Eugene Robinson

I see that Eugene Robinson is still with the Washington Post, while many other WaPo writers have fled the organization in favor of The Atlantic or The New York Times in the wake of Jeff Bezos Trump ass-kissing and heavy-handed tactics. If Bezos starts stifling Eugene, I wonder how much longer he will stay where he is?

Time caught up with Biden. It will also prove him right.

Biden inherited a mess. He leaves the U.S. in far better shape, at home and abroad.

by Eugene Robinson

Jan 10, 2025 

It is easy to forget how desperate things were on Jan. 20, 2021, when Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. became the 46th president of the United States.

Just two weeks earlier, thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters had stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to keep Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory. The nation was at the height of the coronavirus pandemic; in that month, 3,000 Americans died daily from covid-19. There were newly developed, lifesaving vaccines, thanks to the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed— but there was no viable plan to distribute them. Schools and workplaces were shuttered; hotels and airlines had no customers; restaurants tried to survive by offering take-out. The U.S. economy and the world economy were on life support.

Four years later, the country is in vastly better shape, at home and abroad. The economy, though still recovering, is the envy of the developed world; U.S. stock markets are at or near all-time highs. Our political system has survived. We have made overdue investments in infrastructure and technology. And in a world full of conflict and danger, American troops are not at war for the first time in a generation.

History may fault Biden for the way his term in office ended. By any objective standard, however, he was a very good president whose accomplishments will benefit the nation for many years to come.

Biden’s critics find it convenient to look past what may be remembered as his biggest success: He guided the country through, and ultimately out of, the pandemic. The virus has not entirely gone away, but getting vaccinated is as easy as dropping by one’s neighborhood pharmacy. And regardless of what Republican polemicists want us to believe, it was during Trump’s presidency when government officials imposed draconian anti-covid rules that sent us into dour isolation — and during Biden’s when we regained the freedom to go about our lives as we pleased.

On the economy, Biden’s record is remarkable. The pandemic shutdown in the spring of 2020 had caused unemployment to peak at 14.8 percent. When Biden became president, joblessness had eased considerably but was still elevated at 6.3 percent. Unemployment declined steadily during Biden’s first year in the White House until, in December 2021, it dipped to just 3.9 percent — and remained at or below 4 percent for 30 straight months. Biden’s was a “jobs, jobs, jobs” economy.

First Trump and then Biden opened the spigots of government spending to keep Americans afloat during the pandemic. To be sure, the resulting inflation was not as “transitory” as the Biden administration said it would be. But the independent Federal Reserve brought rising prices under control — and did so without sending the economy into a recession. Such “soft landings” are rare, and Biden has one on his ledger sheet.

In an era of bitter partisanship and polarization, Biden succeeded with Congress where his predecessors had failed. The Trump administration repeatedly promised an “infrastructure week” but never delivered; Biden won approval of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Another major piece of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, made the nation’s biggest investment ever in fighting climate change — more than $400 billion. Still another bill, the Chips and Science Act, marked $280 billion to boost scientific research and spur domestic manufacturing of cutting-edge semiconductors.

These initiatives will produce returns in the years and decades to come. When future presidents smile for the cameras at ribbon-cuttings, remember that it was Biden who laid the foundations.

In foreign policy, too, Biden and his team have ably acted in the national interest with an eye toward the future. Begin with the bottom line: For the first time in two decades, there are no U.S. troops deployed in combat anywhere in the world. President George W. Bush got us into wars; Biden finally got us out of them.

Without question, the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 was chaotic and tragic. Thirteen American service members were killed in a terrorist attack amid a sudden collapse of public order in Kabul that Biden and his planners should have anticipated.

That mistake cost Biden dearly in public support. It also obscured the administration’s subsequent foreign policy successes.

Without putting boots on the ground, the United States and its allies fortified Ukraine with the arms and intelligence it needed to fight invading Russian troops to a stalemate. Effectively, Biden forced Russian President Vladimir Putin to pay a much bigger price in manpower and materiel than he had anticipated — weakening the Russian military at minimal cost to the United States.

Taking a broader view, prior administrations had talked about making a foreign policy “pivot” toward Asia as a way to counter the rise of China as a superpower. Biden actually executed the maneuver.

Two new alliances — the AUKUS security partnership, among Australia, Britain and the United States, and the Quad partnership, among the United States, Australia, India and Japan — greatly boost American influence in the region. Biden’s diplomatic envoys also helped reinforce the United States’ relationship with the Philippines and forge closer ties between South Korea and Japan, both of which are U.S. allies.

