(Natural News)—We all know what can go wrong when labs experiment with dangerous pathogens, so why is the U.S. government carrying out bird flu experiments in conjunction with the U.K. and China? That’s the question lawmakers are asking, particularly because taxpayers are footing the $1 million bill.
Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) sent a letter to USDA secretary Tom Vilsack last week demanding information about its spending on the “dangerous bird flu experiments,” which she says involve a “highly pathogenic avian influenza virus.” In a disturbing coincidence, one of the researchers who is part of the project via the Chinese Academy of Sciences is Wenjun Liu, who Ernst says is affiliated with a pathogens lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology where the COVID-19 pandemic is believed to have originated.
The project was made possible by a $1 million grant from the Biden administration for lab virology experiments exploring the strains of the avian influenza virus that are believed to pose the biggest risk to human and avian populations. It runs through March 2026.
One of the viruses they will be working with is H7N9, a strain that first infected animals and humans in China in 2013 and causes most patients to become seriously ill. Another is the “highly pathogenic” H5NX, which can lead to neurological complications in humans. They will also be working with the H9N2 strain, which is also capable of infecting humans.
Of particular concern is the Chinese component of the experiment. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is controlled by the CCP, will be tasked with conducting tests that involve infecting vaccinated Mallard ducks, Japanese quail, Chinese geese and chickens to assess how transmissible the virus is and its potential to be transmitted to “mammalian hosts.”
Ernst asked Vilsack to provide information about any safeguards that have been put in place and whether these experiments involve dangerous gain of function research. This is the type of controversial research that was carried out at the Wuhan lab and involves conducting experiments that make pathogens stronger and more transmissible so that researchers can gain a better understanding of their potential to create pandemics.
She told the New York Post that switching from bats, the animals that were used in the experiments that led to the pandemic, to birds only means that there will be even more pathogens circulating that have the potential to cause pandemics. Therefore, she believes that the USDA should have been more cautious about signing on for this type of research.
She stated: “The health and safety of Americans are too important to just wing it, and Biden’s USDA should have had more apprehension before sending any taxpayer dollars to collaborate with the CCP on risky avian flu research.”
“Here’s my warning: The Biden administration should be walking on eggshells until they cut off every cent going to our adversaries. We cannot allow what happened in Wuhan to happen again,” she added.
In her letter to Vilsack, she cited the notoriously loose safety standards in Chinese labs as another cause for concern.
Some of the bird flu testing involved in the project will be conducted in Athens, Georgia, at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. Statistical modeling will take place at the University of Edinburgh’s Roslyn Institute.
Risky gain-of-function research projects violate federal policies
A recent federal government report on the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Institutes of Health revealed that more than $2 million of taxpayer funds had been sent to Chinese research institutions in Wuhan via sub-grants, including more than $1.4 million that went to EcoHealth alliance to fund the lab’s “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains.”
These experiments were a violation of federal policies pertaining to gain of function research.
Unfortunately, as long as similar experiments continue to receive funding, there is a very real possibility that another lab leak could spur a new pandemic.
Sources for this article include:
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
