Covid was "special" in a lot of ways (though of course it wasn't a lab leak.) Flu pandemics can be extremely deadly, however:

- 'Long flu' is not a thing (it's actually possible but it's rare, mild and short)

- Our baseline immune competence would probably be much higher (even though neutralizing antibodies to H5N1 are low in the population.) This should be particularly true for people whose first flu as children was with Influenza A.

- Unlike Covid, no reason to suspect H5N1 will cause diabetes, heart disease, or various other kinds of permanent damage. It's probably also unlikely to cross the blood-brain barrier.

- There are various vaccine efforts already in the pipeline.

I wouldn't expect it to be like Covid in 2020 but maybe like in 2023, after it went from the 3rd leading cause of death to the 10th.

Feel the need to point out that before it made the evolutionary leap to ready human-to-human transmission there was no reason to suspect what would become SARS-CoV-2 of being capable of causing long-term effects either.

We have no real idea what a highly human-to-human infectious novel H5N1 variant would do in humans, long-term, precisely because we haven’t infected enough people with it to find out.

This is true. However, we've had zoonotic spillovers since before the dawn of civilization, and the Covid pandemic stands out in modern times in the ways I listed.

There's no reason to suspect the next pandemic will stand out in the same ways, or as much in general, particularly if it's Influenza.

The 1917-1918 flu pandemic also stood out for the many novel short-term and long-term effects, most of which we are still learning about because records and data collection were so poor. Every new spillover is an opportunity to learn what can happen that was not captured in our very bad memory of such events, effectively none of which have been rigorously recorded until the mid-20th century.

There is, in other words, no reason to suspect any particular outcome. Given how poorly we handled the still-ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic there is zero reason for optimism.

> 'Long flu' is not a thing (it's actually possible but it's rare, mild and short)

That is not at all demonstrated scientifically.

"Long Covid" took quite a while to be demonstrated and we were monitoring everything like a hawk. "Long flu" has no such monitoring.

As soon as we had the tools and started looking for correlations, the collateral damage that viruses do pops up (HPV and cancer; Epstein-Barr and MS; Herpes and dementia).

Given that, the Bayesian prior favors "Long Flu exists and we just haven't paid attention" rather than "Long Flu doesn't exist."

My suspicion is that we're going to find more and more of these correlations as our medical ability to deal with viruses improves.

> "Long Covid" took quite a while to be demonstrated and we were monitoring everything like a hawk. "Long flu" has no such monitoring.

It wasn't demonstrated because of the monitoring. It was demonstrated by the droves of desperate patients who kept banging on the clinics' doors and wouldn't take no for an answer. Claiming that 'long flu' is the same thing is (IMO) just a different variety of Covid denialism.

Oddly, back in my prehistory (2005 to be precise,) I did a PhD-level internship at a hospital preparing for a possible H5N1 outbreak. This was based on the then-recent experience of what is now known as SARS-CoV-1.

The information we had at the time indicated that H5N1 could result in multiple organ failure. It's been literally two decades (!) and I couldn't tell you the specifics, but yes, H5N1 was deemed to be possibly 'special' in some way.

I'd link you to some resources about this, but your googling's as good as mine, and my information is indeed twenty years out of date.

All the same, as tempting as it is to reasssure oneself with rules of thumb, it's even better to reassure (or perhaps unsettle) oneself with genuine facts, and there's no shortage of these regarding H5N1. I know with certainty that we've been worried about it for decades :)

The scariest thing about COVID wasn’t diabetes or heart disease but the brain damage (microhemorrhages) and in particular the dementia-associated lesions it appears to cause in long-COVID patients.

is that a reference to COVID? I thought the lab leak hypothesis was stronger than the bat cave hypothesis now?

Yes, it’s a reference to SARS-CoV-2, and no, the lab leak “hypothesis” absolutely isn’t the stronger one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Origin_of_SARS-Co...

that makes sense, thanks for pointing it out! I was going off reports related to this: https://oversight.house.gov/release/classified-state-departm...

unfortunately I'm not able to work out how the claim in the article follows from the linked documents, so effectively I'm only able to go off the "headline".

One might assume that a house.gov URL would imply some degree of credibility. This particular link, however, is closer to something that would be found on the ground of said bat cave.

First off, question the source: the current Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic includes as one of its majority members the inestimable Marjorie Taylor Greene… consider, carefully, just how much overlap there is between your definition of “credible” and that of someone so inclined to blame wildfires in California on space-born lasers that demonstrably don’t exist.

Second, note that all that news report actually includes is a call to declassify a classified document, the only non-redacted portions of which are section headings that, for all we normies know, may have been authored by MTG or any number of nutjobs like her. One of the easiest possible ways for a partisan committee to propagandize is to produce documents with contents that can’t (for whatever reason) be declassified and full of leading headings that support their own circularly-arrived-at conclusion.

Virologists and epidemiologists the world over are extremely comfortable that it was a zoonotic transfer. The genome of the virus supports that, as does all available backtracing of the early transmissions. There is zero publicly disclosed physical evidence of a lab origin, there’s just a non-zero chance of a lab origin. Well there’s also a non-zero chance the Earth is flat, the moon landings were faked, and Marjorie Taylor Greene is a genius-level intellect… but me, I’d want physical evidence of any of those before staking myself against the consensus of those with real expertise in the matter.

We know for absolute certain that top officials tried to eliminate the lab leak theory and discredit it, and there's testimony.

So while we don't know if it was a lab leak, we know that the top people that would be the ones involved in it, tried to stop the discussion about it and then lied about trying to hide it. One can make their own assumptions as to why top officials would illegally try to stop discussion of fake conspiracy theories that they don't have relation to.

Considering the complete 180 and sudden viability and admission of supression around the lab leak theory in Wuhan I can 100% see why lableak conspiracy is going over level 9000 for any such thing now :D

I have not done any kind of research into if the Wuhan lableak story is true or not, but the admitted supression by the govt has made sure I cannot trust any kind of conclusion around it.

Exactly why would a government not suppress a conspiracy theory? More importantly, why would you trust any government that didn’t at least attempt to suppress conspiracy theories?

Because they keep turning out to be true?

Just the true ones.

Name three.

Since when is the government supposed to suppress anything?

I don’t mind if the government tries to suppress the ideas that the Earth is flat, that birds aren’t real, that the moon landings were faked, that the four elements are air, water, earth, and fire, etc.

We sometimes call that education.

Since at least the moment the species developed the concept of law and a government to enforce it.

Oh so you guys have found the mythical animal reservoir for COVID-19?