What changed in the relationship between influenza, poultry and wild birds and who benefits from the response?
By Bronwyn Holm, Earthfood Conversations
I knew these birds before they became a biosecurity problem.
Long before Earthfood was in an ecommerce shop, I consulted in natural-history education associated with the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service Special Projects and with Dr Hugh Lavery, one of Australia's significant waterfowl researchers.
Lavery was not a casual bird observer. He studied waterfowl in Queensland and internationally at the Wildfowl Trust in Britain, the Illinois Natural History Survey in the United States and the Delta research station in Canada for 60 years. He became the founding Director of Research and Planning in the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service. Queensland Parliamentary records describe him as an expert on Queensland waterfowl, ducks and quail and my body of study was under this world acclaimed expert and approved by him.
And part of this, I was involved in creative direction for educating people about Australia's remarkable waterfowl through art and exhibition, as an artist and designer in this sector. A collection representing twelve Australian waterfowl species was produced as meticulously researched antique-style decoys, carved by Col Blumson (Australia's third generation sculpture) and hand-painted by me.
At the American Waterfowl Exhibition in Maryland in 1986, an Australian Black Duck and an Australian Wood Duck from that collection were purchased by Former President George H. W. Bush. I retain the original sales records.
I mention that not for celebrity or nostalgia, but to establish something important.
My interest in waterfowl did not begin with H5N1, a government announcement or something I saw on the internet. It began with observation, our records and formal reserach.
That background is why I am asking a question that deserves considerably more attention than it is receiving:
What happened to avian influenza?
Because the story we are now being told is that wild birds arrive carrying a terrible disease and governments must respond which leaves out an enormous part of the biological history.
Wild waterfowl have always carried influenza
Influenza A viruses are ancient companions of wild aquatic birds. Ducks, geese, swans, shorebirds and other waterbirds form the major natural reservoir for an enormous diversity of influenza A viruses.
That does not mean these birds have historically been flying epidemics.
The natural relationship between many low-pathogenicity avian influenza viruses and their waterfowl hosts is often remarkably tolerant.
The distinction between low-pathogenicity avian influenza and highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI, is therefore fundamental.
Highly pathogenic H5 and H7 viruses have repeatedly emerged after avian influenza viruses entered poultry populations and evolved.
This matters because the convenient shorthand wild birds gave poultry bird flu conceals a more complicated ecological cycle. Wild birds maintain enormous influenza diversity.
But intensive poultry systems can provide very different evolutionary conditions: dense populations, close contact, genetically similar hosts and rapid chains of transmission.
Even the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization acknowledges that while wild birds can move influenza over long distances, local poultry trade remains an important driver of spread.
We should therefore stop pretending that wild nature sits on one side of this problem and innocent human agriculture sits on the other. They interact.
1996: something important begins
The modern highly pathogenic H5N1 lineage traces back to A/goose/Guangdong/1/1996, detected in domestic geese in Guangdong, China.
That lineage continued evolving and reassorting.
By 2005 something happened that should be central to every discussion about today's bird-flu crisis. At Qinghai Lake in China, H5N1 caused extraordinary mortality among migratory wild birds.
This was not the familiar picture of waterfowl quietly carrying influenza. Highly pathogenic influenza was now killing wildlife.
Over the following years the descendants of the Goose/Guangdong lineage continued changing. Then came clade 2.3.4.4b.
Since approximately 2020 this lineage has produced something genuinely extraordinary: extensive infection and mass mortality among wild birds across continents, accompanied by repeated infections of mammals.
FAO now describes extensive infection of seabirds and mass die-offs of ecologically important wild species. The virus has crossed into seals, sea lions, foxes, cats, mink, cattle and other mammals.
This isn't somebody imagining that bird flu suddenly looks different. It is different.
That should make us curious rather than compliant.
Humans have also experimented with H5 viruses
There is another part of the history that cannot simply be erased because discussing it makes people uncomfortable. Humans have deliberately manipulated H5 influenza viruses in laboratories.
Highly controversial experiments reported in 2012 demonstrated that H5-containing influenza viruses could be experimentally altered to achieve respiratory transmission between ferrets, which are widely used as a mammalian model for human influenza transmission.
Those experiments generated an international argument over gain-of-function research, laboratory safety and whether creating potentially dangerous viral characteristics was scientifically justified. That history is real.
Here precision matters.
The existence of laboratory manipulation does not prove that the present H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b outbreak was laboratory-created or deliberately released. Nor disprooves.
