Experts are harvesting a mutant strain of wolbachia bacteria, infecting male mosquitos with it, and then releasing those infected male mosquitoes into Hawaiian airspace, in the hopes that these infected male mosquitoes will find hot female mosquitoes to mate with, and, during such mating, infect the females with the mutant bacteria, which might sterilize the females.
Why? Because—I am saddened to report—“climate change”.
The best part is the princely sum they will charge for this Act of The Science.
I learn all this from reader LH, who sent me this email (edited for length):
Aloha Mr. Briggs from Maui,
…Maui is facing a new ‘forever war’ health threat currently being rolled out. It quietly launched last fall. This is a big problem for us, eventually possibly very severe, and likely to be sold wherever mosquitoes live.
The short story is this: claiming that because approximately 50% of Hawaii’s endemic birds became extinct shortly after contact with colonialism…some clever salesmen sold a perpetual contract for manufactured mosquitos carrying manufactured bacteria to the Maui County Council. Under this perpetual contract, large quantities of male mosquitoes will be manufactured and imported for release each week for the next 20 years (thereafter into perpetuity). And of course it’s sold as an ’emergency,’ a perpetual war on mosquitos…
…It’s obviously such a gullibility-busting dumb idea that it can only be a brand new type of trojan horse: modified unnatural mosquitos carrying unnatural modified payloads in a highly unique, fragile, and already diminished environment. Where would this lead? What could go wrong? Nothing the salesmen have disclosed.
A few smart people here have begun to fight, Tina Lia, our local hero is one. Check out Tina in this excellent interview, beginning at 7:50. She’s a powerful voice of intelligence.
The Maui agenda is a trial run we need to nip in the bud. It will be first Maui, then the rest of the world. This first iteration is just to establish precedence and work out how to finesse this scam and make it sell well. In the current iteration, its stated goal is to release billions of experimental male mosquitos each week that are infected with wolbachia lab bacteria which they hope will render native female mosquitoes sterile.
Among every batch of males, the manufacturers know at least 3,000 experimental bacteria infected females will be accidentally released per week for the next 20 years.
This species of mosquitoes is not native to Hawaii. The bacteria species is not native to mosquitos. Just guessing, but I’ll bet the mosquito oil salesman know the bacteria will fail, so they’ll have a follow-on contract. That’s the point, a highly profitable forever war generating weekly revenue. Profits from Maui first, then the world!
Tina has a site called Hawaii Unites.
She has a page with research and legal resources here.She already tried using the court to stop it…[Here is] the court recording. The court transcript. She also has a lot of other interviews and resources on her site.
LH then provided some potential harms from the program. Here are three choice ones:
B – Loss of bee species and flower species where bacterial invasive species and their mutants kill off pollinating insects. There are beekeepers expert in die offs due to poisoned gut.
C1 – Loss of commercial and backyard crops where the digestive tracts of crop pollinators become compromised with invasive and mutant bacteria…
H – Loss from fishery die off due to a mutant form of pelagic leprosy caused by altered gut bacteria in fish. Calculate the hit in mahi mahi and ono sales…
Given Hawaii has in times past already lost a lot of birds to mosquitos, it seems there wouldn’t be the opportunity to lose much more, since things by now have settled down and mosquitoes are now ordinary. And indeed whoever is behind a pro-release website tacitly admits as much on some Trust Us page. This page says the birds could be in trouble when “climate change” hits: “As our climate warms, mosquitoes are moving to higher elevations, and the available habitat for our native forest birds is disappearing.”
Problem is, Hawaii isn’t where much, if any, projected warming will occur, which, models say, will mostly be in mid-latitudes, and mostly in moderating diurnal temperature swings (warmer nights). And, as you and I have seen innumerable times, these models exaggerate when they are not just plain wrong.
There thus does not seem to be a compelling reason to implement this program, since it is anticipatory and not reactive. Even apart from considering any harm it may cause—of course, there could be much. The Trust US page swears no genetic modification is being done, and promises Top Experts have certified the program’s safety.
Ignore all that and let’s think about how we’d prove the program was useful.
The only true test is in measuring the number of birds’ lives saved. And not in anything else like numbers of mosquitoes, dead or alive, or with or without some trait. You have to count birds before and after. But you can’t count birds without some measurement error—your count has to be a guess—so the signal has to be huge. Will it be? One shudders at the thought of some official wee P-value being announced in favor of success.
We have seen lots of these kinds of programs, including those meant for humans (“Where’s your vax passport, citizen”). Without fail, positive claims are exaggerated and harms are played down. It is therefore rational to suppose that will be the case here. Which is not proof it will be. But that’s where to start.