Chinese President Xi Jinping might still be considering an invasion of Taiwan, but now he has to recalculate the risk.

Many in Biden’s own party are sharply critical of his handling of the war in Gaza. The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and hostage-taking were atrocities, and Israel had the right to respond. Killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and reducing their homes, schools and hospitals to rubble are also atrocities. The fact is that U.S. officials have limited influence over how Israel conducts its military operations — and much less influence over Israeli public opinion, which generally supports the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been waging war.

It is true that the world has become messier on Biden’s watch. But he has kept us out of wars, strengthened our alliances and created obstacles for our strategic adversaries. Those count as successes.

Why, then, does Biden have an approval rating that struggles to reach 40 percent? Why did he have to end his campaign for reelection, abandoning a race he still thinks he could have won? What was his unforgivable sin?

Actually, there were two. One sin was political: Biden failed to address the crisis at the southern border — failed, even, to recognize it as a crisis — until far too late. By the time he finally took executive action that calmed the chaos, the immigration issue had become a millstone he could never remove.

The other sin was actuarial: Biden got old. Worse, he showed his age, reaching the point where he walked and talked unsteadily. None of that said anything about his thinking, but no matter. Voters had the right to decide he looked and sounded too feeble to be president for four more years.

But I am confident that historians, with the clarity of hindsight, will focus less on Biden’s softening voice and tentative gait — and more on all that he managed to achieve in a single term. He was a consequential and farsighted president who leaves the nation much better off than he found it.

By Eugene Robinson

Eugene Robinson writes a column on politics and culture and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at The Washington Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s Style section

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L.A. wildfires

Goddamn, the lies about everything are coming hot and heavy. That seems to be all Trump & the Muskrat know how to do, lie to people and keep them pissed off at the Democrats. Why can't they just deal with the truth? They have MAGA so brainwashed, they think Trump & the Muskrat speak the truth without fail. And everything now seems to be the fault of "diversity." See, cities, fire departments, etc, have been hiring women, blacks, or Hispanics for jobs that white men traditionally got, and so whenever ANYTHING goes wrong, the Conspiracy nuts claim that if a white guy got that job, all would be perfect and hunky-dory. It's such a stupid, racist, and sexist argument, but sadly, it resonates with a lot of stupid, racist sexists.

Lahaina in August 2023

Los Angeles in January 2025. 

We are now learning that one person, so far, has been arrested for starting one of the fires. Arsonists have been with us forever. Some people just love fire. They love to watch it. I wouldn't be surprised if some MAGA asshole started one of the fires. They just hate California. After all, so many "libruls" live there. And they don't stop to think that millions of conservatives live there too.

Jeff Tiedrich had some things to say about the wildfires. His columns are too "busy" to transfer to here, but they are well worth a click.

"no idiots, Los Angeles isn't on fire because of 'diversity.' shut the fuck up." 

Biden's economy

The story below in the New York Times epitomizes the election. Joe Biden has had a very successful term in office, and the economy is humming. Inflation is way down, unemployment is still low, record profits for multiple companies, the infrastructure bill, etc etc.

However, Trump and the right-wing media circus have convinced Trump voters that Biden has been a total disaster and everything is rotten. The lies are so pervasive and persistent it's hard to know what is up, especially if you're already poorly educated. I heard echoes of this everywhere, any time I would tune in to FOX "News" or Newsmax or OAN, not to mention lots of blogs all saying the same thing. The Democrats are destroying the country, Biden is the worst president ever, blah blah blah. Too many believed it and didn't bother to check for themselves.

Trump Sees the US as a 'Disaster.' The Numbers Tell a Different Story

by Peter Baker, New York Times

Jan 5, 2025

To hear President-elect Donald J. Trump tell it, he is about to take over a nation ravaged by crisis, a desolate hellscape of crime, chaos and economic hardship. “Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” he declared on social media last week.

But by many traditional metrics, the America that Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden when he takes the oath for a second time, two weeks from Monday, is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since George W. Bush came into office in 2001.

For the first time since that transition 24 years ago, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days indicate that murders are way down, illegal immigration at the southern border has fallen even below where it was when Mr. Trump left office and roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter-century.

