I'm throwing my BS flag on this one! Pasteurization kills bacteria and viruses much worse than flu viruses. And it has been doing so for decades. Those 4% of the population drinking raw milk have always been doing it at their own risk. Again, risks greater than a flu virus. I grew up on a dairy farm and we never drank the raw milk. My mother (another dairy farmer's daughter) knew people who lost a child to listeria. She would cook with milk from the bulk tank (essentially pasteurizing it), but never gave it to her own children raw. Seems pretty simple. I'll be putting my 1/2 & 1/2 in my coffee and pouring milk on my kids cereal. We may be in for another pandemic, but it won't be coming from our commercially pasteurized milk!
Also a dairy farmer here, agreeing with Marlayna. This warning is appropriate for you if you're a proponate of, or member of a group that advocates for, drinking raw milk.
just want to be clear, I don't agree with the author and think the article is weak at best, I fully support his right to an opinion and the FP's freedom to publish it. We need to keep who we are, Americans, in front of our emotional lizard brain reactions. This is for the people bashing the sitting and former president. I'm not a fan of either but i was brought up believing you respect the office even when you don't respect the man. I think there is a difference between respectful debate and even protest and what we are seeing today in campuses, online and in the conventional media. there's plenty Barri and the other FP authors say that i disagree with but we need to have this open and respectful dialogue or we are finished.
I’m personally aware of a case where a Mennonite dairy farmer who had a batch of raw milk that the state tagged because it was contaminated with bacterial pathogens and was illegally selling this raw milk in a major city. He got a misdemeanor ticket and the raw milk activists all turned out. The media never, ever reported the fact that the milk had been tested positive for pathogens, but only focused on the part of the quaint Mennonite family in their cute old fashioned clothing, and the story was framed as government overreach. What kind of sociopath knowingly sells milk that is contaminated with pathogens?
If this is the recent Pennsylvania case the facts are very different from what you saw.
He runs a buyer's club that sells products from a large number of Mennonite farmers. He only sells to customers who sign up, and every customer knows they are buying raw dairy products. It's the reason they sign up.
The state tagged his products because someone who visited one of his customers died. There was no evidence that she ever consumed any of his products, no evidence that it was anything but her late stage cancer that killed her, and the customers stated that she didn't consume any of those products.
The reason the media never reported that his products tested positive for pathogens was because it never happened. The state was unable to produce evidence of positive test results in court.
The testimony of the state agents made it clear that they were looking for any possible excuse to shut down his business, since that takes about 50 Mennonite farmers out of the market.
This isn't about public safety. It's about a state agency doing the bidding of the commercial interests they are supposed to regulate.
All raw unpasteurized milk will have pathogens, it’s one of the reasons people who drink it want it (stupidly). they think these pathogens allegedly help them to be healthier. The immune system is an amazing evolution in us and it can be overwhelmed too. Flu is a respiratory virus and is spread via droplets and contact just like any other respiratory virus. Milk is only one mode of transmission. The truth of how pathogenic it is to humans will be revealed soon enough if humans truly are infected and transmitting it to each other. Stay healthy out there!
It’s not specifically drinking the milk. It’s the aerosolization of viral particles when workers are spraying to clean and doing other tasks. Maybe that’s why they’re getting pink eye as a manifestation of illness.
Looking at the comments shows great confidence in the pasteurization process. Raw milk can be risky for sure, and people who drink or use it are well aware of those risks. However, milk with known pathogens in it shouldn’t be run through an HTST and called good. There are a lot of safeties in place, but it’s not full proof. Also, what about non-pasteurized cheese (e.g. Swiss) that relies on age and competitive bacteria to make safe? I get fear mongering is not the right path, but total disregard of the risks raised is equally ill advised.
Yeah. Our family has chickens so we've have bothered to learn something about bird flu. Pasteurization kills the virus. What they're finding in commercial milk appears to be viral pieces (DNA/RNA fragments) which is exactly what you would expect from a virus that's been boiled into fragments.
CDC should issue an alert for raw milk. For the 99% of us who don't have access to raw milk, nothing to worry about.
Raw milk drinker gets the bug, then bug jumps from raw milk drinker to pasteurized milk drinkers. See how that works? Viruses don’t care about your feelings, they just wanna have your DNA, and some fun. This, of course, is predicated on certain viral transmission properties.
Thank you. Regular pasteurization seems sufficient to degrade a virus, let alone the "ultra" pasteurization that now gives us cartons of milk with a month+ expiration date.
I highly doubt that anyone who drinks raw milk these days is unaware of the hazards. Even 30 years ago, when we had a goat (when we lived in the mountains of Oregon), I *always* pasteurized the milk.
A research scientist in the Midwest shopped for milk products in dozens of stores last month. Pasteurized milk. Found the virus in 20% of the samples. Said he’d still drink the milk. I won’t.
Since we’re talking about canaries, I would like to introduce myself. Swine flu was supposed to kill us all and I was fine. I made no attempt to avoid it. I didn’t even stop going to class when I was sick *gasp* I was in college at the time and thought it was funny since everyone was overreacting. Okay I was 19, leave me alone. I was working as a therapist in an intensive wrap around treatment program for traumatized teenagers, many of whom lived in poverty, when Covid hit.