What it establishes is something different: humans have been actively experimenting with the biology of precisely the family of viruses of which we are now frightened. That deserves transparency, not censorship and not speculation.
Then H5N1 reaches Australia
Australia remained free of this particular global H5 strain long after much of the world had encountered it. Where is the Biosecurity Gate on this and from where did it arrive because we are so far from any mainland of disease.
Then, on 20 June 2026, Australia confirmed H5 high-pathogenicity avian influenza in a wild brown skua near Esperance, Western Australia. The virus subsequently appeared in other states.
By 11 August there had been 236 individual confirmed detections. The Commonwealth then changed its reporting system from individual birds to positive events, because an event can involve one or many birds. Importantly, as the outbreak developed, the Australian Government continued reporting no detections in poultry or the wider agricultural industry. That deserves remembering.
Australia's H5 event began as a wildlife event, not a poultry epidemic.
Australia was preparing long before H5 arrived [Special Note]:
Governments knew H5N1 was moving around the planet and had good reason to prepare.
But the chronology should nevertheless be public and understood.
| Date | Event | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| July 2024 | Commonwealth announces $6.9 million H5 preparedness package | Surveillance, poultry response capability, vaccine investigation and communications were already being funded. |
| 31 May 2024 | TGA evaluation begins for Seqirus AUDENZ and CELLDEMIC | Australian regulatory work on two human H5 influenza vaccines began more than two years before Australia's first H5 detection. |
| 2024 | Commonwealth H5 preparedness expands | Government says commitments since 2024 ultimately exceeded $113 million!!! |
| 20 March 2025 | National Management Agreement for H5 HPAI in Wildlife comes into effect | National governance and cost-sharing architecture existed before arrival. |
| 11 June 2025 | TGA registers AUDENZ and CELLDEMIC | Australia now has registered human H5 influenza products. |
| 1 January 2026 | Seqirus' new Melbourne facility scheduled to commence pandemic-influenza vaccine manufacture | Part of the Commonwealth's long-term pandemic manufacturing arrangement. |
| 20 June 2026 | First Australian H5 detection | Wild migratory seabird in Western Australia. |
| 21 July 2026 | Governments commit up to another $24.8 million | Cost-shared H5 response expenditure begins following detection. |
| 29 July 2026 | National Management Group says eradication from wildlife is not technically feasible | Australia moves into long-term wildlife management. |
| August 2026 | Targeted vaccination of priority native birds begins | Government says almost $2 million of the $113 million preparedness funding went to vaccines and trials. |
There is nothing inherently suspicious about preparing for a disease that is visibly moving toward Australia. But it is the timeline and expectation that is so close to manufactured events.
But preparation creates infrastructure. Infrastructure creates contracts. Contracts create commercial interests.
And emergencies release additional public money. That is why preparedness must remain open to scrutiny. However the purse-strings are in the hands of non-tranparent and unaccountable agencies now.
Follow the money
One company immediately becomes important to this story: Seqirus, the influenza-vaccine business of CSL.
In November 2020, the Commonwealth entered a long-term agreement with Seqirus to secure Australian manufacturing capability for pandemic influenza vaccines, Q-fever vaccine and antivenoms.
The total Commonwealth cost is $1.007 billion.
The arrangement includes an initial prepayment and ongoing capability payments.
Seqirus owns the Melbourne facility.
The Australian National Audit Office examined the procurement in 2025.
Its findings deserve far more public attention.
The Auditor-General concluded that the procurement “did not maximise value for money for the Australian taxpayer in the long term.”
The audit found:
- the government-recommended option of sole-sourcing Seqirus was not the option identified by earlier research or legal advice as providing the best long-term value;
- there was no approach to market to obtain intelligence from alternative suppliers;
- alternative potential pandemic-influenza vaccine suppliers had been identified;
- justification for the sole-source limited tender came after the decision was already well advanced;
- there was no overall value-for-money conclusion supporting the decision to sole-source Seqirus;
- there were weaknesses in probity planning and processes;
- earlier government-commissioned work had concluded that a government-operated model or hybrid market solution potentially offered the greatest net benefits.
That isn't an internet theory. That is the Australian Auditor-General.
Even more interestingly, the ANAO records that one value-for-money assessment referenced analysis commissioned by Seqirus itself.
None of this proves that CSL or Seqirus had anything whatsoever to do with causing H5N1.
