Democrat governors (and some Republicans) fell head-over-heels in love with their emergency powers during the COVID pandemic. We’re fairly certain that Minnesota Gov. Gretchen Whitmer must have got an erotic thrill when she banned the sale of paint to try to stop a respiratory virus. But even “Big Gretch” couldn’t match California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s enthusiasm for bossing everyone around and ruining people’s lives. Newsom is ready for Round 2! Following the first recorded case of “severe” bird flu in a human being in America, Governor “Hair-gel Hitler” has declared a state of emergency in California.
Oddly enough, the case of avian flu in a person occurred in Louisiana. That’s a 23-hour drive from the California border if you leave from the area around Bullhead City, Arizona. It’s better to be safe than sorry when your inner tyrant is yearning to break free, though.
Newsom’s emergency declaration will waste a bunch of taxpayer money on more testing and monitoring for bird flu. Things could get out of hand, you know. He might have to shut down the French Laundry so that only he and his friends can dine there. It costs $160 for a plate of mac and cheese with truffles at the French Laundry, but it goes down much better when you can eat in silence without all those peasants around.
In fairness to Governor Hair-Gel, there is some bird flu present on farms in California right now. There have been 645 cases on dairy farms in the Central Valley and Southern California this year, with about half of them occurring this month. A grand total of 34 dairy and chicken farmworkers in California have been diagnosed with bird flu this year. The most serious symptoms that any of them experienced were eye redness and sometimes a minor cough.
There’s never been a human-to-human transmission of avian flu in the United States. When dairy cows catch bird flu, it makes them sick for a little while but they always recover. So do the humans. What exactly is the emergency?
As for the severe case in Louisiana, the person was an elderly man over the age of 65. He had some backyard chickens that had died from bird flu and he handled the birds as he was disposing of them. It’s not as if he breathed in the bird flu virus and got sick. He got sick because it’s an occupational hazard when you work with animals.
Chickens and turkeys don’t fare as well as dairy cattle when it comes to bird flu. If you do a Google search, you’ll see that bird flu strains have varying mortality rates among chickens and turkeys. The HPAI strain supposedly has a 100% mortality rate among chickens (not true). The H5N1 strain kills about 60% of them. The H7N9 strain has a 30% mortality rate.
The reason why the mortality rate is so high is because the state and federal governments have taken a psychopathic and unscientific approach to dealing with bird flu. As soon as bird flu is detected in a flock of chickens or turkeys, the government orders them all to be slaughtered. That’s how you get a 100% mortality rate from bird flu.
Any farmer could tell a different method that would actually work to reduce the severity of bird flu over time. If some of your birds get sick, quarantine and isolate them. Some will live and some will die. The ones that live now have this thing called “natural immunity,” which you may or may not have heard about during COVID. They’ll also pass that natural immunity along to their offspring. Voila! Less bird flu over time.
Instead, Newsom has had a million chickens slaughtered in Sonoma County, another million in Santa Barbara County, and 550,000 in Merced County. That was before Newsom declared a state of emergency over the case in Louisiana that happened more than 1,500 miles away from California.
Newsom declared a state of emergency on Wednesday over the Louisiana case. Eggs at the store were around $4 a dozen in Southern California. By Thursday, eggs were up to $6 a dozen and all the stores had put up signs warning of a sudden egg shortage. Newsom hasn’t announced any lockdowns or forced masking yet in response to this emergency that can cause eye redness. Americans should watch this emergency closely as it unfolds since Newsom desperately wants to be America’s next president in 2028. Let’s see how he handles this bird flu situation!
