events like diabetes and other chronic conditions and how they differ between population groups. And at that point, you’re able to start to learn more about what could be those potential risk factors that lead to disease, but also, you know, lead to more disease transmission when you start talking about different pathogens.

So the president gets the call, or you get a call from the president, or maybe he relays the message through fema. Word is bird flu is now transmitting human to human. He says that he thinks it’s going to be gone away in six weeks and not to worry about it. But his advisors say, you better contact this guy, Robert Nezgoda. What are we going to do in a situation like that? Obviously, bird flu is kind of the top of mind. I think from a layman point of view, it appears that that one is the most likely to make the jump and be problematic in the future.

But maybe, let’s start there. What is the likelihood of a bird flu pandemic, in your opinion? Based on what we know, Is that likelihood increasing? Is it decreasing? What might it look like? Is it going to be as virulent when it gets here? And don’t worry, guys, I know there’s people in the audience who are perhaps on the fence about a lot of this stuff because of the government overreach of the past. So we’ll talk a little bit about what are the best ways that government services can mitigate the issue in a way that addresses the public health concern but doesn’t overstep their boundaries.

So can you talk a little bit about the threat of bird flu? You know, I’d like to kind of start out with this idea of, you know, maintaining perspective. You asked a lot of questions there in terms of, you know, what’s the level of threat when the pandemic’s going to kick off and whatever else. But, you know, honestly, the answer to all those is you know, I don’t know, and we don’t know. Thinking about the perspective of H5N1, it was first identified in the waterfowl population because it was transmitted to a poultry flock in Scotland, 1959.

Then it reemerged with the incidents in China in 1996, 97 in Hong Kong, you had at that time infected poultry flocks, but also transmission to humans. And then you had more transmission in the early 2000s. By 2007, we actually had clusters of human cases that were suspected to be human to human transmission. Then there was, you know, more transmission, more spread from Asia into Africa and then into. Now it’s in North America, South America, Europe, and it’s basically around the world. And now we’re seeing it more in the United States with deer, cattle, other types of species, and again, more human transmission.

But we haven’t seen human to human transmission. And from all that, we need to kind of think that, you know, it’s been quite a while that this virus has been around, it’s been changing, and it’s not necessarily a threat that you can kind of quantify in the sense that you’re going to have this straight line march from the first identification of it, and then certain things happen, and then all of a sudden you have a pandemic. It’s more like a meandering path. Right, with lots of dead ends. The virus is going to infect different species, it’s going to change, and it may at that point just stop.

And there’s no more spread of that particular strain any further than that. Well, you said, and sorry to interrupt you, but you said that back in the early 2000s, there was concerns that these clusters were the result of human to human transmission, but perhaps the disease hit one of those dead ends. Is that what you’re suggesting? Exactly. You have a virus that is in the waterfowl population, it gets transmitted into the poultry population, and then you have people who are working with those birds that are infected, they’re depopulating or whatever, and then they get the virus at that point.

And the virus, once it infects that human host, goes through this process of, you know, trying to figure out how to change to be better at spreading from that human to other humans. And sometimes it does make that leap from one person to the next, but maybe it doesn’t have those genetic capabilities to then infect more people. It’s not very efficient. Right. So through disease surveillance, hopefully we identify those early cases in those workers who are depopulating, for instance, and we’re able to identify illness. And we step in, we identify contacts, and we either hopefully don’t see any additional contacts.

And it stops right there. There’s no more viral transmission beyond that case. So a good example of this happened with the case in Louisiana. This person, he was exposed through wild birds in his backyard. I think there might have been some. A backyard flock involved there. He gets exposed. He had some underlying health conditions, I think, and then he actually has a severe illness and unfortunately he passed away. But they looked at that genetic makeup of that virus that he had, and it did have some changes to where some of the markers that we’re really concerned about he did have.

I think two of the three is just missing one very important one. But he didn’t have any transmission beyond that person. Right. Or none that they actually saw. And I doubt there was any transmission. But at that point, that’s a dead end. That type of H5N1, that strain or whatever, it stopped right there with those changes. It’s not an instance where you see a change in the virus that infects one person, just suddenly changes all the other virus. It has to go someplace. So the concern would be if you had a virus that was in the waterfowl population that had those changes and then was able to continue to either maintain in the waterfowl wild bird population and then get spread to more humans.

And once that would happen, then you’d have additional chances for that virus to change within those human hosts to then make it more efficient to be transmitted from person to person. When I think about the concern for a pandemic from H1N1, we just don’t know when it’s going to happen or if it’s ever going to happen. It could be another five years or never. Right. But what we have to look for is when you have the initial human case, is there subsequent transmission to another person? And at that point that’s a. That’s probably a trigger point we need to watch for.

And if we see that there’s start to be clustering, we need to focus on that event and say, okay, what’s happening? Is it just a small cluster or is that virus going to really become efficient and be transmitted from person to person to the point that it goes from the initial contact to a household member, Maybe they haven’t identified that person through disease surveillance, that they’re sick, and all of a sudden the virus makes a break out of that household into other people in the community. Once that happens, the possibility of a pandemic is very Very real.

Because once you get sustained transmission like that with an efficient virus, it’s impossible, but it’s very, very difficult to stop the spread again. So what happened with H1N1, for instance, in 2009, there was an instance where you had a reassortment of a virus. They think it was in a pig, got into the human population. You had flu like illnesses. It wasn’t caught through the disease surveillance process in Mexico and then it got out into community and then went person to person to person and then you had a pandemic. But even from the time it was identified in Mexico until the time that started hitting the United States, we had some weeks.

You know, it’s not something where a pandemic happens and all of a sudden it’s everywhere. Okay. I think that’s something that Hollywood has done a disservice because we all thought, you know, the pandemic was going to spread fast. And I mean, it kind of did, but it didn’t also. I mean, it was a multi year process. Right. But you know, if you think about what happened with even going back to 1918 and that and that pandemic, you have a situation where it was first identified in one part of the United States. And even though we were being, you know, the long range transportation at the time was by train, it took a couple months to go across the United States and then it took more months to go around the world.

But with COVID you had a situation where the initial reports were being published by ProMed mail.org in I guess mid December 2019. That’s where I first saw it. And I was like, oh, because they’re reporting severe respiratory illness of a novel SARS like virus was the first report I saw from the Chinese doctors that posted. And once I saw the subsequent posts that were being made, I realized that that virus had already, you know, it already got out of the box. It was infecting lots of people in that city and it was going quickly through the population.

So I knew in early January that we were going to have a pandemic. You know, I wasn’t 100% sure, but based on what they were saying in China, there was a lot of people being infected and they were doing some really aggressive measures to try to contain it and it just wasn’t working. So pandemics, if you are watching, you can see some telltale signs that things are going to potentially get worse, but you have to just pay attention and not necessarily be so panicked that you don’t, you know, take some Common sense measures to help protect yourself or your family.

And I think that’s where, you know, the concern is, is that people get into panic mode and they just, you know, kind of do some things that are probably going to put them more at risk than what they. They just had some common sense plans in place. Well, I think you, you know, you make an excellent point that it really comes down to that one jump. I mean, the difference between a dead end and a continuous pathway is really one transmission potentially. And so that’s where the disease monitoring is so important. But knowing what we know about the prevalence, because it seems now we’re hearing more about other species getting bird flu.