It proves something we should be perfectly capable of discussing without being called conspiracy theorists:
pandemic preparedness is an industry, and enormous amounts of public money are involved.
The billion dollars doesn't buy the pandemic vaccine
There is another important distinction.
The $1.007 billion agreement itself does not include the eventual supply of pandemic influenza vaccine. It buys capability, preparedness, priority rights and other products.
The ANAO states explicitly that pandemic vaccines would be made available for purchase if required.
Seqirus must maintain the scientific expertise, materials, vaccine seeds, registrations and manufacturing readiness necessary to vaccinate the Australian population if a pandemic occurs.
In other words, taxpayers fund the strategic manufacturing capability and, if a pandemic vaccine is required, vaccine supply is a separate commercial transaction.
That arrangement may be defensible as national insurance if questioned in the Senate but it leave the door open to more questions unanswered and possibly hidden....
But when more than a billion public dollars are involved, Australians are entitled to ask whether it was structured competitively and transparently.
The Auditor-General has already answered part of that question.
Two H5 vaccines before H5 reached Australia
The timing attracts attention, so it deserves explanation rather than sensationalism.
Seqirus' Australian regulatory evaluation for AUDENZ and CELLDEMIC began on 31 May 2024.
Both were registered by the TGA on 11 June 2025.
AUDENZ is registered as a pandemic H5N1 influenza vaccine. CELLDEMIC is registered for immunisation against H5 influenza A. Australia did not detect H5 until June 2026.
Is that proof somebody knew an Australian outbreak was coming? Yes or No.
By 2024 H5N1 was already causing an enormous international animal-health emergency. Preparing vaccines was commercially and medically predictable. But the chronology belongs in the record.
We should be mature enough to distinguish evidence of preparation from evidence of foreknowledge. They are not the same thing.
And now we come back to the birds
The danger is that once wildlife becomes labelled a biosecurity threat, intervention develops its own momentum. Surveillance becomes management. Management becomes control. Control can become destruction.
Yet the FAO's current recommendation could hardly be clearer:
"there is no benefit in attempting to control H5 in wild birds through culling or habitat destruction".
It also warns that spraying birds or their environment with disinfectants can be environmentally harmful, counterproductive and ineffective. (A bit like the Fire Ant Poisoning Sprays).
A UN-led scientific task force has similarly warned governments against culling wild birds and damaging natural ecosystems and wetlands in response to H5N1.
Australia itself now says H5 in wildlife cannot technically be eradicated.
Those three facts should establish a boundary around what happens next.
If we cannot eradicate the virus from free wildlife, then we must be extraordinarily careful that disease management does not become ecological destruction.
Vaccinating Australia's wildlife
Australia has now begun another extraordinary experiment.
The Commonwealth has secured an H5N2 inactivated poultry vaccine for targeted use in vulnerable Australian native birds.
The Agriculture Minister announced in August that initial vaccination would concentrate on priority species in captivity. And, they have now established a collection of Fairy Penguins from the wild.
Government says almost $2 million has already been spent on vaccines and trials from the broader $113 million H5 preparedness package.
Again, the question is not whether every intervention is wrong.
The question is whether each intervention is justified by evidence and accompanied by long-term ecological monitoring. Wildlife is not a poultry shed.
A wild population contains genetic diversity, natural resistance, learned behaviour, migration knowledge, social structure and relationships with habitat, food, predators, parasites and microorganisms. Protecting an individual animal and protecting an ecosystem are not always the same thing.
There is an alternative to declaring war on nature
Rejecting indiscriminate intervention does not mean doing nothing. Quite the opposite.
Australia can undertake aggressive genomic surveillance. Publish sequences rapidly.
Track migration corridors. Investigate mortality events. Protect threatened breeding colonies from unnecessary human disturbance. Improve wetland health. Protect poultry feed and water from wildlife contamination. Increase physical separation between intensive poultry and wild birds.
Strengthen quarantine and biosecurity around farms. Study naturally surviving birds rather than looking only at dead ones. Investigate genetic resistance. Study population recovery.
Protect habitat so stressed wildlife is not simultaneously fighting disease, starvation and ecological degradation.
Use targeted captive conservation programs where extinction risk genuinely warrants them.
And above all, recognise that industrial animal production belongs inside the epidemiological investigation rather than standing outside it pointing at wild birds.
FAO itself says poultry trade and farm biosecurity are important parts of avian-influenza spread.
What I want answered
I am not prepared to call H5N1 imaginary. The virus exists. Wildlife is dying.