All of my coworkers suddenly discovered they valued their personal safety over helping kids. They all jumped to working remotely. Which isn’t so effective when a client family struggles to pay their bills and they may or may not have internet. Or a laptop…. Our job involved going into clients homes for therapy so transportation wouldn’t be a barrier to treatment. Anyway, I wasn’t going to abandon my clients, most of them only had one of their parents in their life, and abandonment was something they had problems with. If my clients still requested face to face appointments I showed up. One kid told me his family all tested positive for COVID but he still wanted his therapy appointment. So I showed up, and surprise surprise I got Covid in March of 2020.
So, I’m the canary. I’ll keep double fisting pint glasses of milk until I die.
I spent my career in funeral service. We never had the luxury of staying home from work or of working from home. When AIDS struck, we educated ourselves on universal precautions which helped us with every communicable disease threat that later came through our doors, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (look it up). When Covid arrived (and I’m now retired) I told my children that I had been exposed to worse things than that working in the funeral business and I wouldn’t be living my life in fear of this common cold copycat. I did have Covid once (I stayed home and rested) but living your life with common sense and without fear and with faith in God still seems to be the best approach.
Curious what you think of Abigail Shrier’s new book ‘Bad Therapy?’ My dad abandoned me when I was 7. Life was tough but I never needed therapy for my “trauma.”
I think she has some good points. I think its more of a critique of woke therapists than anything else. I’m glad to hear you got through it. Some people are naturally more resilient or have resilient adults in their life modeling strength for them. Thats what therapy is with me, helping people stand up vs. telling then their weak.
Some people just seem to enjoy having someone to talk to that is legally prohibited from telling others what they say.
I found short-term therapy extremely helpful when I was going through a difficult medical issue and had to put on a brave face for my family. It was nice to have one person I could share my real feelings with and would definitely do it again if the need arises.
Problem with a lot of therapy as it’s not short term, it’s kind of like chiropractic you have to go forever. So it sounds like it worked for you and the fact that it was short term is great.
I just step people down in treatment frequency. If someone with no discernible problem keeps wanting to talk because they say it helps then i’ll meet with them once a month and shoot the breeze. Bad therapy hit more on therapists that are encouraging rumination.
She hit mostly on what’s happening in schools, the increased focus on the mental well being of kids. I never let my kids take those ridiculous social emotional surveys and I’m sure I was the only parent who opted them out. The questions were disgusting.
Snarky, and well meaning I suppose, but also not that smart. Good for you at 19 years old you are robust enough to fight off a disease especially in its early strong stages. Not the case for many others. This isn’t about surviving something. It’s about preventing something very possible to prevent. Most viral infections are innocuous. Some are not. The key is understand all the facts and make your decision. Not merely roll the dice and hope to survive.
RMac, we weren’t allowed to make decisions last time. Loved ones died alone, millions of children were denied education for months or years, small business shuttered while Amazon made a killing, people lost the ability to provide for their families because they wouldn’t submit to a novel therapeutic. All for….nothing.
I can control how I respond. And how I’ll respond will be to live until I’m dead. Human beings should not be boiled down to disease vectors. It’s unethical. Attempting to shame others as grandma killers won’t work this time.
So who cares if people who would have lived had you not given them the virus die right? Because freedom to spread plague matters more than anything else.
COVID was far more dangerous than we were told. My healthy sister suffered a cardiac arrest and arterial dissection in her brainstem following her "mild" 2020 infection. It broke my heart hearing people who claimed to love me and my family saying how only the old and sick and fat were affected by covid and that they were going to die anyway. My sister didn't die, but my family is destroyed forever. I cared for my dying mother alone during lockdown. I have lupus and emphysema and know I won't survive infection, another lockdown, or another jab. My mother passed two years ago (the caregiving was grueling and I still cry for hours every day in flashbacks) but there was one silver lining- a fentanyl patch I saved after her death. I knew I couldn't go through it again. The day they announce the first human to human cases of h5n1. I will unwrap the patch and put it in my mouth. I have begged God every single night to please please please not let them do another bioweapon pandemic again.. it looks like they vaxed livestock with some cockamamie GoF avian flu jab last year that mutated to have the gene it needs to jump. I'm sure it was done on purpose.
What I learned more than anything is that God doesn't answer my prayers and that my life is worthless to Him. I begged on my knees for Him to stop them from doing this. I've never been more hopeless in my life. At least I have the patch.
Respiratory viruses spread because human beings have to breathe to live. Not sure how to get around that. Sweden did better than the US on all-cause mortality, so that’s a pretty strong indication that what the experts had us do didn’t work. Again, I understand that these big picture things have nothing to do with your personal grieving process-and I am truly sorry for your suffering.
Thanks. My sister isn't dead she's just disabled for life with brain heart and immune damage and using a walker in her 30s. 16 hospital stays in 4 years. My mom's death was awful.
Sorry for what you're going through. As far back as the 1700s smart people knew that the only way to survive a plague was to isolate themselves. Daniel Defoe knew this in 1665 when he wrote "Journal of a Plague Year."
I'm certainly not going to go through the extremes we went through during COVID, but I'm also going to exercise the appropriate level of caution. It's not a huge deal to use oat or almond milk in my coffee for a few months until things shake out and more is known.
Right, but at the time, ALL Americans were told to hunker down, and it wasn’t until a year or more later that we were told healthy young people were not in danger of death or being hospitalized…or even needing to wear masks! Kids lost a year or more of normal education and were forced to take a never before used vaccine to go to school. Even the doctors promoting that kids were not a targeted area of concern were blocked from speaking out. Our government made a massive error.
