(Beth Clifton collage)
Muzzling order comes just as news breaks of major H5N1 outbreak on Long Island duck farm
AQUEBOGUE, N.Y.; WASHINGTON, D.C.–– “I look at what’s going on as this administration coming in and getting their ducks in a row,” an anonymous federal official told National Public Radio on January 22, 2025, moments after the incoming Donald Trump administration muzzled all 90,000 employees of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
Yes, this is about ducks. And apparently about the quacks, too, advising Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his nominee to head the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, about public and animal health policy.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“It’s like a deep freeze!”
Dorothy Fink, acting head of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and yes, that is really her name, issued an “order to the heads of all the agency’s operating divisions directing them to refrain from most external communications such as issuing documents, guidance, or notices until such documents can be approved by ‘a presidential appointee,’” reported Gabrielle Emanuel, Selena Simmons-Duffin, and Rob Stein of National Public Radio.
The freeze “applies until February 1, 2025,” Fink explained.
“It includes public speaking and social media,” the National Public Radio team added.
Rat Fink, emblematic character of the late cartoonist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.
“Don’t say nothin’ bad about my baby!”
The Fink directive “includes the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health, and the Food & Drug Administration,” added Times of London New York correspondent Josie Ensor, noting that “The CDC was scheduled to publish several reports this week, including three about the H5N1 avian influenza virus outbreak in which at least one person has been recorded dead.”
Less than two hours after Fink applied the muzzle, New York Daily News reporter Joseph Wilkinson disclosed that, “Nearly 100,000 ducks will be killed at Long Island’s last major commercial duck farm after [the H5N1] bird flu was detected at the Suffolk County facility,” located in Aquebogue, about three miles north of Riverhead, 80 miles east of New York City.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“99,000 birds will be euthanized”
“No people working at Crescent Duck Farm or other nearby animals have tested positive for H5N1, according to News 12 Long Island,” Wilkinson said.
“The farm was quarantined, and its 99,000 birds will be euthanized to prevent any spread of the disease.
“Throughout the U.S.,” continued Wilkinson, “67 people have been infected by H5N1 during the lengthy outbreak, according to the Centers for Disease Control,” which will apparently say nothing more about the body count between now and February 1, 2025, if then.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Trump tried to muzzle CDC in 2020, too
Updated Mike Stobbe and Jonel Aleccia of Associated Press, “The pause,” in Health & Human Services communications, “also applies to anything intended to be published in the Federal Register, where the executive branch communicates rules and regulations, and the Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report, a Centers for Disease Control & Prevention scientific publication,” which warns doctors, hospitals, and public health agencies nationwide about outbreaks of potentially pandemic diseases––such as H5N1.
“During his first term,” Stobbe and Aleccia recalled, “Trump’s political appointees tried to gain control over the CDC’s Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report, which had published information about the COVID-19 pandemic that conflicted with messaging from the White House.
Peking duckling chicks.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Some exceptions” also “subject to review”
“Fink wrote in her memo,” Stobbe and Aleccia said, “that some exceptions would be made for communications affecting ‘critical health, safety, environmental, financial or national security functions,’ but that those would [also] be subject to review.”
With the ducks at the Crescent Duck Farm lined up for slaughter, the Trump administration set about withdrawing U.S. participation in the World Health Organization, as Trump directed by executive order soon after his inauguration on January 21, 2025.
“The executive order also directs the Secretary of State to ‘cease negotiations’ on the World Health Organization Pandemic Agreement, an international treaty to better prepare the world for future pandemics, which has been in difficult negotiations for years,” wrote Newsweek senior reporter Brendan Cole.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Sharing information & expertise
Jointly explained Nature and Scientific American writers Dan Garisto, Max Kozlov, and Jeff Tollefson, citing “Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist who directs the Pandemic Center at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island,” World Health Organization member countries “share information and expertise on infectious disease outbreaks and other threats, and without this key knowledge and data — for instance, the DNA sequence of an emerging virus — the United States will be slower to respond to crises,” such as H5N1.
“In addition,” Nuzzo warned, withdrawing from the World Health Organization creates “opportunities for other countries to step in and assert themselves in ways that might not be compatible with U.S. interests.”
