Elon Musk Once Slammed 'Fauci Fan Club,' Now Bird Flu In Cats, Cows And Humans Puts Pandemic Research Under Renewed Fire

Over the past 20 years, more than 400 million birds have either died from bird flu or from being culled to prevent its spread.

Now, recent cases of bird flu in cats, cows and humans have raised the alarm of another serious pandemic.

Bird flu is of particular concern to epidemiologists because of how lethal it is when humans get infected, with mortality rates around 50%.

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The good news for humans is that so far, it's proven hard to catch. Close contact with sick birds presents the highest risk of infection for the relatively rare disease.

The possibility of a mutation increasing the transmissibility of bird flu has scientists on high alert and has put renewed attention on controversial gain-of-function research.

Gain-of-function research focuses on strengthening a pathogen's ability to cause disease with the stated goal of helping scientists understand a pathogen's pandemic-producing potential and helping prepare pandemic-prevention efforts. 

It's controversial because of the possibility of accidental or intentional lab leaks of even more dangerous viruses than nature would have created.

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Bird flu has a precedent of being looped into the gain-of-function research controversy.

As far back as 2013, scientists sought an ethics review by former President Barack Obama's bioethics committee for bird flu gain-of-function research after multiple 2011 studies modified bird flu to spread through the air among ferrets.  

At the time, the Foundation for Vaccine Research warned that an accidental release of a lab-modified bird flu that could spread between humans could “cause a global pandemic of epic proportions that would dwarf the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed over 50 million people.” 

Tesla Inc. TSLA CEO Elon Musk has been critical of gain-of-function research, tying Dr. Anthony Fauci, former chief medical officer to the president of the United States, into the controversy. Musk once posted on Twitter that his pronouns are "Prosecute/Fauci" and before he bought the platform, publicly slammed an old Twitter Slack channel called Fauci Fan Club.

Musk's Fauci Fan Club remark was part of a thread on the X platform that he now owns, in which he accused Fauci of backing gain-of-function research.

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The controversy around bird flu experiments has not let up.

Earlier this year, U.S. Sen. Joni Ernest (R-Iowa) sought more information on a $1 million grant by the Biden administration supporting "dangerous bird flu experiments" in tandem with the Chinese government.

While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says the risk to the public "remains low" for now, monitoring for a worsening bird flu situation could be another tail risk investors need to account for.