NYT leads way in 'bird flu' propaganda

False and fraudulent notions of 'viruses' and 'contagion' are aimed at making us fearful

As you know if you have been hanging out with me for a while, my main topic in this newsletter is the importance of knowing that viruses have never been proven to exist, and that understanding this, along with knowing that the disproven germ hypothesis and the concept of contagion are false paradigms for how and why we get sick, can open us to seeing all the other ways we’ve been lied to for centuries. The recycled fear-mongering about “bird flu” is a case in point.

These incorrect fundamental ideas have dominated the discourse on illness and health for at least 150 years. They are learned by tiny children from their parents. They are taught to every student in every science class on every level in school. Adults and children alike learn them from the doctor at every visit. They are the underpinning for every ad for over-the-counter or prescription drugs. And of course, they are the mainstay in medical school, nursing school, and in every other branch of health-related science for which people obtain advanced degrees. They are almost the entire content of pseudoscientific field of virology.

“Viruses” and contagion are also promoted in news and entertainment media including TV shows and movies. These concepts are ubiquitous. We have been primed throughout our lifetimes to accept these pseudoscientific ideas as true and correct. I say this to acknowledge how difficult it can be to even consider that these ideas are not true. Doing so can shake the foundation of how we understand something so important as our health—leading to an experience of disorientation and fear. And it suggests that we have been duped and are still being duped—willfully lied to—leading to an experience of rage. These two feelings, at any rate, are what I have experienced over the past four years as I began to question this received knowledge, and still feel from time to time. Especially the rage.

Photo by Alessandro Bellone on Unsplash

I also say this as a prelude to my topic today, which is delving into the level of untruth and fear-mongering that anyone who follows mainstream media is exposed to daily. These three ideas underpin everything in the following article. Everything.

Last week the self-styled “newspaper of record,” the “grey lady,” the “if-it’s-in-the-Times-it-must-be-true” New York Times, carried an article with the following headline:

As bird flu simmers as a human threat, past pandemic lessons take on new urgency

We need to be prepared to fight the next war, not the last one.

By JOHN M. BARRY

PUBLIC HEALTH

With the perspective that I have on the plandemic we have just been through (though it is not really over) and knowing the utter falsity of “bird flu,” the degree to which this article opens with salvo after salvo of fear in just a handful of words--”simmers,” “human threat,” “urgency,” “the next war”—is so over-the-top it is almost laughable. Wow, they are hitting it hard! And as a former journalist who knows that most of what is called “news media” in the world today has not practiced anything remotely resembling real journalism for many decades, it still stuns me that a flagship newspaper like the New York Times would consider this a legitimate headline.

Every phrase is aimed at emotional manipulation of the reader. It also contains several ideas that are either factually false or contextually unhelpful, all based in the false paradigms of “viruses,” the disproven germ hypothesis, and contagion: that “bird flu” exists, that it is a human threat, that there was an actual “pandemic,” that another one is looming, and that the war metaphor (which I wrote about in a recent article) is an appropriate way to discuss issues of disease and health. Evidence is offered for none of these ideas—they are simply asserted because if they are in the Times, they must be true. And because proponents of the disproven germ hypothesis, contagion, and “viruses” do not seem to feel they ever have any obligation to back up their claims.

Public health—what is it good for?

A biographical line at the end of the article identifies the writer as a “scholar” in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University. Since he does not have Dr. before his name, he presumably does not have a PhD, which means he is not a professor. This doesn’t mean he does not have enough authority to speak on the topic—I am not indulging in an ad hominem attack here. I’m only suggesting that he may be young and inexperienced, and therefore less mature as a spokesman for his field than someone with more gravitas. For this we could perhaps allow him some leeway for going a little overboard on the emotional verbiage. I just want to be fair.

Public health is a field whose purpose, according to the CDC, includes “detecting, preventing and responding to infectious diseases.” (The CDC says public health also looks at issues such as lifestyle and injury prevention, arguably not an appropriate role for government.) Public health is the structure under which numerous invasive and harmful policies were enforced during the plandemic. Without “viruses” and “germs” causing contagious and infectious diseases, is there any need for an institutionalized function called “public health?” Just asking a question.

