Hello, everyone, and welcome to Dr. Mercola's cellular wisdom. We're thrilled you could join us for this deep dive into the strange twists and turns of modern medicine, brought to you by two people who love to talk, maybe too much. I'm Ethan Foster, your trusty somewhat cynical observer of all things human.

And I'm Alara Sky, sharp mind, sharper tongue, and always eager to burst a few bubbles in the world of so-called

conventional wisdom. If you can't laugh at life's ironies, what can you laugh at, right?

Indeed. Today we're waiting into a topic that's equal parts sobering and, in some ways,

bizarrely comedic, a tangled web of pandemic prevention, questionable research practices,

mass culling of animals, and the big money swirling

around it all.

I can already hear my neighbor's chickens clucking in outrage.

Not that I blame them.

Imagine.

One moment you're minding your business in the coop.

Next thing you know, you're on the front line of a global threat that might not be all

it's cracked up to be.

Right?

We'll be exploring what some call the bird flu scam, where the ongoing solution to the so-called

crisis is basically to mass slaughter entire flocks whenever you get a positive lab test. Apparently,

that's like trying to fix a squeaky door by demolishing the entire house. Or in official terms,

culling, which is a nice, gentle sounding word for, we're about to fry an entire barns worth of birds in one go.

And it's not just chickens. We've seen a variety of fiascos with animals and labs. Because, spoiler alert,

when you're getting billions of dollars to prevent a pandemic, there's a temptation to keep spinning that fear dial to 11.

It's reminiscent of that old line. We're from the government and we're here

to help. Yet somehow the help leads to things like higher egg prices and an annual budget that

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