The government made a series of decisions that furthered its agenda. The pharma profits were also a big part of it.nThe decision makers knew the science and lied about it repeatedly. That’s not error as in mistake.All the decisions were always in the same direction away from science and common sense.They had motives that we may never fully understand
Agreed…error was probably the wrong word! They definitely knew what they were doing all for the biggest profit, which was the sickest out of the whole experience. They chose profit over lives. Pure evil.
I read and hear often that they made a “ mistake” but were trying to save lives. I don’t believe that for a second. Each of the leaders ( Fauci, Wallensky, etc had staff scientists. They all knew the study results on masking, lockdowns, the decreasing efficacy of the shots etc, and they made a conscious decision to lie, stoke fear, demonize those who refused the shots.
We have the need to know exactly why.we know that pharma made astronomical profits. We need to know what was the gain to the government agency leaders etc.,
Fauci and Wallensky have cushy jobs and have not yet been held accountable.
You do that every time you get in a car. No amount of "all the facts" will keep people from having to make decisions about which risks they will accept and which they will avoid. The very fact of being able to decide this, instead of having to do whatever it takes to eat today, is a marker of high socioeconomic status.
This is why, when I cared for my dying mother alone in 2020 after my sister was disabled from a COVID induced cardiac arrest and arterial dissection in her brainstem, and I lost friends I loved and trusted who said covid was a fake hoax and I was engaging in a demonic ritual by masking on the bus and train to work, that I realized I couldn't go through another GoF pandemic again. The past four years were hell on earth for me and I cry for hours every day in terror grief and fear waiting for my jabs to kill me, Covid reinfection to kill me, and from flashbacks about all that happened. For this reason, I saved a fentanyl patch after my moms death. The day the first H5N1 cases in my city are announced, I will unwrap the patch and put it in my mouth, and swallow. If God wanted me to live, he would have answered the prayers I made on my knees begging Him not to let them do it again.
Bari should be grateful nothing like what happened to my family happened to anyone she loves- her flippant little intro about "covid fatigue" when people are still being maimed and disabled from it like my sister-- shows me why I made the right decision. I just wish I had gotten to see a friend I miss first. I begged God for that, too.
Most people were “on your side” during Covid. I don’t understand your animosity. People like me who thought targeted protection was a much better route than total societal lockdown were ostracized.
Ooh, I know the answer to this one! We get the facts by creating a model that vastly overestimates both exponentially and human influence! It's science circa 2024.
The fact is. Nothing is 100% safe or certain. Including “science”, food/milk and most certainly the corrupted government agencies including CDC. Live accordingly. In truth or cowering
Why on earth would you allow this rubbish to be published? Do you not understand the fake fear that the government employed during Covid-19 to steal our liberties? This is directly out of that same playbook. No one has asked how many cycles they ran the PCR tests to find the fragments of the virus. We know that the level they ran to detect Covid-19 generated a false positive rate of 97%. No one has asked why did the birds only poop on dairy cattle? Why is it not found in beef cattle. Beef cattle are more exposed to wild birds. The dairy cows do not die they got sick go off feed and then recover. The worker had a red eye ( what does that even mean? Did he have pink eye or did he have something else? Yet again he recovered. No idea if the cat story is true the fact that it came from a NYT report makes it suspicious and never to be taken at face value given the lies he would had written on Covid. So Free Press you are showing signs of falling back into your past MSM ways of reporting false news you need to re think and do better.
There is no trust in the CDC. They still push covid boosters for all, in spite of the data, in spite of the DMA contamination( which should have triggered a recall of the product for that reason alone)
Why does the author think the CDC and any government institution involved with public health, is capable of transparency? There has been no accountability for the covid debacle.For them it’s arrogance as usual and business as usual.
I have trouble reading anything that puts out the CDC as some sort of moral authority or trusted source on anything..the CDC needs to shut it and take a permanent seat. I can’t get worked up over a bird flu. But I can understand the addict looking for their next fix and I can also see who the dealers are.
So let me get this straight... the solution to the border crisis, Gaza and Ukraine is just to send them tainted milk and watch them drop off like flies? And we keep sending "weapons"?
** The worker did not return to the public clinic for a follow-up nor allow investigators to test his household. CBS News quoted a Texas state health official saying the worker “did not disclose the name of their workplace.” **
It sounds as though "the worker" and others mentioned are illegal aliens.
To be honest, when I type "alien" I think about Son C, the skinny weird one.
That said, it's a fair and accurate term. People who aren't citizens of this country are "aliens" in that sense, and people who aren't here legally are here illegally.
Setting aside the debate about whether this is a real threat or not. Does anyone other than those who still wear masks in public believe our public health institutions have the ability to properly manage and mitigate any future outbreaks? They demonstrated during COVID that they are not objective and scientific but are ideological and compromised institutions that will push whatever narrative their overlords in politics provide them. The majority of the public knows this, so the next time something serious happens that warrants a coordinated and rapid response the outcome will be far worse than it otherwise would be simply because most people won't trust what the CDC and NIH say until people start dying.
