This video is really informative. She even explains why bird flu is always named H#N#, etc.
But the bottom line is that she says it's a real threat.
I remember a lot of pandemic scares throughout my life, and it always felt like Chicken Little...SARS, bird flu, swine flu, MERS, West Nile, Zika and so on.
None turned into a real pandemic of the level COVID did. But maybe that is because they were controlled. I remember that Obama asked Congress for $1 billion in emergency funding to combat Zika, and part of the response was that the CDC sprayed the southeast USA with an anti-mosquito poison, which then was criticized because it killed off a billion bees and potentially poisoned drinking water, and it turned out that 'indoor mosquitoes' spread Zika, anyway, and those mosquitoes mostly would not be exposed to outdoor poison sprays. Oops! Nevertheless, Zika did not catch on here.
Even after COVID, "bird flu" just doesn't sound really threatening because there have been several bird flu threats over several years that never rose to meet the levels of the hype.
And post-COVID, I feel really stupid for not buying into the hype because now I finally know why public-health experts panic over this stuff.
Years ago, I interviewed an antibiotics researcher from the CDC and she said one of the greatest threats to humanity is the threat of zoonotic infectious disease transfer from animals to humans combined with antimicrobial drug resistance caused not by overprescribing antibiotics to human beings, but because the animal-farming industry feeds unmeasured huge heaps of antibiotics to farm animals to accelerate their growth so they can be killed and sold as meat more quickly for bigger profit. She said the CDC and HHS have zero say over that practice because it falls under the departments of agriculture and commerce, even though it is a top public health threat. THAT scared me.