I mean, this was not something I heard about a few years ago. The seals and the sea lions were dying from it. And now you have it in all these species, tigers and, you know, so is the prevalence in the animal population leading to an increased risk? Now, I know you can’t, you know, nail down and quantify exactly what the probability is, but I would presume if it’s more prevalent now in other species that humans have frequent contact with, including house cats, wouldn’t that mean that the likelihood of it making the jump to humans? Because it’s really, the more interactions that humans have with infected mammals, the greater the likelihood that that mutation is going to take place.

It’s definitely an increased risk. You have a virus that’s being, it’s infecting new species hosts and it gives an opportunity to change. Right. In terms of trying to say that’s an increased risk, it’s definitely red flag. But then you have to think about what are the changes in the virus that are actually resulting in increased infections of species. If it’s a receptor that we have in common with that animal, that’s really concerning. But a lot of times you have different receptors that the virus is going to bind to depending on what species you’re dealing with. So it’s not, you know, something to that we can just easily say, oh, this is happening, therefore we have an increased risk.

It’s definitely concerning, but I think the risks that we have to worry about, well, there’s lots of different risks we have to worry about, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that any one of those increased risks is going to guarantee that the virus is going to result in a pandemic. So. But there is on the whole, an increased risk as a result of more life forms out there having this virus. Yes. And, you know, the, the more backyard flocks we have infected, the more large poultry producers we have infected, the more humans are going to be exposed to that through the depopulation or just when they’re working with those animals.

And I think that at that point you’re, you know, the risk of more people becoming infected is definitely there. But then again, each time that virus infects a human, it has to go through the process of trying to adapt to that person and then adapt to person to person transmission. And those are some pretty big leaps. And we’re seeing some cases that appear to be quite mild. Like some people are testing for it and they have very mild symptoms. Wouldn’t it be very concerning if this thing was incubating in somebody or they actually had the virus and they perhaps, maybe didn’t even know it.

Could they still be infectious in that case, passing on perhaps a strain? And I presume that, you know, this is why highly lethal pathogens don’t tend to spread that long because they kill the host too fast. But, and maybe there’s, maybe that’s not true. I don’t know. You could enlighten me about that. But is it possible that this thing could be spreading covertly in a lighter form and we just don’t realize it yet? Or you know, is it the testing and this where perhaps it gets a little political? Because of course people will say, well, you’re just testing for it more.

And is there a possibility that I guess we get a diluted, less lethal form of bird flu? That’s a possibility. Every time you have somebody who gets infected with H5N1, there’s, well, there’s a few substrates that are being passed around right now from animals to humans. But if it’s in a poultry worker of a, say just a commercial company, I guess they have really strict, a really well developed biosecurity as well as depopulation plans, right. So whenever you have to go through depopulation, part of that is that the health department is there. This is, I’m talking about Missouri.

Now, I’m sure it’s very similar around the United States, probably Canada too. When you have a depopulation event, you monitor the health of those individuals so that they start to have a fever or any sort of other illness type symptoms, they’re going to get tested and then to identify potential for H5. Now the issue is what about those smaller flocks or other contacts with wild birds? Somebody has a mild illness, may not decide to go seek medical care, right. They’re not going to see a healthcare provider, they’re not going to be tested, we’re not going to know anything about them.

Right. So that would be one of those gaps in our surveillance and public health that people would have a mild illness that would give the opportunity for that virus to be in that person, replicate, but then it still has to change enough to be efficient to go from person to person. But that could be a possibility. Is it possible that they could have mild symptoms, but they could pass on a strain which is actually still lethal to other people? Again, it’d be possible. You’d have a virus that was still going to be changing from host to host, because every time it infects, somebody has that possibility as it replicates to have some sort of minor change.

But I guess the possibility is there, though, that people could be spreading something and not even realize it, and then perhaps at some point they detect it and then they say it’s a problem. Yeah, I mean, it’s a possibility. But again, you’d have to have a situation where that initial person that gets infected, the virus has the, you know, the genetic changes in place that make it easier to go from person to person. And again, that’s a pretty big leap. So when a virus, like, for it to go human to human, what has to happen in a virus? And I know nothing about this besides just cursory knowledge.

So this is why you’re here. What changes? Like when it jumps to another host, Is there a change in the DNA of the virus or how does that work? When the virus goes from an animal to a human, that virus has to have the ability attached to receptors in humans, and that’s the first kind of leap. Sometimes the virus will have a really strong affinity or ability to then bind to those receptors in the human upper respiratory tract or lower respiratory tract, depending on what type of receptor it’s binding with. But then it has to invade the cell and circumvent a number of.

Of different immune functions that are going to try to stop it. But once that virus starts replicating in the cell, then it escapes that cell, then you have more cells infected and kind of progresses like that until your immune system kind of, you know, starts to defend itself. So in order for it to then escape that person, there has to be some changes to that cell’s ability to, you know, leave the respiratory tract and become airborne or droplet spread or however it does it. But so there’s a series of different changes that needs to happen with that virus.

And you can look these up. I don’t have them committed to memory, but there’s typically three or four different changes to different receptors and different genetic parts of that virus that you want to look for that then would indicate that the virus is going to become, or potentially could become more efficient going from person to person. So when they get a, when they get a case of somebody who has bird flu, they look for these few receptors that you’re talking about. Yeah, like the gentleman or the person that passed away in Louisiana. They did look at the, you know, the genetic makeup of the influenza virus that affected him.

They kind of spotted the two or three different changes. But there was one that was very specific that they were looking for and they did not have that. So there was also a paper that was released not too long ago about a case in Texas that also had some changes to it. Keep in mind, influenza is an RNA virus. Unlike a DNA virus, the RNA viruses are sloppy when they replicate. DNA has different mechanisms where they proofread the code before it gets replicated with RNA when it’s being produced. There’s lots of instances where you could have different point mutations or even entire segments from maybe another influenza virus that’s co infecting the cell being put together with the existing influence virus that you’re replicating.

So there’s different ways you can get reassortment or mutations or whatever else. So that’s why influenza changes so much, because it’s just sloppy. It’s an RNA virus. Interesting. So if are we seeing sustained transmission in other species or is it just that these species like cows, cats, or is it just that they’re coming into contact with contaminated birds? And perhaps you can talk a little bit about it being identified in the water supplies across multiple states, California in particular, I think they’re reporting a high presence of H5N1 in the water supply. Wastewater. Wastewater, right. So basically those are viral particles that are big, expelled through body fluids into sewage and then they test the sewage for those different viral particles.

So that’s interesting because if you don’t have person to person transmission, then there should be very little of that. Now I’m not saying there is, but it’s interesting. They are finding in the wastewater supply. Now, could that be that they’re seeing the wastewater from bird droppings or some other species and it’s getting into the water that way? But if you had humans that were, for instance, working in upholstery industry and they were infected, those viral particles would be also in the wastewater. But I haven’t read that much about the wastewater surveillance and how exactly is. So that’s a little bit beyond what I can speak to.

But yeah, it is concerning that they’re identifying wastewater, but I don’t think that there’s person to person transmission occurring with a pandemic type strain of H5N1, because you definitely see the numbers in the, you know, presenting to hospitals being tested for influenza A increasing beyond just what you’d see with a normal flu. Right. Or flu season. Now, the CDC has initiated a health alert the other day and they did request that clinicians start sending more of their influenza A samples for subtyping. Okay. Now, I’m not sure if this is just in response to something they saw in their normal surveillance or maybe the wastewater issue, I’m not quite sure, but there is a CDC clinician call on Thursday that I’m going to listen to that, you know, might, you know, shed some more light on why they’re doing this.

