What's more deadly? A new H5N1 flu or the GOP? The H5N1 bird flu is ripping

across America decimating birdflocks and even infecting a few humans and

other mammals.

Should we be concerned?

Particularly since Trump is polling so well after he totally botched our response to COVID.

Keep in mind Trump shut down the offices of pandemic preparedness in the White House and National Security Council in 2017

Leaving America vulnerable to COVID. In this week's Time magazine interview he says if he becomes president again he'll repeat

that performance by shutting down the new office of pandemic preparedness and

response policy the OPPR that Congress authorized in 2022.

When COVID first hit the world four years ago,

its fatality rate among unvaccinated people,

which was all of us back then,

was estimated at 1.4%.

It was 20% among hospitalized patients.

By August of 2023, when it had killed over 1.1 million Americans,

it had declined to an estimated 3 tenths of a percent, in part because of vaccination, hurt immunity, and apparent

diminution of the virulence of the disease as it mutated across those years.

By comparison, the Spanish flu of 1918 to 1920 had a fatality rate of 2.5

percent. An Ebola, the disease that caused Republicans to fall into hysterics when President Obama led a physician

infected with the disease back into America for treatment, has a fatality rate of

an estimated 50%, although it's mostly hit poor people in Africa with little access to modern medicine

estimates among healthy people with access to modern medicine put the

...