Jobs are up, wages are rising and the economy is growing as fast as it did during Mr. Trump’s presidency. Unemployment is as low as it was just before the Covid-19 pandemic and near its historic best. Domestic energy production is higher than it has ever been.

The manufacturing sector has more jobs than under any president since Mr. Bush. Drug overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years. Even inflation, the scourge of the Biden presidency, has returned closer to normal, although prices remain higher than they were four years ago.

“President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “The U.S. economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post-pandemic than prepandemic.”

Those positive trends were not enough to swing a sour electorate behind Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election, reflecting a substantial gap between what statistics say and what ordinary Americans appear to feel about the state of the country. And the United States clearly faces some major challenges that will confront Mr. Trump as he retakes power.

The terrorist attack by an American man who said he had joined ISIS that killed 14 people in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day served as a reminder that the Islamic State, which Mr. Trump likes to boast he defeated during his previous term, remains a threat and an inspiration to radicalized lone wolves. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are daunting challenges even without U.S. troops engaged in combat there.

Thanks in part to Covid relief spending by both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the national debt has ballooned so much that it now represents a larger share of the economy than it has in generations, other than during the pandemic itself. Families remain pressed by the cost of living, including housing, health care and college tuition. The cost of gasoline, while down from its peak, is still about 70 cents per gallon higher than when Mr. Biden took office.

Moreover, Americans remain as divided as they have been in many years — politically, ideologically, economically, racially and culturally. As healthy as the country may be economically and otherwise, a variety of scholars, surveys and other indicators suggest that America is struggling to come together behind a common view of its national identity, either at home or abroad.

Indeed, many Americans do not perceive the country to be doing as well as the data suggests, either because they do not see it in their own lives, they do not trust the statistics or they accept the dystopian view promoted by Mr. Trump and amplified by a fragmented, choose-your-own-news media and online ecosphere.

Only 19 percent of Americans were satisfied with the direction of the country in Gallup polling last month. In another Gallup survey in September, 52 percent of Americans said they and their own family were worse off than four years ago, a higher proportion than felt that way in the presidential election years of 1984, 1992, 2004, 2012 or 2020.

It was in Mr. Trump’s political interest, of course, to encourage that sentiment and appeal to it during last year’s campaign. He was hardly the first challenger to emphasize the negative to defeat an incumbent president.

Dwight D. Eisenhower disparaged the state of the country when he first ran in 1952, much to the irritation of President Harry S. Truman, only to have John F. Kennedy do the same to him when running in 1960. Kennedy hammered away at a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union that did not exist, then after winning declared that America was in “its hour of maximum danger,” in contrast to Eisenhower’s view of his security record.

“This is a contrast you oftentimes find,” said Michael Beschloss, a historian who has written nine books on the American presidency. “Candidates who are running against incumbent presidents or sitting governments make it sound much worse than it is.”

Still, few have been as extreme in their negative descriptions as Mr. Trump, or as resistant to fact-checking. He has suggested falsely that immigration, crime and inflation are out of control, attributed the New Orleans incident to lax border policies even though the attacker was an American born in Texas and as recently as Friday called the country “a total mess!”

Yet Mr. Trump is moving back into the White House with an enviable hand to play, one that other presidents would have dearly loved on their opening day. President Ronald Reagan inherited double-digit inflation and an unemployment rate twice as high as today. President Barack Obama inherited two foreign wars and an epic financial crisis. Mr. Biden inherited a devastating pandemic and the resulting economic turmoil.

“He’s stepping into an improving situation,” William J. Antholis, director of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which has studied presidential transitions, said of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Antholis compared the situation to President Bill Clinton’s arrival in 1993, when he took over a growing economy and a new post-Cold War order. While the country had already begun recovering from recession during the 1992 election, many voters did not yet feel it and punished President George H.W. Bush.

“The fundamentals of the economy had turned just before the election, and kept moving in the right direction when Clinton took over,” Mr. Antholis recalled.

Much as it did for the first Mr. Bush’s team, the disconnect between macro trends and individual perceptions proved enormously frustrating to Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, who failed to persuade voters during last year’s election that the country was doing better than commonly believed. Rattling off statistics and boasting about the success of “Bidenomics” did not resonate with voters who did not see it the same way.

“Of course, not everyone is enjoying good economic times, as many low-middle income households are struggling financially, and the nation has mounting fiscal challenges,” said Mr. Zandi. “But taking the economy in its totality, it rarely performs better than it is now as President Trump takes office.”

Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said the latest reports demonstrated that Mr. Biden’s policies are working and argued that Republicans should not seek to repeal them once they take control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.

“After inheriting an economy in free-fall and skyrocketing violent crime, President Biden is proud to hand his successor the best-performing economy on earth, the lowest violent crime rates in over 50 years, and the lowest border crossings in over four years,” Mr. Bates said.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, responded by citing the election: “Americans delivered an overwhelming Election Day rebuke of the Biden-Harris administration’s abysmal track record: communities being overrun with millions of unvetted migrants who walked over Biden’s open border, lower real wages, and declining trust in increasingly politicized law enforcement agencies that are unable to even publish accurate crime data.”

Mr. Trump does not have to share a positive view of the situation to benefit from it. When he takes office on Jan. 20, absent the unexpected, he will not face the sort of major immediate action-forcing crisis that, say, Mr. Obama did in needing to rescue the economy from the brink of another Great Depression.

Mr. Trump instead will have more latitude to pursue favored policies like mass deportation of undocumented immigrants or tariffs on foreign imported goods. And if past is prologue, he may eventually begin extolling the state of the economy to claim successes for his policies.

He has already taken credit for recent increases in stock prices even before assuming office. He has a demonstrated skill for self-promotion that eluded Mr. Biden, enabling him to persuade many Americans that the economy during his first term was even better than it actually was.

At the same time, with unemployment, crime, border crossings and even inflation already pretty low, it may be difficult for Mr. Trump to improve on them significantly. Mr. Trump obliquely seemed to acknowledge as much when he noted in a post-election interview with Time magazine that he may not be able to live up to his campaign pledge to lower grocery prices. “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” he said. “You know, it’s very hard.”

On the contrary, Mr. Trump faces the risk that the economy goes in the other direction. Some specialists have warned that a tariff-driven trade war with major economic partners could, for instance, reignite inflation.

N. Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard and chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under the second Mr. Bush, recalled that even his former boss faced significant challenges when he took office in 2001 as the economy was already heading into a relatively mild recession following the bust of the dot-com boom.

“There are no similar storm clouds on the horizon right now,” Mr. Mankiw said. “That is certainly lucky for Mr. Trump. On the other hand, all presidents must deal with unexpected shocks to the economy. We just don’t know yet what kind of shocks President Trump will have to handle.”

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John Pavlovitz

John Pavlovitz is an American former youth pastor (who apparently never molested a single child!) and author, known for his social and political writings from a liberal Christian perspective. He runs a blog called, "Stuff That Needs to be Said."

Liberal Christians are about the only type of Christian that I can respect. They could also be called "Modernist" Christians, as they favor reason, modern knowledge, science, and ethics over doctrinal authority. 

There are so many other "Christian" denominations that I am not going to waste my time here on that. It does seem that many of today's Christians, whatever the denomination, use Christianity as a tool to suppress the rights of the masses, and gain advantage or preferential treatment for themselves, while often never having even read the Bible.

This column is not really about religion, though. It's a look back at Jan 6, 2021, when Trump and his thugs tried to disrupt Congress and keep Trump in the presidency. Trump should have been jailed, but he exploited our justice system to quash charges and stay out of jail. And it feels like the US is slipping into fascism.

All Americans Know January 6th Was An Insurrection. Decent Ones Care.

by John Pavlovitz

Jan 5, 2025

We all saw it.

On January 6th, 2021, many of us watched it in disbelief in real time: the almost incomprehensible sight of thousands of people breaching the very seat of our Government: smashing windows, breaking through doors, setting off tear gas canisters, crushing outnumbered and overmatched Capitol police, and parading unimpeded through the chambers of Congress.

As the chaos unfolded, the questions kept running through the heads of incredulous news anchors and millions of good people:
“How is this happening?”
“Why isn’t anyone stopping them?”
“Where the hell is the National Guard?”
“Why won’t Trump say something?”

With each passing minute, it became more and more difficult to reconcile in our brains, how one of the normally-most-secure sites in America could have been so easily and so quickly overtaken. The scenes of scores of people in body armor and gas masks, desecrating monuments, rooting through offices, and crushing police officers were shocking and sickening.

Yet, as disturbing as the initial images were, what soon became apparent is that this was not some spontaneous display of misplaced outrage produced in a random moment—this was a thoroughly-planned attack on our nation; conceived, coordinated, and aided by Right Wing media members, Republicans in Congress, and by a sitting president.

