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Bird Flu Outbreak 40 Miles From Wisconsin Lab Sparks Concern About Gain-of-Function Experiments

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 15, 2026

A bird flu outbreak in a Wisconsin dairy cattle herd has fueled speculation that gain-of-function research at a nearby university lab — where scientists are working to develop a bird flu vaccine for cattle — may have played a role in the outbreak.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) identified what it said was the first known case of highly pathogenic bird flu in a Dodge County, Wisconsin, dairy cattle herd.

The USDA’s Animal and Plant Inspection Service (APHIS) characterized the outbreak as a new “spillover” event — from wildlife to cattle.

The two scientists who conducted the whole genome sequencing for APHIS and identified the virus responsible for the Dodge County outbreak work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, the university confirmed.

Those same scientists — Keith Poulsen, DVM, Ph.D., and Yoshihiro Kawaoka, DVM, Ph.D. — have also co-authored studies on gain-of-function research, including studies related to the H5N1 virus.

One of the scientists, Kawaoka, directs the university’s Influenza Research Institute, known to conduct gain-of-function research on H5N1. Kawaoka was director of the high-security lab in 2019, when it came under scrutiny for a safety breach.

The institute’s lab is about 40 miles from the bird flu outbreak in Dodge County.

Kawaoka is also the co-founder of flu vaccine manufacturer FluGen. And he is among a group of scientists working on the development of a bird flu vaccine for livestock.

Will Cushman, with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Office of Strategic Communication, confirmed that virologists Poulsen and Kawaoka are performing H5N1 research. However, he denied that it is gain-of-function research.

The research, partially funded by the federal government, is aimed at better understanding the H5N1 strains spreading from wild animals and circulating on farms in the U.S., Cushman told The Defender.

D1.1 bird flu strain linked to 3-year-old’s death in Mexico

Last month, Poulsen and Kawaoka identified the H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b genotype D1.1 as responsible for the Dodge County outbreak. The D1.1 genotype contains characteristics that may increase the transmissibility of the virus, including to humans.

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said the Dodge County outbreak “is notable” because national databases do not show “a mammalian host of D1.1 anywhere near Wisconsin” in the past year.

Two “isolated” spillover events involving the D1.1 strain were identified earlier in 2025, in Arizona and Nevada, Reuters reported. APHIS said the Wisconsin spillover event is considered unrelated to those two previous spillovers.

According to APHIS, bird flu viruses circulating among birds and cattle in the U.S. “pose a low risk to the general public.”

However, the World Health Organization reported that the April 8, 2025, death of a 3-year-old girl in Mexico was caused by respiratory complications that developed after the child contracted the D1.1 strain of bird flu.

D1.1 contains mutations that ‘could enhance the virus’s ability to infect human cells’

Several recent journal articles have suggested that D1.1 may have characteristics that make it more virulent, potentially to humans, than previous bird flu strains.

A July 2025 article in Nature characterized new bird flu genotypes — including the D1.1 variant — as having “wide distribution and transmissibility … to cattle.”

A November 2025 article in The Journal of Infectious Diseases showed that the D1.1 variant may be “better adapted to human nasal and airway organoids” than genotype B3.13, the previously dominant bird flu genotype in North America.

“D1.1 does show better adaptation to human respiratory tissues than say, B3.13 in lab models due to its higher replication capacity in human nasal/airway organoids,” said immunologist and biochemist Jessica Rose, Ph.D.

In a December 2024 op-ed for Medscape, Italian physician and freelance health journalist Dr. Roberta Villa suggested there may be a connection between the outbreak of D1.1 and gain-of-function research.

Villa wrote that the publication of the complete viral sequence of D1.1 “highlighted mutations that could enhance the virus’s ability to infect human cells.”

“How do we know this?” Villa asked. “From the highly contested ‘gain-of-function’ studies, which artificially modify viruses to understand which genomic points require the most surveillance — those mutations that can make the infectious agent more virulent or more transmissible between people.”

Villa did not elaborate on the possible link between D1.1 and gain-of-function research.

In 2024, Kawaoka and a team of researchers published research in Nature on how the bovine H5N1 virus can spread systemically in mice and ferrets, and bind to human-type receptors.

History of accidents at University of Wisconsin lab

Since 1990, Kawaoka has been involved in bird flu gain-of-function research. Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (now the Gates Foundation) funded some of that research.

In 2012, Kawaoka and Dutch researcher Ron Fouchier, Ph.D., published a paper in Science revealing how they had modified H5N1 to enable it to spread between ferrets.

The paper sparked an outcry within the global scientific community. A New York Times editorial called the research “An Engineered Doomsday.”

In 2014, Kawaoka again drew attention after The Independent alleged that Kawaoka’s lab created a new strain of the 2009 H1N1 virus with pandemic potential.

In December 2019, a researcher engaged in an experiment involving the transfer of H5N1 between ferrets was potentially exposed to the virus when her air hose broke, according to USA Today. The lab didn’t notify the university’s biosafety committee or the National Institutes of Health (NIH) until February 2020.

In 2013, a researcher at Kawaoka’s lab accidentally pricked a finger with a needle contaminated with a lab-engineered H5N1 virus.

A week later, another lab worker at the same lab spilled a lab-engineered bird flu virus on a gloved hand. Details about the post-spill protocol that followed are unknown.

In 2015, the University of Wisconsin reported “nine other incidents” at the lab to the NIH between 2012 and 2014.