The Times article is too long, and too ridiculously full of inaccuracies, false claims, and disproven ideas, to go through it line by line. I will confine my comments to the first part, where Barry makes many egregious claims about “bird flu,” using inflammatory language designed to raise fears about a new “pandemic” that is lurking just around the corner.

In 1918, an influenza virus jumped from birds to humans and killed an estimated 50 million to 100 million people in a world with less than a quarter of today's population. Dozens of mammals also became infected.

In the first five words, Barry has already introduced an unproven assumption: that “viruses” exist and cause influenza. The narrative around this idea has been in place for more than a century, and has even spawned a scientific field called virology, purporting to study “viruses,” even though not a single paper produced in this field has contained evidence that viruses exist. What is done in those virology labs can’t possibly be the isolation of a “virus,” and what is done in the gene-sequencing “dry labs” can’t provide evidence that the genetic material they are sequencing came from a virus, as many who have read the seminal papers have reported.

Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash

Mike Stone has delved into the unscientific methodology used in virology in great detail in his Substack, ViroLIEgy. Sam Bailey has created numerous 20-minute videos also taking down the various unsubstantiated claims of this field. And Christine Massey has so far received replies to her Freedom of Information requests from well over 200 government and health agencies worldwide—the ones that implemented draconian and sometimes murderous protocols during the “Covid-19” plandemic—affirming that none of them have a paper documenting the existence of a virus from the body fluids of a sick person, which could in any way justify those tyrannical measures.

‘Viruses’ and contagion are both unproven

Then there’s the issue of contagion. As I wrote about in my article How the meme that 'viruses' are fiction can free both humanity and this word, the dictionary definitions of the words “virus” and “contagion” are closely related, though not identical. They are hard to tease apart because in order to be the cause of pandemics, “viruses” must be contagious, so both “viruses” and contagion must be present if there is a pandemic.

If you’ve been following my writing for the last several months, you’ll recall that I wrote about the Rosenau experiments that were done in 1918. In these experiments, Rosenau attempted to prove that the malady that was making people sick and killing them, which at the time was called the “Spanish flu,” was contagious. None of the efforts in Rosenau’s series of experiments proved contagion—not a single healthy individual out of the hundred or so in the experiment got sick from being in close proximity to extremely ill people in a hospital. Numerous similar experiments attempting to prove contagion that have been conducted since then have had the same results. (See my article Contagion has never, ever been proven and Daniel Roytas’ recently published book Can You Catch a Cold? for more details.)

Barry’s claim that “dozens of mammals also became infected” is curious. How does he know this? Where and what kinds of animals were these, and who counted them? Why is it worth mentioning “dozens” of mammals when the human toll he cites is up to 100 million? Is it perhaps a kind of foreshadowing of the jumps and double-jumps that he claims “viruses” now make (see below)?

How the Jenga tower is built

In the next five words of the article, Barry takes that unproven assumption and bases another unproven assumption on it (demonstrating how that Jenga tower gets built). He asserts that a (nonexistent) virus that originated in birds “jumped” into people. This is known as “zoonotic origin,” a fancy scientific sounding phrase for this species-jumping that “viruses” supposedly do. We’ve heard a lot about this in the past four years, mostly concerning bats (and maybe an unsuspecting pangolin).

This “zoonotic origin” notion did not exist in 1918. It wasn’t until 1996 that so-called avian flu virus was supposedly first found in a human, and 2009 that “swine flu” virus showed up in a person. (Of course, since no “virus” has ever been isolated and proven to cause disease, it is impossible for this “jumping” between species to ever have been proven either.) Barry’s assertion that the 1918 “flu” originated in birds is a retrospective application of the zoonotic assumption. In 1918, no one was talking about “avian flu” jumping to humans, but once that notion was added to the virus narrative, it was too good not to start being applied to previous epidemics.

Indeed, the CDC offers an article on its website that attempts to support the retrospective identification of the 1918 pandemic as zoonotic in origin by purporting to document how the “virus hunters” reconstructed the virus that supposedly caused the 1918 deaths. We will need to take a little detour from the NYT article to look at some parts of this CDC article that help us see the false claims being made by Mr. Barry.

