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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2023_03_16 SSchumacher_The Next PandemicFrom:Stephen Schumacher To:jeffbocc; Board of Health Subject:Follow-up re The Next Pandemic and Bird Flu Date:Thursday, March 16, 2023 3:59:29 PM ________________________________ ALERT: BE CAUTIOUS This email originated outside the organization. Do not open attachments or click on links if you are not expecting them. ________________________________ Dear Board of Health, My Public Comment today ran out of time before I could clarify these two points: 1) I was glad to hear Health Officer Berry report that most restrictions from the current pandemic have lapsed. But my primary concern is hair-trigger reinstitution of illegal and counter-productive lockdown responses "when the next pandemic sweeps the United States", per the Seattle Times article (reprinted from WAPost) I cited: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/03/08/covid-public-health-backlash/ The reality is that it's been more than 100 years since the last pandemic in 1918, so why are news articles like this dead certain that "one day we're going to have a really bad pandemic far worse than COVID"?!? The takeaway is that we need to stay on a permanent emergency footing (laws be damned), ready to ramp up at a moment's notice, so every Monkey Pox or Avian Flu scare is treated as the next potential pandemic. Instead we should recognize that pandemics are rare not daily things! Please let's discontinue the deadly "threat -> lockdown -> slight reopen -> rinse & repeat" vicious cycle. http://solmaker.com/public/CVPublicManipulationModel.jpg 2) The one point I really wanted to make about Bird Flu is the possibility that its driving force may be "too many birds too densely packed in too many houses too geographically close together" in factory farms, rather than unfairly focusing on exterminating birds in low-density, free-range, and family farms, under the bogus pretext that "wild birds, backyard flocks, .. buzzards, wild ducks or pests that sneak into barns" are to blame! Let's stop demonizing nature, as opposed to the deadly unnatural forces disrupting our ecosystems. Please carefully consider the revealing analysis below cited in my Public Comment. Yours truly, Stephen Schumacher Port Townsend, WA === https://brownstone.org/articles/why-are-the-chickens-so-sick/ Why Are the Chickens So Sick? By <https://brownstone.org/author/joel-salatin/>Joel Salatin March 14, 2023 As the nation suffers through yet another High Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) outbreak, questioning the orthodox narrative is more important than ever. At a time when people are screaming about overpopulation and the world's inability to feed itself, surely we humans need to figure out how to reduce these kinds of losses. Numbers change each day, but at the last count about 60 million chickens (mainly laying hens) and turkeys died in the last year. A bit more than a decade ago it was 50 million. Are these cycles inevitable? Are the experts funneling information to the public more trustworthy than those who controlled press releases during 2020's covid outbreak? If thinking people learned only one thing from the covid pandemic, it was that official government narratives are politically slanted and often untrue. In this latest HPAI outbreak, perhaps the most egregious departure from truth is the notion that the birds have died as a result of the disease and that euthanasia for survivors is the best and only option. First, of the nearly 60 million claimed deaths, perhaps no more than a couple million have actually died from HPAI. The rest have been killed in a draconian sterilization protocol. Using the word euthanized rather than the more proper word exterminated clouds the actual story. Euthanizing refers to putting an animal out of its misery. In other words, it's going to die and is in pain or an incurable condition. Very few of the birds killed are in pain or even symptomatically sick. If one chicken in a house of a million tests positive for HPAI, the government brings full law enforcement force to the farm to guarantee all live birds die. Quickly. In not a single flock have all the birds died from HPAI. Every flock has survivors. To be sure, most are exterminated prior to survivors being identified. But in the cases of delayed extermination, a few birds appear immune to the disease. To be sure, HPAI is and can be deadly, but it never kills everything. The policy of mass extermination without regard to immunity, without even researching why some birds flourish while all around are dying, isinsane. The most fundamental principles of animalhusbandry and breeding demand that farmers selectfor healthy immune systems. We farmers have beendoing that for millennia. We pick the most robustspecimens as genetic material to propagate,whether it's plants, animals, or microbes. But in its wisdom, the US Department ofAgriculture (USDA­Usduh) has no interest inselecting, protecting, and then propagating thehealthy survivors. The policy is clear andsimple: kill everything that ever contacted thediseased birds. The second part of the policy isalso simple: find a vaccine to stop HPAI. If a farmer wanted to save the survivors and runa test on his own to try to breed birds with HPAIimmunity, gun-toting government agents prohibithim from doing so. The scorched earth policy isthe only option even though it doesn't seem to beworking. In fact, the cycles are coming fasterand seem to be affecting more birds. Someone ought to question the efficacy. Some do. When HPAI came through our area ofVirginia about 15 years ago, federalveterinarians from around the nation descended tooversee the extermination. Two of them had heardabout our pastured poultry operation and asked tocome out for a visit on their own personal time.They were not together; they came a couple ofweeks apart, independently. Both of them told methat they knew the reason for the outbreak: toomany birds too densely packed in too many housestoo geographically close together. But then bothof them said that if they breathed that ideapublicly, they would be fired the next day. Talk about censorship. In its Feb. 24 edition,the Wall Street Journal headlined"<https://www.wsj.com/articles/bird-flu-outbreak-chicken-shortage-egg-prices-eb8cced2>America Is Losing Bird-Flu Battle." Interestingly, whilethe article touts the official narrative aboutwild birds spreading the disease and farmersspreading it on their shoes, one farmer dares tosay that "his largest facility houses about 4million cage-free chickens, which are too manychickens in one locale. 