Experts: Please Begin Panicking Over Bird Flu. Us: No. Experts: (Sob)

There is a well hammered cliche which nails the problem about which an Expert knows only his narrow level of expertise too well, but we avoid all cliches with the same vigor we reject all calls to panic over routine disease.

Which is what Experts who know only the minutiae of H5N1 want us to do. “Panic like it’s 2020!” they ask us. They are tiring of asking us politely.

Remember Wenn? A physician who during the covid panic demanded the unvaccinated be welded into their homes. It’s tempting to suppose Wenn drew upon her Chinese heritage for this authoritative notion. But expecting deference because of her credentialed and awarded expertise explains her attitude better. She hit upon the idea of home imprisonment, and therefore, to her, the idea was justified because she was an Expert speaking ex cathedra.

Wenn is back and insisting on a new panic. “Bird flu,” she told the handful of viewers on Face the Nation, “is becoming a major threat”. By this becoming she asked us to imply that it is already a major threat.

How much of a threat? She said “we have 66 cases of bird flu in humans” in the once United States. This is a number, I calculate for mathematically challenged readers, that represents 0.0000002% of the population. Wenn frets the true number may be even higher. Maybe, I wonder, as high as 67. We don’t know, she says, because we aren’t doing enough testing.

Testing ran amok during the covid panic, which counted for both lengthening and broadening the frenzy. People would—and some still do!—obsessively test themselves. Only to learn, usually, that they were fine. But the lesson they took from these negative tests was the same as Wenn asks us to take from that becoming. The test could have been positive! Solution? Test more!

I don’t know how many diseases exist. There is a database, Malacards, which lists about 20,000. This is likely an undercount because, of course, medical knowledge has not reached its zenith. But let’s use the figure. Do you know if you have any or all of these diseases? Don’t answer. You are not an Expert. You have not tested. Your lowly uncredentialed untutored unExpert opinion cannot be taken as authoritative.

Solution? Test. Often. For each potentially fatal disease. Begin each morning with a full-body MRI. One can be never be too sure!

Now Wokepedia tells us that in twenty one years between 2023 and 2003 the “World Health Organization has recorded 948 cases of confirmed H5N1 influenza, leading to 464 deaths.” Confirmed, you will have noted. This is 22 deaths per year, for an annual global death rate of about 0.0000000028. Which means many more people die yearly of scooter accidents than of bird flu.

I pulled that scooter out of the air. Substitute for it what you will. Because almost every cause of death will be greater than bird flu. It would be a sin to laugh that 12 people alone were killed by, not scooters, but the more morally correct e-scooters in Great Britain in 2022. Don’t even ask about India. Topping 22 annual deaths in 8 billion people is the easiest task you will ever assign a statistician.

The ordinary person would conclude from these facts that there is no special reason to be concerned about bird flu. That, indeed, one spends his time more profitably by watching for scooters. Conclusion? Experts can be ignored. Not about their expertise in the pathology of the particulars, but for what the disease means and what is best to do about it.

Experts are more prone to scientism than ordinary people. They find it difficult to separate their opinions on right and wrong, best and worst, from their specialized knowledge, for which they are used to and expect deference. They find it surprising that they don’t receive the same honor when people react negatively to calls for nation-wide testing for a small threat.

It’s not only Experts. It’s Experts’ fanboys. Experts’ stans. Experts’ sychophants. This is a class of people almost entirely comprised of other Experts, but from different fields. They people react as strongly as Experts, or even more vehemently, to disobedience of Experts.

The “rationlists” (defined as a member of the Expert Cheering Squad) at Marginal Revolution fit this bill. One writes “I remain stunned at how poorly we are responding to the threat from H5N1.” Since nothing in particular is happening to people (though farmed birds are taking it in the neck), it seems to me we are doing well by remaining calm.

Take Sabine Hossenfelder, an Expert on a particular sub-sub-branch of physics. She isn’t taking well the indifference we are showing over attempts to juice a covid-like panic over bird flu. Instead of taking the happy news that two decades of observation proves bird flu to be little threat, she focuses on the number of fatalities among confirmed cases, a highly Expert-tinged number.

This is the known case-fatality rate, which is, as we see by simple division, about 50%. This number sets Hasenpeffer’s heart aflutter. The problem is, or should be, obvious. Death from bird flu is such a rare thing that we have no idea what the infection fatality rate really is, which is the number of people who died divided by who got infected. As Wenn emphasized, this is unknown.

But since we’ve only seen 22 deaths a year, most who get infected aren’t dying, and obviously the vast majority are not even seeking treatment. Or, if they do, their maladies aren’t being put down to bird flu. So the 50% is the wrong number.

Yet there is good news! There still room for worry, Hossenfelder says. “It’s only a matter of time until the current strain mutates and human-to-human transmission starts. This is not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”

True enough, as long as we let “when” be set indefinitely into the future. But again there is no reason to panic because we recall that almost all mutations toward increasing infectiousness are also to less deadliness. If bird flu becomes catchy, then it becomes disease 20,001 added to the list.

All the Experts I’ve seen on bird flu keep asking what they assume is a rhetorical question, “What did we learn from covid?” I have the answer. We learned that idiot panic kills. We learned that “solutions” can be worse than the disease. We learned that Experts cannot be trusted without being questioned.

We also learned that Experts would have you forget these lessons.

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