But. Or it could just be, you know, they’re just increasing their public health surveillance efforts to potentially identify, you know, those subtypes if they’re, you know, present or not. But the case in Missouri, they identified that person as having influenza A and then they subtype it just because that healthcare provider was a member of the influenza surveillance network. So part of what they do is they’ll batch up influenza A samples periodically throughout the year even, and they’ll send it to the CDC just for subtyping just to find out what are the influenza A strains that are out there.

And surprisingly enough, it wasn’t, you know, a seasonal influenza strain they were suspecting. It actually came back as positive for H5. Now, that’s concerning, but. And I did not, you know, find out any additional information about, you know, follow up investigation with that. But I suspect that that person probably had some sort of contact with wild birds. Okay. Or waterfowl or something like that. You know, the possibility that there could be human to human transmission out there with H5N1, you know, I don’t know, it could be that there, you know, might be. But I’m thinking that you’d probably see more cases than what you are seeing now with the seasonal influenza.

Well, I appreciate you being, you know, more conservative in your estimations because, you know, we don’t want to be sensational or anything like that, especially now where the public trust in a lot of health organizations is pretty low. So I think it’s good that you’re, you know, erring on the side of caution and not jumping off the deep end. But I also think that, you know, the wastewater, the animal to animal transmission that I look forward to your insights on as to whether or not that’s happening, I think these are all cause for concern. And like you said, the CDC announcement the other day, and the WHO announcement the other day, it makes me think that maybe they suspect that there is something happening here.

I mean, it just seems like a mathematical, I don’t want to say certainty, but increasingly more likely as it spreads amongst the animal population that there’s going to be more opportunities for it to mutate. Whether that turns into a, you know, a very non virulent strain or something that is, you know, highly lethal, then I guess we won’t know. But in terms of the animal to animal spread, is that something that’s actually happening or is it that they’re just making more contact with, with birds? I think that with the, with the dairy cows, I read that they were hypothesizing that the transmission was occurring due to contaminated milking machines.

Right. So that’s one possibility. It could also be that, you know, there’s some sort of, you know, other mechanism at play. I think that with the cats, I don’t know if it’s something where they had maybe some, you know, raw bird meat that they had fed the animals and that led to it or exactly why there, you know, there was some infections. But again, if you have species within species transmission, you know, there, it could be that that virus has attached those receptors that are unique to those species that wouldn’t necessarily lead to maybe human infections.

Again, if you have, you know, you said it, if you have more infections, that’s more opportunity for the virus to adapt to the host and then lead to some changes that could potentially lead to strain that then is person that’s able to go from person to person. But again, you have to think about what receptors are involved in those species and are they going to be the same receptors that are going to be similar to humans? Right. So if you think of it in that perspective, then you gotta, you know, again realize there’s some very important changes that have to happen to those viruses or to then take that leap to just get into humans.

But then some more change that didn’t need to have occurred to make it person to person transmission. So again, I don’t want to downplay the risk anything but at the same time, you know, no, it’s good that nobody can accuse you of coming on here and fear mongering because you’re not, you’re, you know, you’re giving us a very conservative estimation which, you know, may well be vindicated in the future if something does happen. And if it doesn’t, then, you know, nobody can ever accuse you of fear mongering. I’ll say that if we do have a virus that goes from person to person, it could be mild, right.

But at the same time, it could also be a strain that does result in serialness. Okay. And this is why it’s so concerning because, you know, it’s, it’s going through the process, it’s infecting people, it’s trying to make that leap. Right. And we don’t know if it’s going to do it or not be successful, which is fantastic. It’s not successful. But if it does become a human to human virus and it is on the severe side, it’s going to be a scenario that will make Covid look like a cakewalk. Okay. Because if you look at how Covid unfolded, the overall case fatality rate was overall it was what you’d consider a potentially severe pandemic.

It was between 1 and 2%. Okay. But a lot of the people who were infected that had the higher case fatality rates were older adults. Okay. Once you get down into children and young adults, it was a very, very, very low case fatality rate. Much lower, less than 1%. If you get into the 70, 80 year range, you have double digit case fatality, 8 to 10 or 11%. Right. With influenza, it could be that you have a strain where it impacts young adults, 18 to mid-20s. At that point you could have a situation where 1 to 2% of that population would have severe illness and death.

There’s a real potential that if you have a severe pandemic with influenza, it can make Covid look very mild. Influenza is different with H1N1. In 2009, older adults, seniors, they were not affected that much by it. It was mainly in the children, the adolescent population. If or when this virus becomes a pandemic potential, it’s going to be important for us to look at the data, see who’s it infecting. Is it primarily in younger children, is it in young adults, is it in the older population? And it could, you know, just depend on, on the dynamics of that virus.

Right. But it’s very important to look at the data and then make decisions based on that and make a criticism of COVID A lot of the decisions that were made were not based on the data, but we need to look at the data and be honest about it, say, who is this virus actually affecting? And identify those high risk groups and then at that point respond to what’s happening. Because we don’t need politics involved in pandemic response. It needs to be based on what do we need to do to protect the people that are going to be most at risk and respond accordingly.

Well, I think that’s a very sensible approach to keep politics out of it, especially at this stage of the game, because I think there’s going to be a lot of distrust which is going to lead to, you know, a lot of pushback to any sort of health intervention that that happens thereafter. You were saying that they’re testing for influenza. So when you go in and you say, I have the flu, they do a test for H1N1, I guess it is. Does that actually tell them whether or not you have bird flu, or do they have to do a specific test for that? They’d have to do an additional test.

So a lot of times what you’ll see is a test for influenza A or a test that’s more generic. It’s just going to tell you you have influenza. It’s not going to say A or B. It’s just positive for influenza. We don’t know which. So there’d be additional subtyping of that strain to then determine if you have H5 or H1 or something like that. And then I think there might even be some additional testing that would need to be done to see if it’s H5. So now the CDC is saying we need to start testing for the subtype.

Yeah, and that’s, you know, for clinician, clinicians and, you know, I think it could just be, you know, part of their disease surveillance and just want to see what subtypes are out there. Or are they looking for cases of H5 that aren’t being picked up by or H5 cases that are occurring that are outside of what we’re seeing, that are associated with the infected flocks and dairy cows? This. This might be a little controversial. You might not want to go here at all. But what are your thoughts on the origins of. Of COVID I mean, I think now we’re kind of well in the clear that it’s within the range of the Overton window that we’re allowed to freely express ourselves on the issue.

What are your thoughts on how it emerged and what are some potential lessons that can be learned from its emergence in terms of future pandemic scenario mitigation? I was very surprised that you had a virus, a Covid SARS like virus that was that transmissible from person to person just, just as soon as you identify, hey, it’s there without any sort of Indication that there was, you know, process where you’d have, you know, an initial case without, you know, clustering or something like that, right? It just was there and all of a sudden it was everywhere. That was surprising.

But then when you hear that there’s a biosafety level 4 lab that’s known for working on SARS viruses, just I think it was probably less than 10 miles from that market they pinned it on, that brought up, you know, just in my mind, hey, that’s a possibility, right? But then what really stuck in my mind was suddenly, and this is part politics, but suddenly everybody was quickly denying that. Now, as a scientist, if you have a, you know, a question about something, you want to look into it, right? So you want to at least do some sort of basic investigation.