'We would never do thatagain,' he said. New facilities will be smaller,housing about one million birds each, he said,and spaced farther apart to help thwart the threat of continued outbreak." Yet a couple of paragraphs over, the articlequotes Dr. John Clifford, former US chiefveterinary officer, as saying "It's everywhere." If it's everywhere, what difference does reducing flock sizes and putting more space between houses make? Clearly the farmer in this story has ahunch shared by my two visiting federalveterinarians many years ago: too many, too dense, too close. To be sure, even backyard flocks are susceptibleto HPAI, but many of these miniature flocks areon filthy dirt spots and suffer terrible hygienicconditions. Even so, keeping a million birds in aConcentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO)happy and hygienic is harder than a backyardflock, and the disease data supports this. TheUSDA and the industry desperately want to blamewild birds, backyard flocks, and dirty shoesrather than looking in the mirror and realizingthis is nature's way of screaming "Enough!" "Enough abuse. Enough disrespect. Enough fecalparticulate air creating abrasions in my tendermucous membranes." When Joel Arthur Barker wrote<https://archive.org/details/paradigmsbusines00bark_0>Paradigms and brought that word into common usage, one ofhis axioms was that paradigms always eventuallyexceed their point of efficiency. The poultryindustry assumed that if 100 birds in a house wasgood, 200 was better. With the advent ofantibiotics and vaccines, houses increased insize and bird density. But nature bats last. For the record, any agricultural system thatviews wildlife as a liability is an inherentlyanti-ecological model. The WSJ article notes that"workers have installed netting over lagoons andother spots where wild birds gather." Lagoons areinherently anti-ecological. They are cesspools ofdisease and filth; nature never creates manurelagoons. In nature, animals spread manure outover the landscape where it can be a blessing,not a curse like a lagoon. Perhaps the realculprit is the industry making manure lagoonsinfecting wild ducks, not the other way around.It's guilt by association, like saying since Isee fire trucks at car wrecks, the fire trucks must be causing the car wrecks. Notice the kind of bad guy slant on this WSJsentence: "Buzzards, wild ducks or pests thatsneak into barns also can spread the flu virusthrough mucus or saliva." Doesn't this read likea proverbial conspiracy, with wild thingssneaking around? It's all eerily similar to thecovid virus sneaking around, needing to becontained with quarantines and masks. One feathercontains enough HPAI to affect a million birds.You can't lock down a chicken house from anerrant feather or its microscopic molecules fromwafting into a house. It's absurd. If our current ag policy is insane, what is a better alternative? My first suggestion is tosave the survivors and begin breeding them.That's a no-brainer. If a flock gets HPAI, let itrun its course. It'll kill the ones it'll killbut in a few days the survivors will be obvious.Keep those and put them in a breeding program.The beautiful thing about chickens is that theymature and propagate fast enough so that in ayear you can move forward two generations. That'srelatively fast. Let survival determine tomorrow's genetic pool. Second, how about working on conditions thatincrease hygiene and happiness? Yes, I saidhappiness. All animals have optimal herd andflock sizes. For example, you never see more thana couple hundred wild turkeys together. Even whenpopulations are high in an area, they break upinto smaller groups rather than joining forces inflocks of 1,000. Other birds do join up in big flocks. Why the difference? Nobody has made a definitive study of why, but wedo know that optimal sizes do exist forstress-free living. For chickens, it's about1,000. An elderly poultry industry scientistvisited our farm once and told me that if houseswould break up chickens into 1,000-bird groups itwould virtually eliminate diseases. He said itwas okay to have 10,000 birds in a house as longas they were in 1,000-bird units. That way theirsocial structure can function in a naturalinteraction. Animals have a hierarchy of bulliesand timids. That social structure breaks down above optimal size. With most herbivores, the size is huge, as notedby herd sizes on the Serengeti and Bison on theAmerican plains. Honey bees divide when the hivereaches a certain size. Elk have optimal herdsizes. Mountain goats are in small flocks. Wildpigs too seek a group size seldom exceeding 100.The point is that the first line of defense is tofigure out where the stress-free sweet spot is and respect it. Finally, treat the chickens like chickens. Inaddition to proper flock size, give them freshpasture in which to run and scratch. Not dirtyards. Not little aprons around a CAFO. Withmobile shelter, on our farm we move the flocksevery day or so to fresh pasture. That keeps themon new ground that's been host free for anextended period of rest. They don't sleep, eat,and live every moment of every day on their toilet. The American Pastured Poultry ProducersAssociation (APPPA) is a trade organizationpromoting protocols for this kind of immune-boosting model. Thousands of practitioners adhere to mobile infrastructure that allows appropriate-sized flocks access to fresh air,sunlight, bugs, worms, and succulent greenmaterial. On our farm, we use the MillenniumFeathernet and Eggmobile, welcoming wild ducksand red-winged blackbirds into the vicinity allas part of a symbiotic ecological nest. While I don't want to sound flippant or aboveHPAI susceptibility, incident rates definitelyindicate less vulnerability in well-managedpastured flocks. Creating an immune-buildingprotocol surely merits research as much asoverriding the immune system with vaccines andtrying to stay ahead of disease mutations andadaptations with human cleverness. How abouthumbly seeking nature for solutions rather than relying on hubris? The parallels between HPAI expert orthodoxy andcovid orthodoxy are too numerous to mention. Fearporn is rampant in our culture. The HPAI worryfeeds food worry, which makes people clamor forgovernment security. People will accept justabout anything if they're afraid. Does anyonereally think human cleverness is going to beatmigratory ducks? Really? Think it through andthen embrace a more natural remedy: well-manageddecentralized pastured poultry with appropriate flock sizes. Author Joel F. Salatin is an American farmer, lecturer,and author. Salatin raises livestock on hisPolyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia, in theShenandoah Valley. Meat from the farm is sold bydirect marketing to consumers and restaurants.