Nor am I prepared, without evidence, to claim somebody deliberately manufactured and released the current outbreak.
But neither am I prepared to accept the opposite intellectual laziness: that because the virus exists, every government policy, pharmaceutical contract and proposed intervention must therefore be wise, necessary or beyond questioning.
I want answers.
Where did the evolutionary transition from relatively tolerant influenza circulation in waterfowl to catastrophic H5 wildlife mortality occur?
What role did intensive poultry production play?
What role has international poultry movement played?
What do the genomes tell us about Australia's particular H5 introductions?
Are Australian sequences being released quickly enough for genuinely independent examination?
Which Australian species are dying and which are becoming infected and surviving?
What can those survivors teach us?
What exactly has the Commonwealth's $113 million purchased?
Who received it?
Which universities, laboratories, consultants, pharmaceutical companies, communications companies and wildlife organisations benefited?
What further expenditure has followed the additional $24.8 million response commitment?
What vaccines have governments purchased?
From which manufacturers?
At what price?
Which advisers recommended vaccination?
What conflicts of interest have been declared?
What are the ecological endpoints by which success or failure will be measured?
What would trigger euthanasia or destruction of wildlife?
And if Australia accepts that H5 cannot be eradicated from wild birds, where does intervention stop?
What reports and data are collected to make these decisions and who has those for public viewing because so far = nothing to see.
Mother Nature is not the enemy
I spent part of my earlier life studying and representing Australian wildlife closely enough that individual feather patterns mattered.
That experience taught me something that remains relevant decades later. You cannot understand nature from a distance. You observe. You compare. You notice what has changed.
And when something has changed dramatically, you ask why.
H5N1 deserves serious science because what is happening to wildlife is serious.
But serious science means examining the whole system: The virus. The bird. The poultry shed. The farm. The laboratory. The vaccine. The contract. The government department. The money. And the intervention.
Nature should not carry the entire indictment while the human systems surrounding this disease escape examination.
Before we declare war on wild birds, we need to establish what changed, who contributed to those changes, who now benefits from managing them, and whether our proposed cure could become another threat to the natural world.
That is the investigation I intend to continue.
Key documents and evidence
Australian Government — current H5 bird flu situation and wildlife detections
Australian Government — $24.8 million national H5 response commitment
Australian Government — decision that H5 is not technically feasible to eradicate from wildlife
Australian Government — detailed H5 preparedness funding breakdown
Australian National Audit Office — Seqirus vaccine manufacturing procurement investigation
TGA — AUDENZ registration and evaluation dates
TGA — CELLDEMIC registration and evaluation dates
FAO — recommendations on H5, wildlife culling and habitat destruction
FAO — global H5N1 history and current 2.3.4.4b situation
Side notes of discovery:
Chief Veterinary Officer for PIRSA (Primary Industries and Regions South Australia) and she’s currently publicly commenting on the bird-flu situation in South Australia. Dr Skye Fruen was interviewed on FIVEAA about it on 23 August 2026. She is South Australia’s Chief Veterinary Officer and is overseeing the SA response. The H5N1 itself is real: Australia first detected this strain in June 2026, confirmed cases have risen substantially since then, and on 23 August Australia confirmed its first H5N1-positive local mammal, a long-nosed fur seal in South Australia.
Follow the money and the actual decision-making chain. In the minutes of the meeting in Auckland Council NZ there is reference to granting $3m for bird culling in their region. https://aucklandcouncil.resolve.red/portal/
But I've found something potentially more useful than those minutes: the actual supporting papers and presentations. A June 2024 council memorandum was specifically titled “High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza implications for Auckland Council.”
And this gets interesting in September 2025. Council records state that a cross-council H5N1 Steering Group had existed since June 2024, led by Environmental Services. They also say:
“The operations necessary for Auckland Council to respond to HPAI H5N1 are unbudgeted”
But I found a real $3 million H5N1 figure in New Zealand government records. It comes from Fish & Game New Zealand's submission on proposed Biosecurity Act changes. Fish & Game says roughly one-third of its income comes from game-bird licence fees and that H5N1-related closure or cancellation of hunting could cost it approximately $3 million per year. The submission discusses the possibility of compensation for that loss.
Even more telling, current MPI Minister of Primary Industries advice says sick wildlife should generally be left alone, and dead birds can often be left to decompose naturally. Where large numbers of carcasses require disposal, councils may become involved in disposal.