But very well known scientists who should know better were quickly saying, no, it’s not, you know, a virus like that that emerged from this biosafety lab and that was concerning. I think that there was a study that I read and I missed. I haven’t been able to find it since. But it was a study about the cell phone usage around the Wuhan lab in November of 2019. And then prior, basically what the researchers showed was there was this normal level of activity in cell phone signal usage. And then all of a sudden in November, there was this sudden increase in the cell phone usage around the facility.

And then it dropped off quickly in December of 2019. So, you know, when you start looking at things like that, you know, where there’s some smoke, there might be some fire, right? So I think it did come from that lab. I don’t think it was an intentional type release. But there were biosafety concerns in other Chinese laboratories. I don’t know if this one had any specific biosafety concerns, but if you have a situation where you’re dealing with getting a function test, you’re trying to learn about a virus, but you’re not handling the virus correctly and you modify it so that it can go from person to person pretty quickly.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that you could have a human exposure, not realize it, I mean, and then have that person, you know, just living their lives out in the community before they start displaying illness and quickly transmit that to a large number of people. And if it’s something that you’re not, you know, looking for something that you’re not quickly responding to, or if you’re trying to cover it up, the transmission from person to person could go unchecked pretty quickly through Community. We saw how it spread in our communities. Right. So it could have quickly gone maybe, you know.

Well, I remember doing a video when it started and I was showing a flight radar and all the flights that were still coming out of China. Is there gain of function research that happens with bird flu? You know, I’m not quite sure, but you know, there might have been in the past. I think there was some federal law that went to a place there’s several years ago now, but it stopped a lot of that gain of function test. But they had replicated the 1918 influenza pandemic influenza strain. And these types of studies, I know they’re very controversial, they’re very dangerous, they need to be kept in check, they need to be done correctly.

But it does help us understand the virus’s nature and what needs to happen for it to go from person to person. That’s why we know a lot about influenza viruses in terms of what needs to happen. Right. So I think that there’s, there’s lots of perils with that and I think we, you know, just have to be extremely careful and it should not just be done by, by anyone. I think it needs to be regulated quite a bit. Is there a potential for weaponization? Because, you know, like looking at your, you’ve obviously done some work with bioterrorism.

Is there a potential. And maybe not just bird flu, but some other type of coronavirus variant. Is there potential that somebody with, you know, a modest amount of resources could be working on some biological weapon that is potentially derived from bird flu or you know, some new, what do they call them, respiratory illness? You know, I think there’d be much more efficient and practical ways to develop biological weapons than trying to get a virus like bird flu, I think could be done. But a lot of times when you have a virus like that, it’s going to be difficult to control because once it, you know, you release it in one country, it’s probably going to be in your country pretty quick.

But you have other type of bacterial illnesses that you can replicate fairly easily than virals, viruses. Because it takes, I think, a higher level of expertise to manufacture viral based biological weapons versus things like anthrax or even salmonella. I think you can grow bacteria a lot easier than viruses from what I’ve seen. But then in order to produce a biological weapon from those bacteria, that still requires a level of expertise that, you know, can be done. But in order to make it high grade what the US and Soviet Union had produced, it takes a high level of sophistication to get to that level because I’ll just leave it there.

Because yeah, I mean, it’s. I guess, you know, you say that there wouldn’t be any motive because, you know, it would, there’d be a lot of blowback, obviously, even if you tried to genetically tune it, like as some people claim you could do, there is of course, the potential of that it will mutate and come and affect you. But, you know, this is not to say that you can’t discount the possibility that some fanatical nihilist, you know, at some point, point scientists gone rogue, you know, for whatever reason, or maybe it’s just the case of it’s kind of like the nuclear option maybe for, for some countries.

Whereas, yes, we know we’re going to incur a lot of death and destruction, but you might incur more type thing. When you prepare for bioterrorism. You’re. It sounds like you’re more so focused on the threats that perhaps are more localized, like an anthrax type thing, which perhaps is not going to spread that far. Well, a lot of the bioterrorism preparedness we looked at were agents like anthrax, but also smallpox, issues of disease surveillance. And then once you identify that potential agent, then how are you going to respond to it in terms of the public health response to identify people? Contact tracing as well as delivery of antibiotics, for instance.

If it’s anthrax, if it was smallpox, then, you know, how are we going to deliver smallpox vaccinations to the entire population of your jurisdiction at 72 hours? That’s, you know, kind of how, you know, you, you go through this process of, of planning, but it, you know, it’s. I’m trying to think of. So is there like, I guess what I’m asking is it sounds like, like weaponized smallpox. That’s something that could potentially cause a global pandemic. But when they talk about bioterrorism, it sounds like, and correct me if I’m wrong, you’re focused on things that maybe don’t or are less likely to go global a lot of times.

Yeah, as you know, anthrax, you know, that’s not transmissible from person to person. You could have a situation where if you had a targeted attack on the food supply, you know, you could have something like salmonella or E. Coli or some other pathogen like that that somebody could, you know, develop and then introduce into, you know, food distribution network or something like that. And you’d have quite a few illnesses, but you’d have the illnesses that would Begin with the initial exposure from the contaminated product, but then you could have subsequent person to person transmission after that.

A lot of times, hopefully we wouldn’t get those secondary cases, as many as what you would get with, you know, some sort of viral illness. But you could have a situation where somebody could utilize norovirus to infect a group of people and then from there you’d have a very contagious virus that would be in vomit and feces and then it would spread quickly from person to person. Right, But I think there’s a level of sophistication there to get that viral agent in a, in a contained way and deliver it. Yeah, exactly. So I think it’s, you know, there are probably some terrorist groups that would love to get biological weapons and develop them, but at the same time it does take a little bit of sophistication to be able to produce it in a way that, like what you’re saying in a delivery system that could then be used effectively because you have to take into account, you know, humidity and temperature and other things like that, which you’re going to, you know, use a biological weapon outside.

You know, there’s lots of different obstacles that would have to happen for those biological weapons to be useful. But there have been some that have definitely been manufactured by state level entities that are extremely scary. If you, you know, think about what Ken Alabeck had mentioned about the weapons programs in the Soviet Union before he defected and what they produced there, that’s very concerning. And after the fall Soviet Union, you know, there’s no guarantee that all of those weapons were accounted for. Right. Or destroyed. So what happened to them? Then you have the programs in North Korea.

Okay, so could somebody purchase one of those weapons that’s highly refined and able to be dispersed and wait, it could be that at maximum damage, could somebody purchase one of those and then move it over here to inflict the population and say that’s the concern that led to a lot of the public health and bioterrorism preparedness that occurred just after 9, 11. So, you know, it’s, it’s definitely a possibility. Well, I think too, with the geopolitical conditions around the world, where you have more and more proxy conflicts and you’re reaching a point now where, you know there’s winners and losers and if you know you’re going to lose anyways and perhaps you have access to this pathogen which might destroy your enemy, will destroy you too.

But you were already destroyed, right? So, you know, there’s no longer the disincentive to not utilize that nuclear option. We hear a lot of rumors and hearsay. Some of it’s propaganda. Maybe there’s smoke to the fire, I don’t know. With respect to biological laboratories in Ukraine, is this something you’ve researched at all? You know, I haven’t read too much about the bio labs and Ukraine. We have to, until we actually get information from those laboratories that we know exactly what’s happening. You know, are they just public health laboratories that are involved with disease surveillance and it’s been blown out of proportion? You know, we have state public health labs in every state here in the United States that are being sent clinical specimens to identify specific subtypes and whatever else.