Covid is airborne. It wasn't mild like people here are saying. It gave my sister a cardiac arrest and arterial dissection in her brainstem in 2020. She is disabled for life and my family is destroyed. People are getting weird summer flu already, flu A (H5N1 is influenza subtype A). I'll never survive infection as I have lupus and emphysema and ill never survive another lockdown. If everyone here went through what my family did they would never ever ever say covid was fake. I haven't even gotten up for work I'm just laying in bed fucking crying bc I'll be dead soon anyway from the new bioweapon.
I'm truly sorry for what your family has gone through, that is devastating. Of course COVID was not fake, I don't believe that. Fortunately it was mild for most people, though tragically it wasn't mild for all. My concern is the way the COVID pandemic was handled by the authorities will result in poor outcomes the next time a serious virus emerges.
It actually wasn't mild for most people bc so many ppl had complications of vascular damage via the toxic spike protein that were missed that result in death and disability. I have dedicated every free moment to understanding the bioweapon that destroyed my family forever, covid deaths were likely undercounted. My sister would have died were it not for the one doctor who refused to write of symptoms as anxiety, the damage is forever but bc she was in the ER when it happened (one doctor discharged her but another overruled) she was resuscitated. Forgive typos, substack is glitchy today.
Both of these statements can be true: Covid appeared to be mild for most people (especially children). However, because this was a gain-of-function experiment, we do not know the extent of the residual damage (just as we don't know the extent of the residual damage from the shots, which also appeared to many people to result in only mild side effects).
Why do you keep assuming that I don't know the vax is bad I've said twice here I live in terror every second of every day of dying suddenly from the 3 jabs I got in 2021. I know all about ft Detrik and the GoF bioweapon. You aren't giving me new information.
Both vax and virus kill. I know kids with long covid btw. BOTH main and kill. Both.
(I still pour milk in my coffee, but I microwave it first. If I had young children, I would be nervous.)
It sounds as though you're a hysterical alarmist, Mr. McNeil. Maybe Mr. McNeil could debate Jonathan Haidt on the subject of child-safety fear-mongering of the "If one child dies!!!!" sort.
Putting aside the health concerns (real or imagined) regarding H5N1, the true tragedy is loss of trust in the CDC due to its many obfuscations during COVID. If public trust is ever to be recaptured, the CDC must be completely honest and open with the American people, damn the special interests.
This is fearmongering at its most hyperbolically loathsome. I’m not sure where to start, but let me dissect this one particularly vile paragraph simply by way of demonstration. The author says:
“We’ve been repeatedly reassured that our milk supply is safe. But the FDA issued that opinion on April 23 even before it had proof that pasteurization killed the virus. Even now, we’ve seen little proof that the USDA can assure us that the millions of gallons of milk flowing through hundreds of dairy plants each day are all rendered 100 percent safe.”
1. The opinion issued by the FDA on April 23 is perfectly valid. It wasn’t “before it had proof,” because the process of pasteurization was developed and demonstrated to destroy microbes and viruses long before. That’s the whole point of pasteurization. Duh. It doesn't have to be "proved" over and over and over again.
2. We don’t need to see more proof, so the “little proof” is more than we might even expect.
3. There is no such thing as 100 percent safe. Nothing meets that standard. But as it is, pasteurization reaches a level that is very very very close to 100%. An expectation of 100% suggests a mental disorder called dichotomous thinking.
Finding “viral material” (i.e. DNA fragments) in milk after pasteurization is to be expected, and given the extremely sensitive PCR-based tests for miniscule amounts of DNA, it is not surprising that these fragments can be detected.
A bigger issue, if the author wants to continue grinding his axe, would be law surrounding the regulation of raw milk products. There you might have an issue, though even then I doubt “H5N1 will kill millions of us” as the author, in the throes of his wet nightmare, imagines.
I'm throwing my BS flag on this one! Pasteurization kills bacteria and viruses much worse than flu viruses. And it has been doing so for decades. Those 4% of the population drinking raw milk have always been doing it at their own risk. Again, risks greater than a flu virus. I grew up on a dairy farm and we never drank the raw milk. My mother (another dairy farmer's daughter) knew people who lost a child to listeria. She would cook with milk from the bulk tank (essentially pasteurizing it), but never gave it to her own children raw. Seems pretty simple. I'll be putting my 1/2 & 1/2 in my coffee and pouring milk on my kids cereal. We may be in for another pandemic, but it won't be coming from our commercially pasteurized milk!
Also a dairy farmer here, agreeing with Marlayna. This warning is appropriate for you if you're a proponate of, or member of a group that advocates for, drinking raw milk.
Can’t believe that piece was written by professional journalist
just want to be clear, I don't agree with the author and think the article is weak at best, I fully support his right to an opinion and the FP's freedom to publish it. We need to keep who we are, Americans, in front of our emotional lizard brain reactions. This is for the people bashing the sitting and former president. I'm not a fan of either but i was brought up believing you respect the office even when you don't respect the man. I think there is a difference between respectful debate and even protest and what we are seeing today in campuses, online and in the conventional media. there's plenty Barri and the other FP authors say that i disagree with but we need to have this open and respectful dialogue or we are finished.
"professional" and "journalist" has become a laughable contradiction of terms in recent years.
Sophistry now rules their world.
Elio: I can.
There is nothing that draws an audience like fear-mongering!!