Nuzzo mentioned that the U.S. “has been a leading voice calling for stringent biosecurity measures in the construction of new pathogen research centers.”
(Merritt Clifton)
Withdrawing from WHO increases Chinese influence
Of greater concern to the Trump administration, a rational person might imagine, is that withdrawing the 18% of the World Health Organization revenue that the U.S. contributes to the $6.8 billion total WHO budget leaves a wide opening for China, currently contributing $181 million, to chip in enough more to become the dominant WHO partner.
The U.S. is contributing $264 million to the World Health Organization in the current fiscal year. China is contributing $181 million.
“The next largest donors to WHO,” noted Patrick Wingrove and Jennifer Rigby of Reuters “are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, although most of that funding goes to polio eradication, and the global vaccine group Gavi, followed by the European Commission and the World Bank. The next largest national donor is Germany, which contributes around 3% of WHO funding.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Not in American interests”
Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark told Associated Press that leaving the World Health Organization does not appear to be in American interests, particularly given the “ghastly proposition” that the rapid spread of H5N1 in recent months “might turn into a pandemic.”
“Leaving WHO would exclude the U.S. from WHO-coordinated initiatives, like determining the yearly composition of flu vaccines and quick access to genetic databases run by WHO, which could stall attempts to produce immunizations and medicines,” Associated Press assessed.
The Trump executive order said the U.S. was withdrawing from WHO “due to the organization’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China and other global health crises,” an alleged “failure to adopt urgently needed reforms,” and also alleged “inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Reality tells a different story
Reality tells a very different story. China warned the world about COVID-19 late on December 31, 2019, via Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases moderator Marjorie Pollack, who immediately relayed word about it to the 70,000 ProMED members worldwide, ANIMALS 24-7 included, in the wee hours of January 1, 2020.
The World Health Organization put out a first alert two weeks later.
The first Trump administration, however, had dismantled the U.S. pandemic response team in May 2018, and had recalled the Centers for Disease Control epidemiologist embedded in the Chinese disease control agency in July 2019.
This meant that Donald Trump literally did not get the memo. He could have, but he and his administration were not paying attention.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Timeline
The World Health Organization on January 5, 2020 announced “a pneumonia of unknown cause” in Wuhan, China, not yet designated COVID-19, “and later that month confirmed human-to-human transmission of the disease,” recounted Brendan Cole of Newsweek.
“On January 30, 2020, WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, and declared the disease a pandemic on March 11, 2020,” Cole continued.
But the Trump administration had still not taken any decisive action.
Instead, with 20,000 Americans already dead, Trump “accused the World Health Organization of mismanaging and covering up the pandemic and announced a halt in funding to the WHO on April 14, 2020,” Cole detailed.
(Beth Clifton collage)
1.2 million American dead
With 100,000 Americans dead, Trump on May 29, 2020 announced that the U.S. would leave the World Health Organization, “but because the process takes one year,” Joe Biden reversed the Trump decision “on his first day in office in 2021,” Cole added.
Altogether, 1.2 million Americans died from COVID-19, many of them due to Trump administration fumbling and denial of the severity of the outbreak, while most other World Health Organization member nations brought it under control within the first year of the multi-year pandemic.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Vaccine development grant
Unclear as yet is whether Trump will cancel a grant of $590 million to the Moderna pharmaceutical corporation made by the Joe Biden administration on January 17, 2025, to “help speed up the development of an mRNA-based bird flu vaccine, alongside other influenza vaccines,” as described by Youri Benadjaoud and Meredith Deliso of ABC News.
“The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services said in a press release that the funding will allow the pharmaceutical company to accelerate the development of an H5N1 influenza vaccine “that is well matched to strains currently circulating in cows and birds and expands the clinical data supporting the use of mRNA vaccines that may be needed if other influenza strains emerge with pandemic potential,” Benadjaoud and Deliso summarized.
Merritt & Beth Clifton with Henry the rooster.
What can be said for now is only that the first two days of the Trump administration confirm that some people never learn: both Donald Trump himself, and those who voted for him after his actions in 2018-2019 left the U.S. wide open to the worst pandemic in U.S. history, killing twice as many people as the Spanish flu of 1918.
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The post “Getting ducks in a row,” Trump team silences agencies about H5N1 appeared first on Animals 24-7.