And they have within those labs lots of different pathogens. Right. Probably nothing. That is, you know, what you would see in a, a bioweapons lab. Right, right. You’re talking about samples of tuberculosis, salmonella, and all the other typical things you’d see in a patient population. Right. And even some bio agents like tularemia. Right. Because we have certain, like Missouri, you have naturally occurring cases of tularemia. Right. But that is a biological agent. So are those laboratories in Ukraine, are they just laboratories that are there for clinical purposes or are they there to actually produce bioweapons? And I think that’s the, like a big question mark.

You know, people are claiming it, but in terms of the evidence, I mean, you know, it’s a, it’s, it’s a pretty big claim to say that there’s bioweapons there or bioweapons labs without, you know, some evidence. I always see the evidence. So, yeah, I’m the same way. I mean, there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence, you know, that especially of course, from Russians, which many people will say is just propaganda. But interestingly, the, the head of their CBRN program was assassinated recently and he was one of the most outspoken about these biolabs. Now, like you say, we don’t know if these were just, you know, run of the mill biolabs that weren’t at all dealing with weapons of mass destruction, if that’s the appropriate term.

But I mean, there’s always the possibility, I guess the more desperate countries become in these times of conflict, struggle, the greater the likelihood that they could just go scorched earth. And, you know, maybe not. It might not be a national decision. It might be some rogue element that decides to unleash something and perhaps even to their own peril. Yeah, exactly. And, and you know, Ukraine had a large number of nuclear weapons after the fall. So union, they would, you know, turn those over. But, you know, I don’t know about biological weapons, you know, so. Yeah, yeah, so that’s a big question mark.

Yeah, it’s. There’s definitely, you know, I think it’s incredible that it hasn’t happened yet. And I’ve always been concerned about a pandemic. That’s been one of my most likely scenarios in terms of a disaster that would unfold on a global scale. It always was prior to 2020. I talked about it a lot on the channel. I know you’ve watched the channel for a few years, which is concerning that. There’s an epidemiologist watching my channel. But, you know, for me it’s incredible that it didn’t happen sooner and that it doesn’t happen more frequently. Like here they are stopping the world for two or three years for this one virus.

Well, I mean, what would happen if we get another virus after that and this one is more lethal? You know, what sort of economic effects is that going to have? I mean, when you really look at the residual effects and the unintended outcomes of COVID you know, right after it, you had all these wars flaring up everywhere. And it might not be directly tied to that, but, you know, it creates a certain set of stressful socioeconomic conditions that are more likely to give birth to these conflicts and other disasters around the world. And then if there are issues that we have to address as a species, we’re less likely to address those issues and those problems become worse.

So it seems like a vicious cycle where now that we’ve opened Pandora’s box one once, there is a higher probability now that another one could be released and we’re just find oursel in an endless sort of doom loop. Not a pleasant thought. Well, that’s why we’re preppers, right? I mean. Yeah. So, you know, I think you got to think of these as independent kind of events. Right. So just because one has occurred doesn’t mean the next one is going to be around the corner. So like flipping a coin, right. The probability of getting heads is the same.

It, you know, you flip the coin, it’s the same probability of getting heads than, you know, if you flip it five times, you know, it’s, you know, each individual instance is its own event. Right. So I, I think if you just look at H5 and 1, definitely some concerns there. But at the same time, you know, it’s been a concern for over 20 years, over 25 years. And if it was just one of Those things where each year that goes by, it increases the probability of it changing into a pandemic virus. That would be a concern.

But it’s not like that because it’s. Each time you have an infected host, the virus still has to go through that, that those changes. And if it doesn’t go through those changes, it ends. So we have to just kind of keep that perspective and, you know, realize that if it does happen, there’s a lot of things we need to keep in mind, that when it does start spreading, how severe it’s going to be. Because you can have a pandemic with a mild virus, right? Having a pandemic is not about severity. Now, within each pandemic, you’re going to see a virus that is going to have a certain level of severity.

It could be very mild. It could be on the other end where it has a high level of severe illness or morbidity and high level of mortality. You have to, again, not to hurry up and wait here. Think about identifying those instances where you have transmission to a human. What happens to that human host? Do they have a cluster? And if we have a cluster, does then it start to be a strain that’s very efficient to go from person to person. And then once that happens, how is it manifesting itself in those people? Right. Is it severe illness and death or is it mainly mild? Okay.

And that’s where looking at the data is going to be extremely important. Because if we have that triggered event, we see illness in people. It is a severe illness. That’s when, you know, the, the probability of a really bad event occurs. That’s when we need to respond and, and very, you know, take it very, very seriously. If you start to see those human clusters. Okay. Because at that point you might have a virus that is just, you know, very close to getting into person to person transmission, having a really great risk of becoming a pandemic strain.

Yeah. Like when I’m, you know, I’m quite cynical, I’ll be honest, as you know. But I would say that based on our experience with COVID you know, in many ways that could be viewed as a godsend in the sense that we got a little taste of what it could potentially be if we had something worse. And so we’ve been able to develop a bunch of protective factors which could be implemented more expediently than previously perhaps. And now we know what works, what doesn’t. We can sift the wheat from the chaff in terms of the application of whatever tools that we decide to leverage to Mitigate the risk.

And there’s also a lot of things that I think nowadays are protective factors that weren’t there in 1918. Obviously they didn’t even really truly understand disease back then. But you know, you have touchless everything now. There’s not like people are handling money anymore. So there’s at the same time that we have this globalized world where you know, viruses can transmit very quickly. There’s also on a contact level there appears to be less contact and less. What are they called? Vectors or like points of. There’s a name for it. Contaminated surfaces like fomites. Fomites, that’s what it is.

Yeah. Like there’s, there appears to be like a less fomites. But I guess what I’m saying with, with respect to the ramifications of COVID having increasing the likelihood. So I’m talking about things like poverty, you know, things like war, which create a certain set of conditions where maybe people’s immune systems aren’t as great, they’re not getting proper nutrients. We’re doing more, how can I say, like we’re not. There’s a possibility for it to have all these knock on effects that are negative, which may create the conditions which are more likely to facilitate the next outbreak, if that makes, which who’s to say if it’s going to increase the likelihood or not.

But of course we have a lot of medical interventions now as well. We have a lot of surveillance as you say. So I would think looking at the current bird flu statistics, that it’s only a matter of time. What if any, is if there’s anything that keeps you up at night. As an epidemiologist, like what is one of your primary concerns for an illness? Is it bird flu or is it something else? You know, I think that having H5N1 or any hypothetic avian influenza virus get into people to the point that it’s going person to person.

Because at that point you have the very real possibility of a virus that causes a lot of severe illness, a lot of death. And if you get a severe illness or a virus that has a case fatality rate just in the 1 to 2% range, that’s considered a severe pandemic. And I’m not just talking 1, 2% and you know, the elderly population across the board, you know, you’re going to have a lot of fear because with COVID it’s very easy. It was very easy to say, well it’s just the old people or I’m not correct for this.

It was just. Yeah, we get what you mean. Yeah, yeah, it was just the seniors. It was just people that had chronic conditions and that sort of thing. Yeah. Different comorbidities. Well, it’s easy to dismiss the risk if you’re a young, healthy person. Right. But what happens when we start seeing young, healthy people have very severe illness, very rapid death, and they were in perfect shape, you know, just a really highly pathogenic influenza virus. It’s going to have some significant impacts to our society. Right. We already saw some, the supply chain disruptions with COVID Okay. If you had a situation where people are just absolutely afraid to, you know, go to work, which truck drivers and, you know, meatpacking plants, grocery stores, wherever else, it’s.

