© PHILIPPE HUGUEN / AFPFILE PHOTO: Chickens at a henhouse near Loon-Plage in France. France is one of several European countries now battling a highly contagious strain of bird flu.
France has culled 600,000 to 650,000 chickens, ducks and other poultry over the past month, officials said Friday, in a race to contain a bird flu virus threatening to become the fourth major outbreak in the country since 2015.
The Agriculture Ministry reported virus clusters
at 26 factory farms, mainly in the southwest — home to France's lucrative foie gras pate industry — as well as 15 cases in wild fowl and three at barnyards.
Several European countries are now battling a highly contagious flu strain, H5N1, just a year after a similar virus decimated flocks.
Belgium and Britain have announced outbreaks, while Czech veterinarians said Wednesday that 80,000 birds would be culled at a single farm where over 100,000 animals have died from the virus since last week.
Comment: The irony in all of this is that people being barred from taking molnupiravir and paxlovir are being done a huge favor. So the people who are set to receive the most damage from these dodgy drugs are minorities. In other words, progressive racism will detrimentally affect the same communities they think they're helping - nothing new under the sun.
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