I’m personally aware of a case where a Mennonite dairy farmer who had a batch of raw milk that the state tagged because it was contaminated with bacterial pathogens and was illegally selling this raw milk in a major city. He got a misdemeanor ticket and the raw milk activists all turned out. The media never, ever reported the fact that the milk had been tested positive for pathogens, but only focused on the part of the quaint Mennonite family in their cute old fashioned clothing, and the story was framed as government overreach. What kind of sociopath knowingly sells milk that is contaminated with pathogens?
If this is the recent Pennsylvania case the facts are very different from what you saw.
He runs a buyer's club that sells products from a large number of Mennonite farmers. He only sells to customers who sign up, and every customer knows they are buying raw dairy products. It's the reason they sign up.
The state tagged his products because someone who visited one of his customers died. There was no evidence that she ever consumed any of his products, no evidence that it was anything but her late stage cancer that killed her, and the customers stated that she didn't consume any of those products.
The reason the media never reported that his products tested positive for pathogens was because it never happened. The state was unable to produce evidence of positive test results in court.
The testimony of the state agents made it clear that they were looking for any possible excuse to shut down his business, since that takes about 50 Mennonite farmers out of the market.
This isn't about public safety. It's about a state agency doing the bidding of the commercial interests they are supposed to regulate.
No this was an entirely different matter in a different state and I personally observed everything related to the comment.
All raw unpasteurized milk will have pathogens, it’s one of the reasons people who drink it want it (stupidly). they think these pathogens allegedly help them to be healthier. The immune system is an amazing evolution in us and it can be overwhelmed too. Flu is a respiratory virus and is spread via droplets and contact just like any other respiratory virus. Milk is only one mode of transmission. The truth of how pathogenic it is to humans will be revealed soon enough if humans truly are infected and transmitting it to each other. Stay healthy out there!
Religious freedom.
It’s not specifically drinking the milk. It’s the aerosolization of viral particles when workers are spraying to clean and doing other tasks. Maybe that’s why they’re getting pink eye as a manifestation of illness.
The talk of microwaving the milk to heat it up…that’s what pasteurization is!
Looking at the comments shows great confidence in the pasteurization process. Raw milk can be risky for sure, and people who drink or use it are well aware of those risks. However, milk with known pathogens in it shouldn’t be run through an HTST and called good. There are a lot of safeties in place, but it’s not full proof. Also, what about non-pasteurized cheese (e.g. Swiss) that relies on age and competitive bacteria to make safe? I get fear mongering is not the right path, but total disregard of the risks raised is equally ill advised.
Yeah. Our family has chickens so we've have bothered to learn something about bird flu. Pasteurization kills the virus. What they're finding in commercial milk appears to be viral pieces (DNA/RNA fragments) which is exactly what you would expect from a virus that's been boiled into fragments.
CDC should issue an alert for raw milk. For the 99% of us who don't have access to raw milk, nothing to worry about.
Raw milk drinker gets the bug, then bug jumps from raw milk drinker to pasteurized milk drinkers. See how that works? Viruses don’t care about your feelings, they just wanna have your DNA, and some fun. This, of course, is predicated on certain viral transmission properties.
There is no evidence that it can be transmitted between people.
“This, of course, is predicated on certain viral transmission properties.”
Unfortunately, I cannot find my comment without scrolling through hundreds of comments. But in general, your statement is indisputable.
Thank you for throwing some science onto this scare tactic story. You are right. Shame on the NYT.
Thank you. Regular pasteurization seems sufficient to degrade a virus, let alone the "ultra" pasteurization that now gives us cartons of milk with a month+ expiration date.
I highly doubt that anyone who drinks raw milk these days is unaware of the hazards. Even 30 years ago, when we had a goat (when we lived in the mountains of Oregon), I *always* pasteurized the milk.
https://open.substack.com/pub/trusttheevidence/p/what-cows-milk-tells-us-about-pcr?r=79kf0&utm_medium=ios
Thank you!!!
A research scientist in the Midwest shopped for milk products in dozens of stores last month. Pasteurized milk. Found the virus in 20% of the samples. Said he’d still drink the milk. I won’t.
Yeah how did he find it? If he found it via PCR I would drink it. If he found it via culturing, I would not drink it.
💯
Since we’re talking about canaries, I would like to introduce myself. Swine flu was supposed to kill us all and I was fine. I made no attempt to avoid it. I didn’t even stop going to class when I was sick *gasp* I was in college at the time and thought it was funny since everyone was overreacting. Okay I was 19, leave me alone. I was working as a therapist in an intensive wrap around treatment program for traumatized teenagers, many of whom lived in poverty, when Covid hit.
All of my coworkers suddenly discovered they valued their personal safety over helping kids. They all jumped to working remotely. Which isn’t so effective when a client family struggles to pay their bills and they may or may not have internet. Or a laptop…. Our job involved going into clients homes for therapy so transportation wouldn’t be a barrier to treatment. Anyway, I wasn’t going to abandon my clients, most of them only had one of their parents in their life, and abandonment was something they had problems with. If my clients still requested face to face appointments I showed up. One kid told me his family all tested positive for COVID but he still wanted his therapy appointment. So I showed up, and surprise surprise I got Covid in March of 2020.
So, I’m the canary. I’ll keep double fisting pint glasses of milk until I die.
This is the way. I’m going to live until I’m dead.