It’s going to be very disruptive, much more than what we’ve seen with COVID And I think that in terms of how we dealt with mass fatalities, how we dealt with, with a lot of other, you know, actions to limit people’s congregating in mass groups. Right. Well, that was something that I was very concerned about with COVID because, well, one, the way they implemented it, Covid itself had an incubation period of, you know, two to three days on up to 14 days. Right. So that range of up to 14 days. But they were going to shut everything down for, for two weeks only.

It’s like. Well, that was a little bit dis. Disingenuous. Right. Because essentially what we did was we used a, a method that had a lot of promise to flatten the curve, but we used it in, you know, so early in the pandemic that nobody was going to be locked down after they let everybody back. Right. So you kind of used up that bullet. You had to actually to be effective to, to help when we needed it, because people are not going to be locked down again. And I think with future pandemics, it’s going to be very difficult to get people to do the things that they did from 2020-21 or whatever.

Is that going to be a problem? I think it will. And the only. But at the same time, I think that if you have a severe enough virus, people are not going to wait for the government to tell them to not congregate. They’re going to just say, hey, I don’t want any part of that. I see people dying in real time. Right. So that might be one factor that would aid with the idea of helping people or getting people to, to take different measures. But at the same time, the, the government was so heavy handed, you know, and it was Kind of as if, you know, individual liberty was just completely ignored.

And that can be very detrimental because you’ve lost the trust in public health. Right. And I think that in the future we’re going to need that trust because we do have a severe pandemic. You know, we’re going to have from the public health side lots of important messages we need to get out for people to actually take actions to protect themselves. And people don’t, if they don’t trust those messages, they’re not going to do what they need to do in order to help protect themselves and their, their, their families. And that’s, that’s troubling for me because I think there was a lot of things that happened Covid that really undermined public health and the science that we used to do different things.

And because of that, without that trust, people are going to just probably follow misinformation and other things that are going to be very detrimental to their health, which is unfortunate. Well, that’s one of the things, like I’m a realist, like I’m fully aware of the government overreach. I totally side with people on that. But I’m also of the perspective just because the government mismanaged something doesn’t mean there’s not a real threat there. And there’s going to be some people who, you know, go in one direction and they listen to whatever, you know, the health authorities say.

And then there’s another group who is not going to believe a word of it, possibly to their own peril. And so one of my missions, if you will, is to try to bring a more, more even keeled point of view with these things, especially as preppers. I know there’s a lot of people in the audience that this message resonates with them in my audience. But of course, a lot of the most vocal people, especially in the influencer space, seem to be either one or the other. And there doesn’t seem to be just that common sense approach that you’re sort of talking about where, yeah, like these are real threats.

But if you lose people’s trust by doing the one size fits all. Where you don’t look at, like you were saying earlier, how, you know, they should have focused more selectively on how they tried to manage the problem with looking at the groups that were most vulnerable instead of just, you know, casting this wide net, there is a danger there that it’s going to spread far more rapidly. And what I often find in the United States, just as an example, Western societies in general typically pride themselves on, you know, individual freedom, rights and freedoms. That backfired, obviously, in a lot of ways.

Obviously China, eventually, you know, eventually it got out of control. But the collectivist seems to be one of their strong points when it comes to this sort of thing. I think people there are going to be more easily sort of having those regulations imposed upon them as opposed to here, where I think this go around. I mean, forget it. I think if a, if a lethal pathogen happened, if bird flu happen, yeah, you’re going to have that portion of society who’s going to be wearing their masks in their cars while they’re by themselves. I mean, you know, those are lifers.

But I think you’re going to have a much more critical portion of the population and that can potentially have some pretty damaging effects. I know even with COVID for myself personally, I had it twice and even though I didn’t die, and even though I wasn’t an advocate of a lot of the draconian policies that they put in place, that was a really bad illness and I’ll never forget it. You know, that’s something I’ll remember the rest of my life. So I just feel as though there needs to be a more middle of the road approach to these things before it’s too late, you know? Yeah, exactly.

And I think that hopefully public health officials have kind of had some time to reflect on it. And you know, I know a lot of the administrators down here in Missouri and you know, they were responding as best they can based on guidance that we’re receiving from state health department and guidance that was coming from the cdc. So if you think about it, the people that are working at the local health departments, you know, they’re part of the community. You know, they, a lot of them lived there, you know, for years and years and years. They know people, they’re, you know, they’re community members and they’re trying to do the best to help protect all the families that live there.

And you know, so it’s not like, you know, they’re trying to do anything nefarious, but if you’re getting bad advice and guidance for whatever reason, I, I think again, lots of politics involved. It could also be the fact that you have officials in Washington, D.C. and Georgia who come up with ideas and they may not have the experience or, or whatever to, you know, be making those calls, but they’re also trying to, like you said, one size fits all for every community in the United States. And what works in Washington, D.C. is probably not going to work in Missouri.

Right there’s differences. What’s going to work in California is not going to work in Oklahoma. Right. So if you had more leeway at the local level to make recommendations and based on what their community needs and would tolerate, I think at that point you have a much more successful response. Because if you try to impose something on a population and they’re not ready for it, they’re going to push back. And what I tell my students is that when you’re engaging in policy making and you have the great idea and you want to put out this policy and you get a tremendous amount of pushback, you shouldn’t double down enforcement.

At that point you need to pause and try to understand their viewpoint and say, okay, what’s happening here? Why are we getting this pushback? Understand their side and come to some sort of agreement to say, okay, we need to protect people’s health. How do we do that in a manner that’s going to protect people’s liberties, Address the concerns that different population groups have so you can come together with a census and once you get that consensus on how to move forward, then at that point you’re going to have a much more successful response to anything, especially a pandemic when people are very concerned and very fearful.

And this is something that I tried to point out when I was a student in Iowa, is that the vaccine mandates were just wrong for healthcare providers and other people. Because I still tell my students this, it was just a morally reprehensible policy because you’re going to somebody who is deathly afraid of the vaccine and you’re telling them you’re going to take this vaccine, you’re going to be fired, which means you’re going to lose your house, your career is going to be destroyed, your family could be in poverty, you know what’s coming to children. So all these negative things, what type of.

That’s a public health official or health care administrator. What type of. Of choices? Yeah, that’s a whole. You can’t justify that morally or ethically. It’s just not right. And a lot of people, because I think a group think or whatever else, they saw nothing wrong with that. And that deeply concerned me because all those healthcare providers had been putting their lives and their family lives on the line by showing up to work during the first two waves of of coronavirus, when it had a much more severe outcome and possible fatality rate than later stages. And they pushed through long hours.

They made the sacrifice and they did what they had to do. And a lot of them probably had immunity from Being sick with COVID Right. Natural immunity. But all that was disregarded for this push. And that really concerned me because I was like this. It just didn’t feel right. It still doesn’t. It’s still not right. You know, so I think that, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of things if you hopefully, historically we can look back and, and you know, say what happened in Covet, what was done correctly, what was not done correctly, own up to it and, you know, learn our lessons.

And this is something that, you know, concerns me. You mentioned, you know, we learned all this stuff and with H1N1 we learned quite a bit. Okay. How to deal with messaging, how to deal with vaccine supply and all this other stuff. I was really involved with that response here in Missouri when Covid started. We didn’t deal with the issues we knew we were going to have with messaging. We didn’t deal with the issues that we knew we were going to have with vaccine distribution. And there are a lot of other things that I saw. I was like, well, we learned that in 2009 and 2010.