In 2023, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform investigated “dangerous gain-of-function research” conducted at the University of Wisconsin.

That same year, Wisconsin lawmakers proposed Assembly Bill 413, which would have shut down gain-of-function research at universities in the state. The University of Wisconsin lobbied against the bill, which was defeated in April 2024.

Trump’s USDA not focused on vaccine solution for bird flu

As bird flu outbreaks have continued, a bipartisan group of 23 U.S. senators last month co-authored a letter urging the Trump administration to develop a “science-based plan” for developing a bird flu vaccine for livestock.

“Any finalized vaccine strategy must take into account feedback from animal health stakeholders, industry experts, and be grounded in sound science,” the letter stated.

Reuters, quoting a USDA spokesperson, reported that the agency considers farmer biosecurity efforts — and not the development of a vaccine — as the most effective means of fighting the spread of bird flu.

In May 2025, the Trump administration cancelled a $700 million contract with Moderna to develop a human bird flu vaccine.

In a 2024 interview with CHD.TV during a bird flu outbreak in Texas that year, Dr. Richard Bartlett suggested that bird flu vaccines were “ready for mass production.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

January 16, 2026 Posted by | Deception | , | 3 Comments

Why The WHO Faked A Pandemic – Forbes 2010

By Michael Fumento

Note: This article, published on 5 February 2010, originally appeared in Forbes. It was removed sometime in mid October 2020 with no explanation.

While you can find a capture at archive.org, we have saved a copy here to protect against censorship and for easy sharing. – Evidence Not Fear 

The World Health Organization has suddenly gone from crying “The sky is falling!” like a cackling Chicken Little to squealing like a stuck pig. The reason: charges that the agency deliberately fomented swine flu hysteria. “The world is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as a fake is wrong and irresponsible,” the agency claims on its Web site. A WHO spokesman declined to specify who or what gave this “description,” but the primary accuser is hard to ignore.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), a human rights watchdog, is publicly investigating the WHO’s motives in declaring a pandemic. Indeed, the chairman of its influential health committee, epidemiologist Wolfgang Wodarg, has declared that the “false pandemic” is “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century.”

Even within the agency, the director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Epidemiology in Munster, Germany, Dr. Ulrich Kiel, has essentially labeled the pandemic a hoax. “We are witnessing a gigantic misallocation of resources [$18 billion so far] in terms of public health,” he said.

They’re right. This wasn’t merely overcautiousness or simple misjudgment. The pandemic declaration and all the Klaxon-ringing since reflect sheer dishonesty motivated not by medical concerns but political ones.

Unquestionably, swine flu has proved to be vastly milder than ordinary seasonal flu. It kills at a third to a tenth the rate, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. Data from other countries like France and Japan indicate it’s far tamer than that.

Indeed, judging by what we’ve seen in New Zealand and Australia (where the epidemics have ended), and by what we’re seeing elsewhere in the world, we’ll have considerably fewer flu deaths this season than normal. That’s because swine flu muscles aside seasonal flu, acting as a sort of inoculation against the far deadlier strain.

Did the WHO have any indicators of this mildness when it declared the pandemic in June?

Absolutely, as I wrote at the time. We were then fully 11 weeks into the outbreak and swine flu had only killed 144 people worldwide–the same number who die of seasonal flu worldwide every few hours. (An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 per year by the WHO’s own numbers.) The mildest pandemics of the 20th century killed at least a million people.

But how could the organization declare a pandemic when its own official definition required “simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” Severity–that is, the number of deaths–is crucial, because every year flu causes “a global spread of disease.”

Easy. In May, in what it admitted was a direct response to the outbreak of swine flu the month before, WHO promulgated a new definition matched to swine flu that simply eliminated severity as a factor. You could now have a pandemic with zero deaths.

Under fire, the organization is boldly lying about the change, to which anybody with an Internet connection can attest. In a mid-January virtual conference WHO swine flu chief Keiji Fukuda stated: “Did WHO change its definition of a pandemic? The answer is no: WHO did not change its definition.” Two weeks later at a PACE conference he insisted: “Having severe deaths has never been part of the WHO definition.”

They did it; but why?

In part, it was CYA for the WHO. The agency was losing credibility over the refusal of avian flu H5N1 to go pandemic and kill as many as 150 million people worldwide, as its “flu czar” had predicted in 2005.

Around the world nations heeded the warnings and spent vast sums developing vaccines and making other preparations. So when swine flu conveniently trotted in, the WHO essentially crossed out “avian,” inserted “swine,” and WHO Director-General Margaret Chan arrogantly boasted, “The world can now reap the benefits of investments over the last five years in pandemic preparedness.”

But there’s more than bureaucratic self-interest at work here. Bizarrely enough, the WHO has also exploited its phony pandemic to push a hard left political agenda.

In a September speech WHO Director-General Chan said “ministers of health” should take advantage of the “devastating impact” swine flu will have on poorer nations to get out the message that “changes in the functioning of the global economy” are needed to “distribute wealth on the basis of” values “like community, solidarity, equity and social justice.” She further declared it should be used as a weapon against “international policies and systems that govern financial markets, economies, commerce, trade and foreign affairs.”

Chan’s dream now lies in tatters. All the WHO has done, says PACE’s Wodart, is to destroy “much of the credibility that they should have, which is invaluable to us if there’s a future scare that might turn out to be a killer on a large scale.”

Michael Fumento is director of the nonprofit Independent Journalism Project, where he specializes in health and science issues.

March 11, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 3 Comments