I spent my career in funeral service. We never had the luxury of staying home from work or of working from home. When AIDS struck, we educated ourselves on universal precautions which helped us with every communicable disease threat that later came through our doors, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (look it up). When Covid arrived (and I’m now retired) I told my children that I had been exposed to worse things than that working in the funeral business and I wouldn’t be living my life in fear of this common cold copycat. I did have Covid once (I stayed home and rested) but living your life with common sense and without fear and with faith in God still seems to be the best approach.
Curious what you think of Abigail Shrier’s new book ‘Bad Therapy?’ My dad abandoned me when I was 7. Life was tough but I never needed therapy for my “trauma.”
I think she has some good points. I think its more of a critique of woke therapists than anything else. I’m glad to hear you got through it. Some people are naturally more resilient or have resilient adults in their life modeling strength for them. Thats what therapy is with me, helping people stand up vs. telling then their weak.
Some people just seem to enjoy having someone to talk to that is legally prohibited from telling others what they say.
I found short-term therapy extremely helpful when I was going through a difficult medical issue and had to put on a brave face for my family. It was nice to have one person I could share my real feelings with and would definitely do it again if the need arises.
Problem with a lot of therapy as it’s not short term, it’s kind of like chiropractic you have to go forever. So it sounds like it worked for you and the fact that it was short term is great.
I just step people down in treatment frequency. If someone with no discernible problem keeps wanting to talk because they say it helps then i’ll meet with them once a month and shoot the breeze. Bad therapy hit more on therapists that are encouraging rumination.
She hit mostly on what’s happening in schools, the increased focus on the mental well being of kids. I never let my kids take those ridiculous social emotional surveys and I’m sure I was the only parent who opted them out. The questions were disgusting.
So in other words You Did Your Job!. Thumbs Up!
"All of my coworkers suddenly discovered they valued their personal safety over helping kids."
And they Didn't.
BTW Mother Nature is ALWAYS trying to kill you.
"So, I’m the canary. I’ll keep double fisting pint glasses of milk until I die"
And COOKIES! Don't forget Cookies.
Ha. See my post above, re cookies and milk!
With Apologies to Ben Franklin
Milk & Cookies. More proof there is a God and he wants me to be happy.
Snarky, and well meaning I suppose, but also not that smart. Good for you at 19 years old you are robust enough to fight off a disease especially in its early strong stages. Not the case for many others. This isn’t about surviving something. It’s about preventing something very possible to prevent. Most viral infections are innocuous. Some are not. The key is understand all the facts and make your decision. Not merely roll the dice and hope to survive.
RMac, we weren’t allowed to make decisions last time. Loved ones died alone, millions of children were denied education for months or years, small business shuttered while Amazon made a killing, people lost the ability to provide for their families because they wouldn’t submit to a novel therapeutic. All for….nothing.
I can control how I respond. And how I’ll respond will be to live until I’m dead. Human beings should not be boiled down to disease vectors. It’s unethical. Attempting to shame others as grandma killers won’t work this time.
So who cares if people who would have lived had you not given them the virus die right? Because freedom to spread plague matters more than anything else.
COVID was far more dangerous than we were told. My healthy sister suffered a cardiac arrest and arterial dissection in her brainstem following her "mild" 2020 infection. It broke my heart hearing people who claimed to love me and my family saying how only the old and sick and fat were affected by covid and that they were going to die anyway. My sister didn't die, but my family is destroyed forever. I cared for my dying mother alone during lockdown. I have lupus and emphysema and know I won't survive infection, another lockdown, or another jab. My mother passed two years ago (the caregiving was grueling and I still cry for hours every day in flashbacks) but there was one silver lining- a fentanyl patch I saved after her death. I knew I couldn't go through it again. The day they announce the first human to human cases of h5n1. I will unwrap the patch and put it in my mouth. I have begged God every single night to please please please not let them do another bioweapon pandemic again.. it looks like they vaxed livestock with some cockamamie GoF avian flu jab last year that mutated to have the gene it needs to jump. I'm sure it was done on purpose.
What I learned more than anything is that God doesn't answer my prayers and that my life is worthless to Him. I begged on my knees for Him to stop them from doing this. I've never been more hopeless in my life. At least I have the patch.
I’m so sorry for your loss.
Respiratory viruses spread because human beings have to breathe to live. Not sure how to get around that. Sweden did better than the US on all-cause mortality, so that’s a pretty strong indication that what the experts had us do didn’t work. Again, I understand that these big picture things have nothing to do with your personal grieving process-and I am truly sorry for your suffering.
I’m so very sorry for your losses.
Thanks. My sister isn't dead she's just disabled for life with brain heart and immune damage and using a walker in her 30s. 16 hospital stays in 4 years. My mom's death was awful.
That’s a LOT of suffering, Cait. Your heartache is merited. May you be surrounded by kind people who can help you grieve.
Sorry for what you're going through. As far back as the 1700s smart people knew that the only way to survive a plague was to isolate themselves. Daniel Defoe knew this in 1665 when he wrote "Journal of a Plague Year."
I'm certainly not going to go through the extremes we went through during COVID, but I'm also going to exercise the appropriate level of caution. It's not a huge deal to use oat or almond milk in my coffee for a few months until things shake out and more is known.
Right, but at the time, ALL Americans were told to hunker down, and it wasn’t until a year or more later that we were told healthy young people were not in danger of death or being hospitalized…or even needing to wear masks! Kids lost a year or more of normal education and were forced to take a never before used vaccine to go to school. Even the doctors promoting that kids were not a targeted area of concern were blocked from speaking out. Our government made a massive error.