Why are we doing it this way? I was out of public health by then, but I still have questions about why did we not implement the things that we learned several years ago in this new pandemic. In my mind, I think you’re optimist that we’re going to learn from our response to Covid. I think what will happen is we’ll. There’s probably after action reports that have been drawn up and submitted. I’m not very confident that we’re going to learn from this because it seems like we repeat the same mistakes over and over again, which is unfortunate.

Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of public awareness campaigns, they almost have to be crafted on a more regional level or something like to have like a national, you know, guidance handed down from the cdc. A one size fits all thing. I just can’t see because then the messaging, it just seems so insincere and impersonal that a lot of people are just gonna, you know, turn their brains off for that. And it’s going to evoke contempt in a lot of people when, like you say, you try to force it more and you know, you made me think of something.

It’s fear messaging in both directions. So on the one hand, there are people who are very fearful of the government and what are they putting in this vaccine. Right. And then on the other hand, you have people who are very fearful of the virus itself. And we almost need to just have a rational conversation you know, get rid of the fear, whether it’s of the government, of the virus itself, and just really communicate more with the public in a way which is open and, you know, sympathetic to their concerns and, you know, understanding that, you know, maybe there’s reasons why a person doesn’t want to get said intervention or, you know, but I don’t actually believe that we’re going to do that.

When I say that I’m optimistic, I think I’m just optimistic in the sense that I guess we’ve already been through the process and maybe that in itself might help us easier, more easily get in line for the big one, possibly. But at the same time, I don’t think the government’s going to learn its lessons. I mean, they’re not, but there’s just too many social, psychological hurdles that are going to prevent that from happening. And we’ve lost a lot of people in public health. They. They’ve left, you know, they’ve either retired or they change professions. They worked really long hours.

They were vilified and some of them were threatened. Some were actually, you know, attacked. So it’s kind of like, you know, if you have people who, who sincerely wanted to do right by the communities and help people, but then they get treated like that, you know, that’s, you know, it’s a shame that we lost those people, but at the same time, demoralizing. Yeah. And they’ve, you know, all that, you know, knowledge of public health, as well as what they learned during COVID and all that knowledge is gone. So you have a whole new group of people that are now.

Well, not entirely whole new group of people, but we have a lot more new people that may not have worked during COVID So how are they going to respond to the next pandemic? You know, they’re going to have to learn everything again. So. Well, I remember our British Columbia, it’s province here in Canada. The health director there, her name was Bonnie Jeffrey. And when the pandemic first, this was when it was first starting to seem like it’s going to be a thing. I remember a press conference where she actually cried. Okay? So she was actually genuinely concerned that this was going to be a big deal.

But later, you know, even she probably became caught up in this group think and these, this chain of command and, you know, the irrational mandates and all this stuff. So she eventually became a village, a villain at one point. Point she was, you know, widely revered as, you know, like a person, a humanitarian who just cared about the people and, you know, people were you know, supporting her right to emotionally express herself. But by the end of it all, she was viewed as the villain who was imposing what people at the time were thinking were irrational policies, trying to, you know, basically keep people indoors and keep this two week lockdown going for years on end.

So it’s incredible how, you know, and I could see why a lot of those people just fall off. You know, it’s a difficult situation to be in when I’m sure she’s getting orders from somebody and if she doesn’t do her job properly then, you know, it’s so, it’s. I, I can’t see us having necessarily evolved much in that respect, is what I’m saying. You know, I think as preppers we’re always prepared for the big one, the big pandemic. I have an epidemiologist on while I want to talk about, you know, the global pathogen outbreak. But I think what commonly kills people is things like waterborne pathogens.

You know, after a disaster it might not be, you know, some crazy virus that has a high fatality rate. It could just be, you know, that the power is out, people are drinking nasty water, they’re not practicing proper hygiene. Can you speak to that a bit? And what is your experience working in disaster zones? What are some of the risks that people need to be mindful of and how can they prepare for them? When you look at a lot of disasters, natural disasters, what you have is concerns with water quality. Of course, if it’s flooding, then you have contaminated wells, you have potentially broken public water systems and you know, so you have boil water ores and that sort of thing.

That’s a concern whenever you have a natural disaster, whether it’s a flood, tornado, ice storm, whatever, power outage. What’s happened to your food in the refrigerator, right. A lot of people don’t want to throw out that food. Food, right, it’ll stay cold for, in the proper temp for only certain period of time. But once that food starts to thaw in your freezer or gets too warm in your refrigerator, a lot of people basically might push the envelope. They might try to eat that stuff beyond when it’s probably safe to. So a lot of the foodborne illnesses that you see, you know, potentially after natural disasters, from a public health perspective, that’s one of the messages we try to get out, is to let people know, hey, you need to be, you know, doing these certain things in order to make sure that you’re, you’re food safe.

We also respond to restaurants and other facilities that are regulated for food safety, to make sure that during a powder outage, no matter what the disaster is, to make sure that they’re taking steps to either keep the food at proper temps or if it’s out of temp for a long time, you have to embargo it, have them destroy it. We don’t like to waste food. I know that. But at the same time, you don’t want to be consuming something that’s going to result in a potential gastrointestinal illness. Water quality, food, also air quality, you know, with the wildfires, that’s a huge problem with particulate matter and other chemicals that are in that, in that woodland, fires and everything.

But additionally, you have air quality. If you had, for instance, a flood or a tornado, and you have buildings that are damaged, water soaked, then you have the presence of mold. So you have to think about the water, the air quality inside those buildings that are damaged. When you go to clean that sort of thing. Also, all that sludge during a, a flood, for instance, all that mud is going to be potentially contaminated. So you have to protect yourself against the, the chemicals and the raw sewage and everything else that’s in that mud that’s, you know, all over the place after a flood.

Also tetanus, whether you’re responding to a flood or tornado or other natural disaster, having that tetanus shot to make sure that you’re, you know, protected. That, that’s very important. That’s one of the things we, we did in the floods and the tornado down in Taney County. But also, if you’re looking at a lot of other natural disasters we were involved with, I gotta say, I’m not a big fan of vaccines, but that’s one that I’ll always get. Exactly. That’s because that’s one of those things that can, you know, if there ever is going to be a disaster, there’s going to be all kinds of rusty pieces of metal and, you know, it’s just one of those easy, easy wins, you know? Yeah, exactly.

There’s lots of materials out there that you can find in terms of how to protect yourself after a natural disaster. You know, probably one of the, the things that I had never thought about till the Joplin tornado was, you know, having boots in your tornado safe area. Right. When the Joplin tornado went through the hospital there, a lot of the patients did not have their shoes. As you’re sitting in a bed, they willed the patient into the safe area. In the hallways, all the windows got blown out of the hospital. Right. There’s no power. So the patients had to be basically assisted to go from the various floors all the way down to the first floor to be evacuated.

Well, they found out that a lot of the patients had lost their shoes. Okay. Because the tornado blew everything up. Yeah. So all these patients that were ambulatory, that they were trying to walk, you know, downstairs with it, which they were perfectly probably capable of, they couldn’t because it had any shoes. So each patient had to be basically carried downstairs because all the broken glass and debris. So that’s one of the things that, you know, tornadoes come at all hours of the day. And if it’s at night, I always have a pair of boots or sturdy shoes there where we would go for tornado.

