H5N1: Truth Over Fearporn

Weaponizing disease fear to advance public policy agendas is psychological bioterrorism

Robert W Malone MD, MS

May 18, 2024

Fearporn definition

Fear porn refers to mainstream media content that deliberately and enticingly plays on people’s fears about disaster, disease, and death. It is often used to describe sensationalized and exaggerated reports or stories that aim to provoke strong emotional reactions, such as fear, anxiety, or outrage. This type of content can be found in various forms of media, including news, social media, and online articles.

Some definitions of fear porn also include the idea that it is used to manipulate people’s emotions and attention, often for the purpose of increasing viewership, engagement, or clicks. Fear porn can be seen as a form of psychological manipulation, as it preys on people’s natural fear responses to create a sense of drama or excitement.

In some cases, fear porn can also be used to describe conspiracy theories or misinformation that is spread online, often with the intention of generating fear, anxiety, or outrage. This type of content can be particularly harmful, as it can spread misinformation and perpetuate harmful stereotypes or biases.

Overall, fear porn is a term used to describe a type of media content that uses fear and sensationalism to engage audiences and manipulate their emotions.

AI-generated answer to Brave search query “Fearporn Definition”

The above definition is close, but misses the role of various stakeholders in the Fearporn ecosystem. In the case of the weaponization of fear of infectious disease to advance hidden agendas relating to “public health”, and to manipulate citizen and voter consensus, these stakeholders include a wide range of Governmental (State), Non-governmental organizations, corporations and transnational actors.

Organizations within the US Federal government which routinely weaponize infectious disease fear and anxiety to manipulate public opinion include the White House (in particular the The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)), the US “Intelligence Community” (18 agencies and organizations, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)), Department of Homeland Security, and of course offices within the Department of Health and Human Services including CDC, FDA, and ASPR/BARDA.

Examples of Non-governmental organizations that routinely practice this include the Gates Foundation, United Nations, World Economic Foundation, and of course the World Health Organization.

In the case of the European Union, national governments, the European CDC, and various institutes associated with the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) routinely resort to deploying both nudge and outright fearporn to generate support for infectious disease public policy agendas.

And having lived through the COVID crisis, one does not need to look hard to find multiple examples of influential corporate members of the pharmaceutical industry combining promotion of fearporn via a wide variety of sponsored and influenced content, typically in combination with the use of PsyWar methods previously restricted to Governmental intelligence and military communities. This is becoming a routine component of Pharmaceutical industry “marketing” efforts. One of many examples of this new wrinkle involves the use of sponsored cutout organizations (eg: “Shots Heard Round the World” for example) and pseudo “Medical News” services to engage in crowdstalking and more traditional bot farm/Trollery. Keep in mind that the massive media sponsorship programs of major Pharma corporations are not always aimed at directly promoting a drug or biological, but also function to discourage any negative coverage of products or the industry by the sponsored media outlet. The former is overt, the latter is much more covert.

These types of dynamics extend all the way down to small alternative media and podcasters who accept sponsorship agreements with companies peddling alternative nutraceutical products. Just like big media, there is just no way that struggling small players are going to bite the hand that feeds them meager scraps when they would otherwise starve.

WEAPONIZING AND PROMOTING FEAR OF AN INFECTIOUS DISEASE FOR POLITICAL OR FINANCIAL PURPOSES IS GROSSLY UNETHICAL.

Please join me in condemning this practice. It has been normalized in thousands of peer reviewed scientific publications as necessary to overcome “vaccine hesitancy” and to advance various public health agendas in the name of advancing the public good. This practice is a violation of the fundamentals of bioethics, is a violation of public trust, and those practicing these methods must be broadly shamed as the true purveyors of mis- dis- and mal-information. Weaponizing and promoting fear of infectious disease is quite literally and transparently a form of psychological bioterrorism.