We *knew* the risk profile very early on, the powers that be chose to ignore it.
The government made a series of decisions that furthered its agenda. The pharma profits were also a big part of it.nThe decision makers knew the science and lied about it repeatedly. That’s not error as in mistake.All the decisions were always in the same direction away from science and common sense.They had motives that we may never fully understand
Agreed…error was probably the wrong word! They definitely knew what they were doing all for the biggest profit, which was the sickest out of the whole experience. They chose profit over lives. Pure evil.
I read and hear often that they made a “ mistake” but were trying to save lives. I don’t believe that for a second. Each of the leaders ( Fauci, Wallensky, etc had staff scientists. They all knew the study results on masking, lockdowns, the decreasing efficacy of the shots etc, and they made a conscious decision to lie, stoke fear, demonize those who refused the shots.
We have the need to know exactly why.we know that pharma made astronomical profits. We need to know what was the gain to the government agency leaders etc.,
Fauci and Wallensky have cushy jobs and have not yet been held accountable.
"Not merely roll the dice and hope to survive."
You do that every time you get in a car. No amount of "all the facts" will keep people from having to make decisions about which risks they will accept and which they will avoid. The very fact of being able to decide this, instead of having to do whatever it takes to eat today, is a marker of high socioeconomic status.
This is why, when I cared for my dying mother alone in 2020 after my sister was disabled from a COVID induced cardiac arrest and arterial dissection in her brainstem, and I lost friends I loved and trusted who said covid was a fake hoax and I was engaging in a demonic ritual by masking on the bus and train to work, that I realized I couldn't go through another GoF pandemic again. The past four years were hell on earth for me and I cry for hours every day in terror grief and fear waiting for my jabs to kill me, Covid reinfection to kill me, and from flashbacks about all that happened. For this reason, I saved a fentanyl patch after my moms death. The day the first H5N1 cases in my city are announced, I will unwrap the patch and put it in my mouth, and swallow. If God wanted me to live, he would have answered the prayers I made on my knees begging Him not to let them do it again.
Bari should be grateful nothing like what happened to my family happened to anyone she loves- her flippant little intro about "covid fatigue" when people are still being maimed and disabled from it like my sister-- shows me why I made the right decision. I just wish I had gotten to see a friend I miss first. I begged God for that, too.
Most people were “on your side” during Covid. I don’t understand your animosity. People like me who thought targeted protection was a much better route than total societal lockdown were ostracized.
There in lies the rub. How do we get the “ facts”? Whose version of the “ facts” ?
Ooh, I know the answer to this one! We get the facts by creating a model that vastly overestimates both exponentially and human influence! It's science circa 2024.
The fact is. Nothing is 100% safe or certain. Including “science”, food/milk and most certainly the corrupted government agencies including CDC. Live accordingly. In truth or cowering
Considering this guy batted 0.0 during COVID, everyone should ignore everything he says about H5N1.
In late May, 2020, he insisted that emergency rooms would be overwhelmed and voters would rebel when governors reopened. Wrong.
He dubbed the lab leak theory a conspiracy until it was convenient for his career to publicly reconsider. Craven.
He admits to cheating on his mandatory quarantine for SARS 1 while scolding others for doing the same for COVID. Self-centered.
Finally, he’s fear-mongering here just so he can sell more copies of his book. Don’t buy it, literally and figuratively.
Outstanding summary!
That explains a lot
I bet this journalist is still wearing a mask.
Why on earth would you allow this rubbish to be published? Do you not understand the fake fear that the government employed during Covid-19 to steal our liberties? This is directly out of that same playbook. No one has asked how many cycles they ran the PCR tests to find the fragments of the virus. We know that the level they ran to detect Covid-19 generated a false positive rate of 97%. No one has asked why did the birds only poop on dairy cattle? Why is it not found in beef cattle. Beef cattle are more exposed to wild birds. The dairy cows do not die they got sick go off feed and then recover. The worker had a red eye ( what does that even mean? Did he have pink eye or did he have something else? Yet again he recovered. No idea if the cat story is true the fact that it came from a NYT report makes it suspicious and never to be taken at face value given the lies he would had written on Covid. So Free Press you are showing signs of falling back into your past MSM ways of reporting false news you need to re think and do better.
Agree!. This story is not of "TFP" quality. It belongs in the TGIF column--another example of non-TFP quality.
There is no trust in the CDC. They still push covid boosters for all, in spite of the data, in spite of the DMA contamination( which should have triggered a recall of the product for that reason alone)
Why does the author think the CDC and any government institution involved with public health, is capable of transparency? There has been no accountability for the covid debacle.For them it’s arrogance as usual and business as usual.
For God’s sake CDC…take that damn shot off the childhood vaccine schedule!
I have trouble reading anything that puts out the CDC as some sort of moral authority or trusted source on anything..the CDC needs to shut it and take a permanent seat. I can’t get worked up over a bird flu. But I can understand the addict looking for their next fix and I can also see who the dealers are.
This.
What Marlayna said! This is fear mongering with no fact base. Until the virus is found POST PASTEURIZATION this is a nothing burger.
So let me get this straight... the solution to the border crisis, Gaza and Ukraine is just to send them tainted milk and watch them drop off like flies? And we keep sending "weapons"?
Fucking government can't get anything right...
LOL!!! Obama- we need you as Sec. of Defense!!