This unthinkable act of violence was not only an inside job, but one whose genesis came from the very highest level of our public servants and brought us the width of an onion-skin from complete collapse. We were literally a handful of courageous officers, a few quick-thinking politicians, and one or two fortuitous seconds from an overturned election, an installed dictator, and an unrecognizable America.

But perhaps worse than all of all we have learned about January 6th, even more tragic has been the response to that day from people we know and love: an infuriating multiple choice of gaslighting, denial, and complete silence.

The dissonance in them since that day has been profound:

Blue Lives suddenly no longer mattered.
The Law and Order folks now had no use for either.
The God and Country crowd were seemingly able to easily discard both.

And in the days since that day, all their flag-waving histrionics, hand-wringing anthem outrage, and border-defending bravado ended up being nothing but fake news; all that America First chest-bumping and God Bless America showy piety they’ve peddled for four years, proved purely ornamental.

Because when the smoke dissipated and the arrests began and the phone records surfaced and the sheer scope and intent of this day were revealed—they didn’t give a damn.

In fact, if they’re honest, millions of our family members, friends, neighbors, and co-workers are likely only truly upset that the attack was not fully successful. Then, they would not have had to reckon with the evidence or hear the testimony or be accountable for any of this, because their candidate and their party would be controlling the narrative, silencing dissension, and preventing justice. And they would be winning.

It would be a small comfort to dismiss this all as mass ignorance: to tell ourselves the story that Republican voters (especially those we know and love) have been duped by complicit media and corrupt politicians who’ve leveraged their fears, disabled their critical thinking skills, and rendered them unaware of all that unfolded on that day in January—but we would be lying to ourselves.

They know.

Outside of a small percentage of the most deluded and unstable among us, they all know the reality of that day. They saw it, too. They could read the names on the flags surrounding dying officers, hear the familiar FoxNews rhetoric being screamed through the halls of Congress, and they could not avoid the Make America Great Again signaling saturating everything. They know who was responsible for this, what their intentions were, and what the stakes were to our nation. That is precisely why they have spent a year denying, defending, justifying or ignoring it: they wanted it—and that has struck the most vicious blow to our great national fracture, one that we may not be able to recover from.

The deepest wound is knowing that they know, and that it doesn’t matter.

January 6th was a coordinated attempt to kidnap members of Congress, overturn a free and fair election by its people, and install a president whose criminality is simply unprecedented and whose involvement was complete.
It was a threat to our sovereignty.
It was a rejection of our Constitution.
It was antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.
It was the opposite of patriotism.
It was an historic act of treason.
It was a vicious attack on democracy.
It was a partisan act of domestic terrorism.
It was a violent insurrection.

All Americans know this.

All of them.

Only decent ones care.

Only Americans who truly love this nation and what it stands for and what it aspires to and the people who call it home and those who wish to call it home are outraged right now, regardless of their political affiliation.

Everyone else—is simply revealing that they do not.

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Scott Dworkin

Scott Dworkin is another voice for sanity (on Substack) from the left. He's not a conspiracy theorist or a wild-eyed liberal. He's a realist, and a good Democrat. He uses the levers that are available to us to counter Trump. 

I try to find as many of these people as I can to help me cope with the upcoming shitstorm otherwise known as Trump's 2nd term. Perhaps they can help you too.

(Yeah, I'm no conspiracy theorist either but there are signs here and there that this election was manipulated to favor Trump, especially in the swing states, but it could take a while to unveil it. Fucking bastards cannot win fair and square. They have to gerrymander, they have to strike as many people off the voter rolls as possible, they have to restrict polling places in blue cities to suppress the vote, and perhaps worst of all, they lie repeatedly about damn-near everything to keep their voters all hopped up. Where do you think the Cybertruck bomber got his warped ideas about wiping out Democrats? From the sick, diseased right-wing media networks that constantly pump lies and misinformation to their viewers to keep them in the dark. The media landscape in America is disgraceful. Lies are the currency these days.)

Anyway... 

Trump Will Always Be A Convicted Felon, Who Should've Been Disqualified From Running

by Scott Dworkin

Jan 4, 2025

Yesterday, the judge in Trump’s hush money case announced that Donald will still be sentenced for his crimes on January 10th.

Donald has no mandate, seeing how most Americans didn’t vote for him. He will forever be known as a convicted felon who should have already been disqualified from office.