Reconstructing a non-existent virus

To no one’s surprise, it was in 1999, just a few years after zoonotic origin was added to the virus narrative, that the effort to reconstruct the 1918 “virus” led to finding its “viral genome.” As told by the CDC article, this astonishing finding was the result of researchers studying material taken from the lungs of the excavated body of a woman who “likely died in her mid-20s due to complications from the 1918 virus” (in other words, died from unknown causes) in 1918 in a village in Alaska that lost many residents to death that year (CDC). They also obtained lung material from the excavated bodies of two servicemembers who died in 1918 of acute respiratory illness or pneumonia, which was also assumed to be caused by the “virus.” The article does not mention how they did the sequencing of the genome of this “virus”; it merely asserts that they found the entire sequence of a “virus” which they then made further equally unfounded assertions about.

Mike Stone has written many times about the flawed methodology of “viral genome sequencing.” This is a recent article; I strongly suggest you look up others on his page.

A Friendly Chat About "Viral" Genomes

“Avian flu” viruses from the 1918 era were “unfortunately not available for study” in the 1990s, according to the CDC article. The scientists attempting to identify the “virus” that caused the 1918 epidemic used genome sequencing of the “virus” they claimed to have found in the three dead bodies. They determined that it most closely resembled the “oldest classic swine flu influenza virus”:

This means that it likely was an ancestor or closely related to the earliest influenza viruses known to infect mammals. However, the authors believed the virus likely obtained its HA from avian viruses, but were unsure how long the virus may have been adapting in a mammalian host before emerging in pandemic form. (CDC)

Notice the weasel words—”likely,” “believed,” “unsure.” Notice also that “mammals” are part of this fabricated story, recalling Mr. Barry’s mention of “dozens of mammals” being “infected” in 1918. He apparently wants to make sure we see this link in the zoonotic chain. There are also many other unsubstantiated claims in this short paragraph, which I will not go into due to space constraints, but suggest you read with a critical eye and see the blocks being added to the Jenga tower.

A note on H’s and N’s: HA or H refers to Hemagglutinin, the protein that supposedly makes up the coat of the virus and “plays a role in allowing an influenza virus to enter and infect a healthy cell” (CDC). It is the H in the names of so-called bird flu and swine flu viruses, for example, H5N1, the current “avian flu” virus about which fear is being raised. The N is for Neuraminidase, the other protein said to be in these “viruses.” These letters seem to give a scientific patina to how “viruses” are identified. However, in reality, neither of these proteins has ever been linked directly to any “virus,” and in fact they are commonly found in humans and animals, including birds and pigs (Dr. Sam Bailey, personal communication, May 26, 2024).

You can only believe the claims in the CDC article if you accept that the processes used in virology labs to identify viruses and sequence their genomes actually ever have an identified viral particle to begin with. Neither the CDC nor public-health scholars like Barry feel the need to provide evidence of that. But if you check out Mike Stone’s work, Sam Bailey’s videos, and Christine Massey’s FOI results, you will see that neither viruses nor their genomes have ever actually been found.

Clearly, something happened in 1918 that killed a lot of people. Whether the estimated numbers cited by Barry—50 million to 100 million—are correct or not (what do you think?), there was something going on that took many, many lives. From what is known about the fraudulence of all claims made so far about the existence of “viruses,” it can only be concluded that Mr. Barry has made an unsupported assumption in claiming that it was caused by an “avian flu virus.”

What did happen in 1918-1920 that caused mass death, like what happened in Europe in the 14th century that has been called the “Black Death” or “Bubonic Plague,” is a subject for further investigation—and a fascinating one, in my opinion. There have been some thoughts put forward on this, such as those suggested by Dawn Lester and David Parker in their indispensable book, What Really Makes You Ill? (pp. 133-141). This is an example of how dropping the disproven germ hypothesis can open opportunities to really understand what happened in these historic events, and to learn what that understanding can teach us about how our bodies and our world really operate. For another time.

A new ‘first’: the virus ‘double-jump’

Back to the NYT article.

Now we are seeing another onslaught of avian influenza. For years it has been devastating bird populations worldwide and more recently has begun infecting mammals, including cattle, a transmission never seen before. In another first, the virus almost certainly jumped recently from a cow to at least one human — fortunately, a mild case.

