150 Comments

The point I take away from your story, is that even you don't trust the CDC anymore.

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Bari, or whomever monitors the comments, I have a suggestion to make concerning the software. It would be very nice if I could find my comment, or the comment of some else, just by putting the name in a search box and all the comments by that person on the thread would be displayed.

I received a reply to a comment of mine, but I couldn't remember what my comment was, and I certainly did not want to spend the time to scroll through hundreds of comments to find my comment. So please, see if you can modify the software, I would not think it would be very expensive.

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"The director of the CDC should go on television warning Americans to avoid raw milk. "

Except the people who drink raw milk generally don't trust the CDC.

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2020 an election year. Here comes a virus that will KILL EVERYONE! Unless We Obey.

Fast forward 4 years . Its an election year and here comes a virus that will KILL EVERYONE! Unless we obey.

Seen this movie before.

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You can fool some of the people some of the time...

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We buy raw milk from the Amish in Pennsylvania and have for going on 10 years. I’m not worried about this one.

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This article provides the necessary reasons for giving us, the readers, a "thumbs down" button.

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After the Covid fiasco have little faith in government agencies especially like the NIH. I have used soy, almond or oat milk for years on my cereal to help prevent saturated fat and cholesterol from clogging my arteries but also any other potential maladies. Cows milk is great for nursing baby calves but not so good for other species like humans.

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founding
May 7·edited May 7

If I drink raw milk through my keffiyeh, will it filter out the pathogens?

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Kudos to The Free Press for being the only news outlet reporting about poultry litter being fed to cattle. If anything, this was likely the vector of infection (if there was truly an infection). The virus fragments are found using our favorite test... the PCR. There has been no reporting on the cycle threshold used in this test. A high enough cycle threshold and they'll find traces of one of Benjamin Franklin's toenails.

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May 7·edited May 7

Actually, the New York Times had a Zeynep Tufekci column on April 24 that said some of the same:

“Another possible route is the cows’ feed, owing to the fairly revolting fact that the U.S. allows farmers to feed leftover poultry bedding material — feathers, excrement, spilled seeds — to dairy and beef cattle as a cheap source of additional protein.”

The Free Press is to be complimented for running an important story that Bari and Company must have realized would not be super-popular with her base.

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I don't read the New York Times so I missed that one. I should have said "one of the only" instead.

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That was the REAL story here. But TFP only mentioned it in passing.

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https://lesliebienen.substack.com/p/seek-and-ye-shall-find?r=86doz

I wrote about this on my substack recently. Pasteurization works very well. I do think that agencies tasked with protecting health are wayyy too cosy with industry though--in this case, dairy. Why should dairy operations refuse to test cattle or the people that work with them?

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"agencies tasked with protecting health are wayyy too cosy with industry though"

They Always Are.

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After reading this, I still consider Daniel DeFoe's "Journal of the Plague Year" to be the best book written on the subject of human responses to pandemic outbreaks.. It has no science in it, but it does describe everything else that happens - fear, scapegoating, superstitious beliefs, government obfuscation followed by government overreach - it just has it all.

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If you drink raw milk, you’re on your own. Not worth worrying about that.

It should be easy to confirm whether pasteurized milk is free of this virus or not.

But I would be interested about human to human transmission after a dairy worker contracts some version of upper respiratory tract illness. And also if it’s affecting dairy cattle, whether it affects other cattle as well.

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Wait, the sad and the insecure can use botulinum--a pathogen that I think is especially terrifying--to distort their natural looks, but now my bowl of shredded wheat is a threat? I hope they outlaw raw milk and reform farming practices before they upend our refrigerators.

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The real test will come if and when the virus jumps to pigs. Didn't see this mentioned in the article.

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Will the people in Congress who raised such a fuss about the origin of COVID support investigating the milk supply when it's likely going to affect their states? I doubt it.

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Readers of this article may find another article interesting: https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/01/bird-flu-pasteurization-inactivates-h5n1-in-milk/. Summarizing, there has been extensive testing of pasteurized milk and no evidence that the virus can survive it.

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