Cartoon diagram of the structure of an Influenza A virus. H5N1 is one of many examples of Influenza A. H5 refers to one “serotype” of influenza A Hemagglutinin. The hemagglutinin of Influenza virus is somewhat analogous to the spike protein of coronaviruses. N1 refers to a serotype of the neuraminidase or sialidase. Sialidase is a viral enzyme that has a key role in the life cycle of influenza viruses

Colorized transmission electron micrograph of Avian influenza A H5N1 viruses (seen in gold) grown in MDCK cells (seen in green). MDCK cells are used to manufacture the FDA authorized H5N1 vaccine “AUDENZ”, manufactured by the Australian company Sequirus.

Avian influenza A viruses do not usually infect humans; however, several instances of human infections and outbreaks have been reported since 1997.

I provide this image for those who repeatedly claim that viruses do not exist, which in some cases may be another example of deployed PsyWar techniques intended to delegitimize groups which oppose currently promoted/approved narratives.

Viruses exist. As a graduate student I was personally involved in isolation, purification and genetic characterization of influenza viruses and the proteins that they produce as well as retroviruses. While an undergraduate, I have also personally isolated, amplified, purified and manipulated bacterial viruses commonly known as “bacteriophage”

More details

For comparison to influenza, and for those who claim that there is no such thing as a SARS-CoV-2 virus, the following is a colorized electron micrograph of a SARS-CoV-2 virus. Both Influenza and SARS-CoV-2 are enveloped RNA viruses, although Coronaviruses have a single RNA genome, and Influenza has a multi-segmented genome which enables serotype “shifting” due to re-assorting these segments in cells infected with two different influenza virus serotypes to yield an influenza virus which combines aspects of both parental viruses, much like chromosomal reassorting in animal and plant (eukaryotic) cells. In rare cases, there can be recombination between influenza “strands” much like occurs with eukaryotic cells.

It is obvious to any paying attention with open eyes that there is currently an active, sustained and ongoing campaign to weaponize fear of “Bird Flu”, otherwise known as the H5N1 influenza virus.

One important issue relating to this campaign is what are the hidden agendas being advanced by this western nation/WHO propaganda? As is often the case, there are multiple working hypotheses which should be considered, and clearly many different agendas may be supported at the same time. Those seeking to delegitimize discussion of these, in other words those seeking to shut down the Overton window of allowed discourse, will label these with the term “Conspiracy Theories”.

However, after four years of chronically promoted proven governmental and WHO/UN/WEF lies about the COVID crisis (and the promoted treatments and prophylactics), the “Conspiracy Theory” accusation has grown a bit long in the tooth. This term, which has been actively weaponized and deployed by the US Intelligence Community (IC) to manipulate the Overton window beginning at least with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, has lost much of its power due to chronic overuse, and is now mostly useful as a way to identify forbidden topics for discussion. So it often goes with IC “initiatives”. So often that the unintended or unanticipated consequences of bungled IC actions have a special term- “Blowback”.

So what “alternative hypothesis” agendas may be advanced by promotion and deployment of H5N1 fearporn propaganda?

1. First and foremost is that the vote on the World Health Organization (and Biden administration) initiative to designate and empower the WHO to become the designated and authorized global manager of future public health “crises” in coming up next month. Under this initiative, WHO leadership (and specifically the Director General) will have the power to unilaterally designate a public health crisis for just about anything desired - and not coincidentally will confer a massive budgetary expansion to the WHO. This initiative is commonly known as the WHO Global Pandemic Treaty (or “accord”, in an attempt to sidestep US Senate treaty oversight). This is one of two legs of the current attempt to expand the power of this globalist organization, the other being modification of the “international health regulations”, also initially proposed by Biden’s HHS. All of this is wrapped up in justification and authorization language involving the “One Health” initiative which seeks to link the health (and health “rights”) of all species on the Earth. We have previously seen the weaponization of public health fear porn to advance this agenda in the context of “Monkeypox”, as well as “Disease X”. H5N1 provides an almost perfect focus for advancing the logic of the “one health” agenda because it is predominantly an infection of birds but now has been shown to rarely infect cattle and also rarely infect humans. Many viruses can be genetically traced back to plant and/or bacterial ancestors, often followed by insect ancestors, and so viruses can be used to make the case that proper pandemic planning and risk mitigation should extend all the way back to plants.