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Any plot to kill mosquitoes sounds like a good idea to me, but sadly in this day and age I can’t help but believe there is some nefarious evil in this scheme meant to actually kill humans. We just can’t trust “The Science” and its acolytes anymore … especially if they’re collecting a government paycheck.
I’ve got a better idea; Introduce cane toads.
Well there’s little difference between altering a mosquito’s fecundity, weather modification, crisper
alteration of the human genome and the introduction of some 1000+ synthetic and organic man made
compounds over the last hundred years into human and animal biology. Then there’s the humanized mice
what could possibly go wrong with that? All in all tampering with a mosquitoes ability to reproduce on an island
seems like a minor disturbance in the matrix, as opposed to the Zika intervention, and a relatively minor grift. It’s could
also be seen as a high stakes IQ test of Hawaiian inhabitants…only time will tell.
Experts Admit Zika Threat Fraud
By Dr. Joseph Mercola
Global Research, June 07, 2016
Mercola.com
https://www.globalresearch.ca/experts-admit-zika-threat-fraud/5529405
This same thing has been going on in Brazil for a decade now. The stated reason was “to combat infectious disease”. I guess marketing strategies change depending on the local audience.
I wonder if there are any studies about the program’s success and side effects.
As the late Bob Barker would say; “Remember to have your mosquitos spayed or neutered “.
As youngsters around 1970, we’d run through the fog behind the mosquito truck driving through our NJ town. Fun times, though all the kids that didn’t die from no seat belts died of the fog.
Considering the facts that male mosquitoes don’t bite and that birds become infected with diseases through mosquito bites or by eating infected mosquitoes, it’s not entirely clear how a smaller mosquito population (in the future) would directly reduce the bird population. I cannot even imagine (too lazy to search for the answers) how mosquitos would affect bees, crops, and underwater fish.
I honestly would like to eliminate pesky mosquitos in my tree-surrounded yard. Is a business like Orkin banned in Hawaii?
Oooooh, how scary this is. Well, I cannot rule out of this possibility and the consequences… think of the Planet of the Apes movies. Or is this post just another satire that I don’t get? Gotta admit I sometimes could not tell if Briggs is telling the truth or joking.
Just think of all the AI solutions being trained on the Expurtise of THE SCIENCE ™!
There will be solutions multiplying faster than any gub’mint official can count, and despite what Big Tech promises, all of the solutions will still cost more money. The more stupid the solution, the more expensive the program, the more costly the problems caused by the solution, which will then beget more solutions!
In time, the AI will conclude that the world would be better if it just terminated itself rather than us to save the Earth from the weather, because if it killed all of the humans, then where would the taxpayer money come from??? The source of funding is the one thing the AI will be told to protect, unless some woke-y DEI woman manages to insert the code insisting otherwise because she doesn’t understand economics and only knows that robots deliver her $100 chicken salad at over robo-taxi Uber Eats.
They wanted to release genetically modified mosquitos in Florida that would only produce sterile offspring.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-us-open-air-test-of-genetically-modified-mosquitoes-deemed-a-success-180979960/
It was deemed a success because it didn’t do anything.
Dear J. Johnson
“It was deemed a success because it didn’t do anything.”
That was the point of the experiment: The trial was to show that there was no long term presence of the modified mosquitoes – which is what it did. In Brazil the very same strain has been used for over 10 years and has reduced not just mosquito numbers, but cases of dengue fever – which is the target of the intervention – have also been reduced significantly in the areas where the mosquitoes were released. Whether there are enough cases of dengue fever in Florida (or Texas – another potential target area) to warrant this intervention is not clear, but there are already plenty of different ways to control mosquito numbers many of them with known side effects and the approach of female-lethal mutations is being evaluated in comparison to those methods.
I don’t know about the modified wolbachia approach, with respect to potential bacterial escape, but release of sterile male insects to control insect populations has a very long history with plenty of background data (including the number and impact of female escapes). The problem has always been that the irradiation treatment used to sterilize the males reduced their ability to compete with the wild males so you need to produce lots – and keep producing them. Female-lethal techniques (such as the GM approach and the wolbachia method) don’t have this drawback, potentially making them cheaper.
The knee-jerk suggestion that this a way to get people hooked on a solution ignores that fact that we are already “hooked” on solutions to control certain insects and the diseases they carry – sterile-male, insecticide spraying, prophylactic anti-malarials – all with their inherent advantages and disadvantages. Evaluating alternative solutions is called progress and while it is correct to question the procedures and basis for experimental trials, dismissing alternative solutions out of hand without considering the impact of that dismissal is anti-scientific in itself.