Oh, my mistake. I could have bypassed the article when the introduction said “just published a new book.”
** The worker did not return to the public clinic for a follow-up nor allow investigators to test his household. CBS News quoted a Texas state health official saying the worker “did not disclose the name of their workplace.” **
It sounds as though "the worker" and others mentioned are illegal aliens.
I love that you are using the United States Code term “illegal aliens.”
To be honest, when I type "alien" I think about Son C, the skinny weird one.
That said, it's a fair and accurate term. People who aren't citizens of this country are "aliens" in that sense, and people who aren't here legally are here illegally.
Setting aside the debate about whether this is a real threat or not. Does anyone other than those who still wear masks in public believe our public health institutions have the ability to properly manage and mitigate any future outbreaks? They demonstrated during COVID that they are not objective and scientific but are ideological and compromised institutions that will push whatever narrative their overlords in politics provide them. The majority of the public knows this, so the next time something serious happens that warrants a coordinated and rapid response the outcome will be far worse than it otherwise would be simply because most people won't trust what the CDC and NIH say until people start dying.
Covid is airborne. It wasn't mild like people here are saying. It gave my sister a cardiac arrest and arterial dissection in her brainstem in 2020. She is disabled for life and my family is destroyed. People are getting weird summer flu already, flu A (H5N1 is influenza subtype A). I'll never survive infection as I have lupus and emphysema and ill never survive another lockdown. If everyone here went through what my family did they would never ever ever say covid was fake. I haven't even gotten up for work I'm just laying in bed fucking crying bc I'll be dead soon anyway from the new bioweapon.
Nobody is saying Covid was fake. The disease was mild for most healthy people under age 65, not all, but most.
I'm truly sorry for what your family has gone through, that is devastating. Of course COVID was not fake, I don't believe that. Fortunately it was mild for most people, though tragically it wasn't mild for all. My concern is the way the COVID pandemic was handled by the authorities will result in poor outcomes the next time a serious virus emerges.
It actually wasn't mild for most people bc so many ppl had complications of vascular damage via the toxic spike protein that were missed that result in death and disability. I have dedicated every free moment to understanding the bioweapon that destroyed my family forever, covid deaths were likely undercounted. My sister would have died were it not for the one doctor who refused to write of symptoms as anxiety, the damage is forever but bc she was in the ER when it happened (one doctor discharged her but another overruled) she was resuscitated. Forgive typos, substack is glitchy today.
Both of these statements can be true: Covid appeared to be mild for most people (especially children). However, because this was a gain-of-function experiment, we do not know the extent of the residual damage (just as we don't know the extent of the residual damage from the shots, which also appeared to many people to result in only mild side effects).
Why do you keep assuming that I don't know the vax is bad I've said twice here I live in terror every second of every day of dying suddenly from the 3 jabs I got in 2021. I know all about ft Detrik and the GoF bioweapon. You aren't giving me new information.
Both vax and virus kill. I know kids with long covid btw. BOTH main and kill. Both.
(I still pour milk in my coffee, but I microwave it first. If I had young children, I would be nervous.)
It sounds as though you're a hysterical alarmist, Mr. McNeil. Maybe Mr. McNeil could debate Jonathan Haidt on the subject of child-safety fear-mongering of the "If one child dies!!!!" sort.
I stopped reading after the word “terrifying.”
Preemptive hysteria.
If you argue with him, you're not "respecting his fear."
"respecting his fear." Forget about any sort of logic or sense. Haven't we been through that before?
Yes, it's familiar.
I can’t help but think the Democrats will find a way to use this for the next cheat just like they did with Covid
The timing is...very coincidental, no?
As if this isn’t the third or fourth round with bird flu.
Putting aside the health concerns (real or imagined) regarding H5N1, the true tragedy is loss of trust in the CDC due to its many obfuscations during COVID. If public trust is ever to be recaptured, the CDC must be completely honest and open with the American people, damn the special interests.
This is fearmongering at its most hyperbolically loathsome. I’m not sure where to start, but let me dissect this one particularly vile paragraph simply by way of demonstration. The author says:
“We’ve been repeatedly reassured that our milk supply is safe. But the FDA issued that opinion on April 23 even before it had proof that pasteurization killed the virus. Even now, we’ve seen little proof that the USDA can assure us that the millions of gallons of milk flowing through hundreds of dairy plants each day are all rendered 100 percent safe.”
1. The opinion issued by the FDA on April 23 is perfectly valid. It wasn’t “before it had proof,” because the process of pasteurization was developed and demonstrated to destroy microbes and viruses long before. That’s the whole point of pasteurization. Duh. It doesn't have to be "proved" over and over and over again.
2. We don’t need to see more proof, so the “little proof” is more than we might even expect.
3. There is no such thing as 100 percent safe. Nothing meets that standard. But as it is, pasteurization reaches a level that is very very very close to 100%. An expectation of 100% suggests a mental disorder called dichotomous thinking.
Finding “viral material” (i.e. DNA fragments) in milk after pasteurization is to be expected, and given the extremely sensitive PCR-based tests for miniscule amounts of DNA, it is not surprising that these fragments can be detected.
A bigger issue, if the author wants to continue grinding his axe, would be law surrounding the regulation of raw milk products. There you might have an issue, though even then I doubt “H5N1 will kill millions of us” as the author, in the throes of his wet nightmare, imagines.