2. Commercial and government agency interests. There is currently one FDA authorized H5N1 vaccine (cell-based manufacturing, just in case the egg supply is compromised by bird flu). It is manufactured in a facility built by Novartis and funded by ASPR/BARDA (Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority). This facility, which cost over US 1B$, is located in Holly Springs, North Carolina. After the BARDA cell-based influenza vaccine contract with Novartis expired, the facility and products manufactured there were sold by Novartis at a loss to the Australian company Sequirus, because Novartis found that there was no profit to be made, and Novartis decided to get out of the infectious disease vaccine business. Sequirus now has a “stockpile contract” for the H5N1 vaccine product AUDENZ. That means that they get paid by their single customer, HHS/ASPR/BARDA, to produce the product for placement into a US Government “stockpile” for potential future use. And of course, the product has a shelf life which means that the old vaccine needs to be tossed and new vax produced (More profit! Great cash cow!) every few years. Obviously Sequirus has a financial interest in any activities which result in the possibility of AUDENZ being deployed as part of a widespread (potentially mandated) vaccine campaign. As does the sponsoring bureaucracy known as HHS/ASPR/BARDA.

3. Academics, Physicians, Medical Care Providers, Pharma and NGO specializing in infectious diseases. Just as the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus crisis was enormously lucrative for a wide range of academics, physicians, pharmaceutical companies and lower level non-governmental organizations (as well as for the newly emergent censorship-industrial complex), all of these stakeholders in biodefense-related initiatives would benefit greatly from further promotion of public fear of “Bird Flu”.

4. Electoral manipulation. There is no denying the facts that with the last US Presidential election and the COVIDcrisis, viral infectious disease outbreaks have become normalized as a justification for widespread deployment of mail-in ballots, with all of the electoral shenanigans which are enabled when this approach to elections is enabled.

Lets briefly examine and factcheck some of the common propaganda talking points being deployed.

1. H5N1 is highly lethal in humans. Highly misleading. The case fatality rate (CFR) of H5N1, also known as the human mortality rate from H5N1, is the ratio of the number of confirmed human deaths resulting from confirmed cases of transmission and infection of H5N1 to the number of those confirmed cases. The currently weaponized and often repeated statistics on CFR of H5N1 reflect a form of sampling bias, in that only individuals with unusually severe upper respiratory virus symptoms typically present to medical personnel or hospitals for diagnosis and treatment. Such individuals usually have either received an unusually high exposure to the virus (resulting in overwhelming of natural immune responses) or have a pre-existing condition which makes them more vulnerable to disease associated with the virus. A similar situation was present early (2020) in the evaluation of CFR for SARS-CoV-2, which was modeled (based on this type of sampling error) as over 30% lethal. We now know that the true SARS-CoV-2 CFR for all comers is somewhere in the range of 0.02-0.001 percent.

   According to various sources including WHO, FDA, and ECDC, the overall case-fatality rate (CFR) of H5N1 is around 50%- 60%. However, this rate can vary depending on the country, age, and other factors. For example, one study found that the highest case fatality rate (76%) was found among those aged 10 to 19 years, while the lowest case fatality rate (40%) was found among those aged over 50 years.

   It’s also worth noting that underreporting has been a concern, particularly in China, which may affect the accuracy of the CFR. Additionally, the WHO has reported that the official estimate of the H5N1 CFR has been described by some as an over-estimate, with little relevance to the rate that would be encountered under pandemic conditions.

   Here are some specific examples of case fatality rates mentioned in the search results:

   • As of August 27, 2015, 844 human cases of H5N1 had been reported worldwide, with 449 deaths, resulting in a CFR of around 53%.

   • According to the WHO, the case-fatality ratio (CFR) of H5N1 is around 60%.

   • A study found that the CFR of H5N1 was 32% as of 11 August 2013.

   • Another study reported a CFR of 83% in Indonesia and 36% in Egypt.

