A Great Bird Flu Find

Nightline last evening did a piece on the bird flu. I was joyous at this, because readers of this site know I don't think this issue is discussed enough in mainstream media. Anyway, a housekeeping issue first. Several posts ago, I mentioned that if the NSA was discussing this, we should be. Silly me to confuse the NSA with the Council on Foreign Relations. Ha ha, have your laugh at my expense, because I'm laughing with you as to how I could be so stupid.
Anyway, browsing today at the CFR's website, I found this transcript of a discussion on the Threat of a Global Pandemic. In part:

"One of the things we're very worried about in today's situation versus 1918 is that, in fact, we have so many new hosts available, that virus can transmit between those billions and billions of chickens in one year more so today than it used to be able to do in a whole century."

Scared yet? No? Okay, how about:

"The difference with this situation is, unlike 1957 and '68 where, yes, we had thousands and thousands of deaths, even in a place like the United States, this virus has the characteristics of killing like 1918 did, or 1830, where it actually turns your immune system on its head, and it causes that part to be the thing that kills you.
In 1830--or excuse me, in 1918, the vast majority of deaths were healthy people between 20 and 40 years of age whose own immune system killed them. And it wasn't the very young and the very old. Today we don't have much better tools to handle that situation than we did in 1918. As I noted in my article, in this country today we have 105,000 mechanical ventilators. On any one given day, 70-80,000 are in use, just with routine medical care, and during just a mild flu season we get right up to the 105,000, and we're moving ventilators around like we do donated organs, to make sure that they're there. We have no capacity. So what we're worried about is that this virus is due to spin out again of this bird population, as Laurie pointed out. This time, if it is the H5, it has all the bad characteristics of causing this kind of severe problem."

Read the whole thing. Then tell me we should trust China with
anything until they become transparent about this issue.