Bird flu: The goose laying the golden egg for Big Pharma
PAULA JARDINE
WHEN government pours millions of pounds into managing negligible public health risks, it’s worth asking why.
For the last 20 years, pandemic preparedness has been focused on influenza. H5N1, purportedly ‘highly pathogenic’ avian influenza (HPAI), a pathogen whose real world risk to humans has proved to be vanishingly small, is the pandemic phantom the public is meant to fear the most.
A bird flu pandemic may soon become a self-fulfilling prophecy because the UK government is trying very hard to find evidence of it.
Early this month, the Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) ordered all flocks of 50 or more domestic birds in England to be kept indoors.
Christine Middlemiss, the Chief Veterinary Officer, said: ‘Given the continued increase in the number of avian influenza cases in kept birds and wild birds across England, we are now taking the difficult step to extend the housing measures to the whole of England . . . We know from previous years that housing birds will bring the rates of infection down from the high we are currently experiencing.’
There are more than 50,000 premises housing 327million birds in the UK. This housing order affects roughly 30 per cent of those in England.
DEFRA says 49 detections of HPAI have already been confirmed for 2025-2026. Historically these figures rarely reach double digits, negligible in the grand scheme of things.
Under laws implementing guidance from the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), any detection of HPAI in flocks results in compulsory culling.
DEFRA doesn’t routinely publish culling data but in a May 2025 response to a Parliamentary question, it said two million birds housed at 28 premises were culled between October 2024 and February 2025, and more than £11million in compensation was paid out.
Sixteen flocks have already been culled by DEFRA since the first housing order last month. Fourteen of these culled flocks were on commercial farms. Eleven were large scale which typically means huge flocks of 40,000-50,000 broilers or 16,000 laying hens.
Intensive farming conditions – artificial light, loud ventilator fans, continuous feeding and density of living space – make these birds extraordinarily vulnerable to stress and disease. Yet absurdly, wild birds, which these intensively reared birds never come into contact with, are blamed for transmitting HPAI.
Dead wild birds, which are often the triggers for housing orders, are collected and tested; positive tests justify further measures, which in a self-perpetuating cycle increases the ‘evidence’ of risk.
In 2016, the UK Government adopted the OneHealth Agenda. Now adopted by the World Health Organization, it was developed by the vaccine-promoting Rockefeller Foundation in conjunction with the now discredited EcoHealth Alliance.
A strategic shift from culling is being planned with WOAH identifying vaccination of animals as a ‘pivotal opportunity’.
Universal livestock vaccination for all and sundry invisible perils will certainly be a pivotal opportunity for pharma profits. The UK is already positioned to capitalise on this as the Johnson government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) awarded £40million in funding to the Pirbright Institute in 2021 to establish an Animal Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (AVMIC).
As is always does, the BMGF cynically uses virtue signalling to distract from profit motives.
‘We see this partnership as an exciting opportunity to build on British scientific excellence to safeguard the livelihoods of farmers in poor and marginalised communities around the globe, while protecting people everywhere from the increasing risk posed by zoonotic diseases,’ said Rodger Voorhees, BMGF’s President for Global Growth and Opportunity.
The stated goal of the AVMIC is to accelerate veterinary vaccine development and position the UK as a world leader in ‘novel livestock vaccine development capability’.
Beyond this under the OneHealth framework, vaccines developed for animals can be adapted for human use.
The Pirbright Institute already uses pigs to model human vaccine responses. It helped accelerate the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine project by testing dosing strategies.
Meanwhile, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), intent on protecting humanity, ran a pilot project to test for ‘asymptomatic’ highly pathogenic bird flu in humans.
Eighty-four people with exposure to the culled birds, took up the offer – a mere 31 per cent of those eligible. The first confirmed case was an 80-year-old duck keeper who remained perfectly well.
Armed with this fresh evidence of the non-problem of highly pathogenic bird flu, the government continues surveillance of wild and domestic birds and asymptomatic humans, in order to feed the narrative that HPAI is a threat to humanity.
A further £200million was committed by the current government in November 2024 to upgrade the Weybridge laboratories of the Animal Plant Health Agency (APHA) which PCR tests animals and birds.
In May 2025 a further £10million in funding was directed to the Genomics Animal and Plant Disease consortium, a clear indication that genetic vaccines for animals and birds form part of the plans.
Gene sequences for ‘emerging zoonotic pathogens’ discovered by this consortium will become targets for new ‘plug and play’ veterinary vaccines as soon as they are spotted.
This past summer, DEFRA and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council put out a £12.5million call for proposals to develop new veterinary vaccine platforms.
All of this creates a reinforcing loop of government measures, testing based surveillance and vaccine development, all of which are intended to make bird flu appear more threatening than it is, justifying more interventions which generate more ‘cases’ to hype the threat. Any bird flu crisis is partly manufactured by the system designed to prevent it.
The public health nihilism doesn’t end with the livestock. Just in case H5N1 or some new bird flu variant makes the jump to humans, the government has a rapid response plan for that too.
In September 2023, UKHSA signed a four-year advance purchase agreement with CSL Seqirus to reserve manufacturing capacity for up to 100 million doses of pandemic strain influenza vaccine which are to be manufactured exclusively at its Liverpool factory.
UKHSA won’t disclose the value of the contract, but it ordered five million doses of an H5 influenza vaccine in December 2024.
Soon after the UKHSA bird flu testing programme had a second hit. In January 2025 a poultry farm worker tested positive for bird flu and although the person was said to ‘remain well’ they were admitted to a hospital ‘High Consequence Infectious Disease’ unit.
Professor Susan Hopkins, Chief Medical Adviser at UKHSA, said: ‘The risk of avian flu to the general public remains very low despite this confirmed case.
‘We have robust systems in place to detect cases early and take necessary action, as we know that spill-over infections from birds to humans may occur.’
Until this past September, the CSL Sequirus facility was the only end-to-end vaccine manufacturing facility in the UK which perhaps goes some way to explaining this public health bung.
Moderna’s sparkling new mRNA vaccine factory in Harwell became fully operational in September.
The company, which signed a 10-year partnership with the government in 2022, has several mRNA influenza vaccines in development and this factory is capable of producing up to 250 million doses a year.
Wouldn’t it be remarkably convenient if all this robust government ‘enhanced pandemic preparedness’ led to a highly pathogenic bird flu crisis being manufactured?
This article (Bird flu: The goose laying the golden egg for Big Pharma) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Paula Jardine
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