   Despite allegedly billions of cases in birds and some cows, less

   than 900 cases of H5N1 have been recorded in humans, ever!

2. H5N1 is a new virus.False. Although the currently circulating H5N1 clade (one of four dominant H5N1 clades) has genetically drifted somewhat from earlier versions, and is associated with a poultry (chicken) outbreak during 2022 which either directly killed or resulted in culling of large numbers of chickens being produced for food, H5N1 has been circulating for decades if not centuries. It commonly infects (and will continue to infect) migratory waterfowl including geese and ducks. These migrating birds produce large amounts of H5N1 virus in their stool, and influenza viruses are very stable in water. Therefore virtually all wildlife (and cattle) that drink from open water sources visited by migratory waterfowl will be exposed to significant amounts of H5N1. This may give risk to positive PCR signals for H5N1 RNA which have nothing to do with whether or not the animal is productively infected, has disease, or is shedding newly replicated virus.

3. H5N1 is a threat to cattle herds, and infected cattle (and milk) are a threat to human health. False. A small number of infected and symptomatic cattle have been detected, but USDA has only recently started testing for H5N1 in cattle. Therefore it is unknown whether this has been going on for decades or if cattle are a newly acquired host species for H5N1. In general, cattle may develop influenza virus infection with symptoms, but healthy cattle typically clear the infection (as do healthy humans) quickly- typically in less than a week. Lactoferrin in cow’s milk, along with pasteurization, enzymes in

   saliva and HCl in stomach prevents illness in consumer in the event that dairy cattle were to become infected with H5N1. At this point, we should all be sensitive to the problem of over diagnosis of viral diseases through inappropriate use of PCR-based tests.

4. H5N1 has been engineered using gain of function methodology to more readily infect and transmit between mammals potentially including humans.True. Often overlooked is that publication of gain of function research findings by two separate laboratories is what triggered the initial temporary moratorium on US Federally funded gain of function research. Two laboratories, the Kawaoka laboratory at the University of Wisconsin in the United States and the Fouchier laboratory at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, decided to test experimentally whether the H5N1 virus could evolve to productively transmit from mammal to mammal, and potentially from human to human, using the well-established ferret model for transmission. Both laboratories, using different approaches, were able to isolate viruses that could spread via aerosols from one ferret to another. Parallel publication of their findings in 2012, including the details of what mutations were required to enable this characteristic, prompted outrage and discussion of the wisdom of gain of function research, eventually leading to the moratorium during the Obama administration which was later rescinded. At this point, it is now almost child’s play for bad actors to create an H5N1 which can be readily transmitted by aerosol between mammals. I will let you imagine and speculate as to the many ways such a virus might be deployed to advance a variety of nefarious agendas.

1. Herfst S, Schrauwen EJ, Linster M, Chutinimitkul S, de Wit E, Munster VJ, Sorrell EM, Bestebroer TM, Burke DF, Smith DJ, Rimmelzwaan GF, Osterhaus AD, Fouchier RA. 2012. Airborne transmission of influenza A/H5N1 virus between ferrets. Science 336:1534–1541. doi: 10.1126/science.1213362. [PMC free article]

2. Imai M, Watanabe T, Hatta M, Das SC, Ozawa M, Shinya K, Zhong G, Hanson A, Katsura H, Watanabe S, Li C, Kawakami E, Yamada S, Kiso M, Suzuki Y, Maher EA, Neumann G, Kawaoka Y. 2012. Experimental adaptation of an influenza H5 HA confers respiratory droplet transmission to a reassortant H5 HA/H1N1 virus in ferrets. Nature 486:420–428. doi: 10.1038/nature10831. [PMC free article]

In a following substack article, with research and interpretation assistance from my friend and colleague Dr. Lynn Fynn MD (a pseudonym), I will dive deeper into the history of gain of function research performed on influenza A virus. But until then I hope that this essay will help reduce any anxiety you may have which stems from the weaponized and promoted fear of H5N1 which is currently being amplified by governments, the WHO, and a wide variety of ethically challenged media outlets.