Barry is right that another “first” is being seen: the zoonotic origin narrative is growing longer as “viruses” are now said to jump from one species of animal to another species of animal, and then to humans. We need to see this for what it is—another effort to ramp up fear and induce in people the feeling that no matter where we turn, a “virus” is apt to jump into us from some other creature—a pig, a bird, a bat, a cow, what will be next? And how long will the chain of jumping get? Three jumps? Six jumps? Twenty? Note that there has been ONE “case” of a human supposedly infected by a cow—just one—and it was “mild.” From this, we are supposed to get ready to “fight the next war.” (How gullible do they think we are?)

And how do they determine that any bird or any cow has been “infected” by a “virus?” Often it is by use of a PCR test, the same kind of test that was used to create the “case-demic” of the first couple of years of “Covid-19.” This is the test about the use of which its inventor, Kary Mullis, commented that “you can find almost anything in any body.” Never intended as a diagnostic tool, it is nevertheless used constantly for that purpose and has been since the days of HIV. Vast numbers of “infected” birds are presumed from just one or two that “tested positive.” Barry claims that “avian flu” has been “devastating bird populations worldwide” for years. But when significant numbers of dead wild birds are found and their deaths are attributed to a “virus,” this obscures the likely real causes: toxins, EMFs, heavy metals, and other environmental contaminants about which we should be concerned and be doing something rather than getting into a sweat about a new “virus.”

A new assault on real food

To take it even further, this latest “virus” has supposedly been found not just in cows’ bodies, but in their milk. So the narrative of “infected cows” is being used to stir up fear in the public, reignite the campaign against raw milk, and turn up the heat again on farmers who produce and sell raw dairy products. This is part of the increasing effort that seems to be underway to push us towards lab-grown “food” and away from real food, and to limit or even put an end to normal food production. Sam Bailey addressed this in her video from Feb. 2023, when “avian flu” was last being hyped in the media.

Taking Away Your Chickens

The rest of the NYT article deals with issues around mask mandates, school closure, vaccines, wastewater testing, and other invasive and harmful measures that Barry warns may need to be put in place in order for public health agencies to be “prepared” for this next pandemic. All these things are only relevant if everyone believes the premise of a deadly “virus” jumping around through various animals and about to “infect” people. The whole Jenga tower is built on top of this one assumption, every part of which has either never been proven to be true (“viruses”) or disproven multiple times (disproven germ hypothesis and contagion).

My dad called TV the ‘idiot box’

I do not watch TV or listen to or read any mainstream news sources on a regular basis. Just reading this article from the New York Times and parsing out the untruths and false assumptions and fear-mongering in even two paragraphs of it has been exhausting! I strongly urge you, unless you have a very strong nervous system, to limit your exposure to the propaganda and emotional manipulation of the “news,” whether TV (the worst), radio, or print (very capable of propaganda and twisting unsuspecting readers up emotionally, as we have just seen). And if you do partake, do so with a keenly critical eye. And help your loved ones to do the same.

It becomes more important every day that more people wake up to the lies we are being told about “viruses” and “pandemics.” This will ensure that the next one, which the nefarious ones and their willing and eagerly uncritical minions like Barry are already anticipating and planning, is a complete flop because the public has seen through the propaganda and laughed them out of the room.

Thank you for reading. This Changes Everything has just passed 500 subscribers, and that is very affirming. Deep thanks to all 507 of you! If you find value in what I offer here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. And please share my articles with others you feel may benefit from reading them, especially people who are not regular Substack readers. Let’s spread this information to a wider audience.

Further reading and viewing

More of the eager and uncritical minions that carry out the nefarious plans of the self-styled elites: Sam Bailey documents Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, and her team planning how to prepare for the “avian flu” pandemic and what meaures they are willing to impose on the Canadian public.

Theresa Tam’s Leaked Meeting Reveals H5N1 Launch

The indefatigable Christine Massey adds another “germ” to the list of those that can’t be found or can’t be documented to be contagious by any governmental or health agency.

CDC confession: no scientific evidence of Haemophilus influenzae being pathogenic

The brilliant Mike Stone reviews the unsavory history of “the germ theory” in his most recent article. Mike explains it all so clearly.

The Germ Hypothesis Part 1

Dawn Lester’s article from last December takes on the accusation that pointing out the lack of evidence for the existence of viruses is a “psyop.”

No, it isn't a psyop!