Because, you know, if your house does get hit, there’s going to be lots of debris. And if you got to your safe place at 2 o’clock in the morning while you’re half asleep, you don’t want to try to walk out of there in bare feet, Right. Well, especially if you have to dig somebody out or you’re walking over stuff. A good pair of muck boots has so many uses. Exactly. And you know, I even have a helmet in my tornado area because, you know, head injuries. So, you know, I think that if you go back and you read a lot of the instances of different natural disasters and how people responded to them, there’s lots of really good lessons there that you can apply to your own family preparedness.

Reading the stuff that the government puts out, you know, I think that’s a lot of that stuff’s entry level, but listening to what you know, you have to say, other channels that are kind of more advanced, I think that’s, you know, there’s lots of lessons learned you can use to then apply to your own family plan. Yeah, we had Dr. Timogen Tan on here recently and he was going over a variety of different, more advanced first aid procedures that people can do. And I’ll post a link to that video in the description section in terms of, you know, different types of medications or treatments.

I know you said you had some involvement with a strategic stockpile. I don’t think a lot of people know what that is. I mean, there’s a strategic oil reserve, there’s a strategic gold reserve. In fact, I did a video at one point talking about how the government are actually the biggest preppers. What can you tell us about the strategic medicine reserve? And maybe a little bit of motivation perhaps for people to, to leverage other options to, to get their own emergency supply of various medications. Now there’s lots of services, as you probably know, that you can get antibiotics and things like that.

What is the strategic stockpile? And. And how does it work? And I guess some of it’s classified, so I know you can’t. I will tell you as much as I can. The Strategic National Stockpile is a program that is run by the CDC through Homeland Security, of course, partially Department of. They changed it since I went through this training, but I. I think it’s. It might be through Homeland Security back when I did it. I think FEMA’s kind of part of that, but it’s really run by the CDC because it’s Health and Medical. I think when I went through the training, it was still under the Department of Health and Health and Health and Human Services.

Okay. But they have, I think, a total of 12 stockpile push stockpiles that they can get to anywhere in the country within, I think it was 12 hours. So they’re strategically placed around the United States. And these stockpiles have carts that basically be pushed up into an airplane. They contain medical supplies, medications, ventilators, durable medical equipment, just a massive amount. And these can be requested through the state government to the CDC, and then it could be delivered, you know, within 12 hours. Now, the other side of the strategic national stockpile is the vendor. The vendor managed inventory.

And the vendor managed inventory is a much larger stockpile that is, you know, basically held by various companies. Yeah, yeah. So basically they rotate this. The supply through their normal inventory practices. But basically, if you had a major event and the initial push packages get sent out there, that. That will be the initial supply. And then more supplies would come in from the vendor managed inventory. And then when you start thinking about the amount that that has, I mean, it’s tremendous. Tremendous amount of various medications and bandages and dermatological equipment, all kinds of stuff. And the government would have dibs on that.

Yeah. But I mean, in some respects, throughout the pandemic, at least in the initial phase, there was a pretty significant shortfall of numerous supplies, despite having a lot, arguably they weren’t sufficiently prepared for a national emergency. And I mean, could you really ever be. When you’re talking about 300 million people. Right. You can only. Yeah. Have so much insurance. I guess the. That was interesting because in 2006, going 2007, we had a lot of pandemic preparedness work that we had done, and it was part of the federal money that was coming down to every state. And we implemented and developed pandemic plans.

We exercised them and did a Whole bunch of other work. But part of the fund that came out after that was the development of different types of caches around the country for emergencies, pandemics, what, you know, all kinds of different things. And in 2009 when H1N1 came around, a lot of those caches were used by, by hospitals, health departments to respond to the pandemic back in. But I don’t know if they were replenished after 2009, 2010. Right. That’s a lot of money, right? Yeah, it did. It was a lot of money. And so the question I had was, you know, what happened to those caches for.

And I think what happened was just, you know, the funding to support those programs went away and those caches just kind of, you know, went their way. Because it did take, it did take quite a bit of work to keep those things up to date. And yeah, so it, I was real surprised that they didn’t have more masks in those caches, but I guess, you know, they’ve been used up and were replenished or something. But yeah, so I can only imagine today I, I wonder if those stockpiles have been fully replenished yet or not. I mean, that’s something to keep in mind.

No, we live in such a just in time delivery, global supply chain that the likelihood of being able to get stuff is actually diminishing as things start to decouple here. Which is why I always encourage people to have a bit of a contingency plan. You know, get your emergency antibiotics, get your own medical supplies. A lot of them have been shown to be able to, and this is by US Military studies, to last a lot longer than the expiration dates might indicate. But don’t sue me about that, please. But that is according to the U. S.

Shelf life extension program. But is there anything else that you think people should be just mindful of with all of this stuff? I mean, obviously it’s a hot button issue for a lot of people. It be a very contentious issue. I think you’ve presented a, a fairly even keel case for people to consider. But with respect to pandemic preparedness, anything else you’d like to advise us about? You know, I think the important thing is to maintain perspective, listening and to all your work. There’s a lot of things happening. We have to keep in perspective that the pandemic with H5N1 may or may not happen.

So we still need to be concerned. We still need to watch for those trigger points, you know, clusters of cases and potential early human to human Transmission and at that point, you know, that’s when you can start being concerned, really concerned. Right. The other thing is just generally keep perspective of, you know, what’s all happening in the world. But you know, maintain and be aware of your own mental health, mental health around your family because that’s one of those things that could, well, it will decide and factor into how well you respond to different emergencies. If you’re struggling with depression or anxiety and you have an extremely stressful event that you have to respond to and take care of yourself and your family, it may not go very well.

So take care of yourself right. Now you mentioned your physical health. I think mental health is right there. Lots of studies say that if you exercise and you’re, you have good diet, it’s going to help improve your mental health as well. But generally, you know, just, you know, keep yourself physically mentally healthy because I think, you know, there are lots of threats in the world and I would say that we’re probably closer than not to something happening, not necessarily with the pandemic maybe, but we have enough geopolitical global economy and you just keep going down the list of different things that are possibly out there.

But just keep a perspective and having positive mental health is going to help you a lot because we’re going to need it, unfortunately. Well, I appreciate your, your scientific analysis and candor with respect to the issue. Nobody could ever accuse you of fear mongering here today, which is very important. I am quite concerned about it. I think even just by virtue of me having you on, that is a sign to me that, you know, a storm is brewing perhaps. I think the fact that it’s, it’s receiving so much attention and that, you know, just the, as we discussed the general prevalence of it all and perhaps even some of the more nefarious motivations that we didn’t really get into in terms of entities that might be involved in wanting to do this for whatever sort of diabolical purposes, be they terrorists or otherwise.

You know, there’s just so much a flurry of possibilities and I always advise my audiences, you know, never be scared about this stuff, be concerned. It’s kind of intriguing, it’s kind of exciting in a weird way. But we just want to be of the mindset that hey, this is a risk and I think the more we kind of front run all of that with this kind of information, the less panic there’s going to be. So I appreciate you coming out today. It’s been great having you on and yeah, I wish you the best of luck with your PhD defense.

Thank you very much. And I agree with you. Be concerned. Don’t be panicked. Yeah, absolutely. Don’t be a panic prepper. Yep, exactly. Thank you. All right. Thanks a lot. Thank you. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up@canadianpreparedness.com where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices. No junk and no gimmicks. Use discount code prepping gear for 10% off. Don’t forget, the strong survive, but the prepared thrive. Stay safe.
[tr:tra].

See more of Canadian Prepper on their Public Channel and the MPN Canadian Prepper channel.