Trump will lie, cheat, steal, and abuse his power in every way imaginable. He should be serving prison time, instead of getting sworn in.

We did everything we legally could to stop this from happening—from uncovering his Russian ties, to running the original impeachment campaign. We came really close, but the system failed us, and now our country will pay the price for it.

I remember calling out Trump on MSNBC in 2016, and how lonely of an island I was on. It took a while to get folks on board with everything we organized. Protests, online actions to push back against him on Twitter, petitions, letters to Senators, calls, etc.

That was more than 8 years ago. Now we are stronger, bigger, and louder than ever before.

Look no further for that proof, than the fact we’ve already sent (drumroll) more than 100,000 letters to Senators opposing Trump’s unhinged and unfit cabinet picks. And we’re going to turn up the volume even more as confirmation hearings begin in the next few weeks.

We’ve already seen Republicans bend to our public pressure, by pushing out Gaetz and getting the House Ethics report about him released.

Trump expects us to cower in fear, but we’ll never bend a knee or kiss the wannabe dictator’s ring. We’ve never backed down before, and won’t be starting now. Yes, we’re getting threats every day, but that just means we are doing something right.

We will once again be leading the charge, pushing back against Trump and maga at a constant, while holding corporate media accountable. We need all hands on deck. If you want to help us stand up to this orange monster, please become a paid subscriber today.

Onward

Scott

Do you agree that Trump should already be in prison? And that he should’ve been disqualified?

Leave a Comment

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bird flu!

Oh boy, it looks like Trumpy might have another virus on the horizon that needs attention. Good luck! This time it's Bird flu, aka H5N1 or avian influenza. We know how he handled the last one (Covid-19). And with that loony goofball RFK, Jr hanging around and squawking bullshit in that cringy raspy voice of his, there will probably be less urgency to deal with H5N1 if needed. I hope some enterprising corporation (or billionaire?) will research it and develop a vaccine. Lots of us Americans still believe in science. This item was found on the IFLScience website.

First Severe Human Infection Of Bird Flu Virus In The US Shows Signs Of Mutation

ROSIE MCCALL, Freelance Writer

December 28, 2024

A patient in Louisiana became severely ill after contracting Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced in a statement on Thursday. This is the first serious case of bird flu affecting a human reported in the US since the outbreak began. An analysis of the virus revealed the existence of mutations that affect the virus’ ability to attach to infected cells.

Following the hospitalization of the patient, researchers compared the genomic sequences of the strain affecting them with those collected from animals including dairy cows, wild birds and poultry. The sample was also compared to those in earlier cases involving humans. The results identify the strain as the D1.1 genotype, different to the B3.13 genotype affecting cattle, poultry and other animals across the country but matching those found in samples from birds on the patient’s property as well as those recently found in wild birds and poultry in other parts of the US. 

However, the results also revealed the presence of mutations not seen in those of the poultry, indicating genetic changes that occurred in the patient post-infection. According to the CDC, these mutations display changes in the hemagglutinin (HA) gene – a gene responsible for helping the virus bind to the infected cell. These mutations occurred at a “low frequency”, meaning they represent a small proportion of the virus sampled. This again suggests that the changes likely took place post-infection, when the virus was replicating, and not before pre-infection or during transmission.

“Although concerning, and a reminder that A(H5N1) viruses can develop changes during the clinical course of a human infection, these changes would be more concerning if found in animal hosts or in early stages of infection (e.g., within a few days of symptom onset) when these changes might be more likely to facilitate spread to close contacts,” the CDC states.

According to the CDC, these mutations are rare but have been reported in previous incidents affecting people in other countries, including a patient in British Columbia, Canada. The changes most commonly occur during severe cases of the disease but don’t show signs of reducing the effectiveness of antiviral drugs when it comes to treating the virus. 

“Overall, the CDC considers the risk to the general public associated with the ongoing U.S. HPAI A(H5N1) outbreak has not changed and remains low,” the CDC states.

“The detection of a severe human case with genetic changes in a clinical specimen underscores the importance of ongoing genomic surveillance in people and animals, containment of avian influenza A(H5) outbreaks in dairy cattle and poultry, and prevention measures among people with exposure to infected animals or environments.”

According to the CDC tracker, there have been 66 confirmed cases of bird flu reported in humans since the start of the outbreak, the majority of which have taken place in California.

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