What is documented is much more interesting to investigate properly: councils were preparing well before H5N1 arrived; council responsibilities include managing consequences in public spaces; central government leads the disease response; and authorities acknowledge that once established in wild birds, eradication isn't achievable.
Meanwhile in Australia - There is, however, a financial trail worth examining. Australia has a $1.007 billion Commonwealth agreement with CSL subsidiary Seqirus covering sovereign manufacturing capability for pandemic influenza vaccines, antivenoms and Q-fever products. The Auditor-General subsequently found weaknesses in the procurement process, including limited competitive tendering, inadequate documentation and the absence of an overall value-for-money conclusion supporting the original sole-source decision.
| Date | What happened | Why it matters |
|---|
| 2018–2019 | Government reviews considered alternatives to simply continuing with Seqirus. ANAO says a government-operated model or open market approach had potential economic advantages. | This is before COVID and well before the Australian H5 outbreak. |
| 16 Nov 2020 | Commonwealth signs the Seqirus agreement, ultimately costed at $1.007 billion. | It guarantees domestic capability for pandemic influenza, antivenoms and Q-fever products. |
| 31 May 2024 | Seqirus submits Australian applications for AUDENZ and CELLDEMIC H5 vaccines. | Important date: H5 vaccine registration work begins two years before Australia's H5 arrival. |
| 25 Mar 2024 | H5N1 confirmed in US dairy cattle after already circulating internationally in wild birds and poultry. | This provides a conventional reason why companies/governments were accelerating H5 preparedness in 2024. |
| 11 Jun 2025 | TGA registers both Seqirus H5 products. | Australia now has registered H5 vaccines a year before the Australian wildlife detection. |
| 2 Dec 2025 | New Seqirus Melbourne facility formally opens. | Minister Butler explicitly describes pandemic-influenza vaccine manufacturing as part of its purpose. |
| 1 Jan 2026 | New facility scheduled to commence pandemic-influenza manufacturing capability. | ANAO records this timetable. |
| 20 Jun 2026 | Australia's first confirmed H5 detection: brown skua near Esperance, WA. | This is the actual Australian starting point. |
| 21 Jul 2026 | Governments commit up to $24.8 million for the initial response. | New public money flows after detection. |
| 29 Jul 2026 | Authorities conclude H5 in Australian wildlife is not technically feasible to eradicate and activate the national wildlife management agreement. | Major shift from incursion response to long-term management. |
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The ANAO report is considerably stronger than ordinary political criticism.
The government didn't simply run a competition and Seqirus happened to win.
ANAO found that the Department didn't formally approach the market, despite identifying possible alternative suppliers, particularly for pandemic influenza vaccines. Only approaches extending the Seqirus arrangement were ultimately pursued.
More importantly, ANAO says there was no overall value-for-money conclusion supporting the original decision to sole-source Seqirus, partly because there was no comparator.
The eventual value-for-money assessment relied partly upon research commissioned by Seqirus itself.
And Australia was already maintaining a stockpile of candidate pandemic influenza vaccine antigen, with CSL Seqirus contracted to maintain bulk antigen for a strain selected by government. The Health Department reported that arrangement in its 2023–24 annual report. Australia had already committed more than $113 million to H5
Then:
+$24.8 million response funding
and in the 2026–27 Budget:
+$11.2 million further preparedness/native-species funding.
So we're already looking at at least $149 million in specifically identified H5 preparedness/response money, completely separate from the much larger Seqirus manufacturing agreement.
Why were H5 vaccines being registered in 2024–25 when Australia had no H5N1 and "girt by sea".
What exactly has Australia subsequently bought from Seqirus for H5, in what quantity and at what price?
That last question is now the one I want answered.
I haven't yet established political donations, lobbying links or actual Australian government purchases of AUDENZ/CELLDEMIC for humans, so I'm not going to manufacture that connection. The AEC search results I obtained weren't sufficient to establish either presence or absence of CSL political donations.
The issue is bigger than poultry economics. A disease-management system can become an ecological threat itself if frightened governments start treating free wildlife as defective livestock. The evidence already gives us a strong alternative case: understand the virus, protect habitat, reduce agricultural spillover, surveil intelligently, protect vulnerable colonies and resist indiscriminate intervention in wild populations.
Liz Gunn from FreeNZMedia in which the podcast has the Minutes of the Meeting as described above, with Clare Swinney and exposes the intent of interference and demise of the natural entities in their region.
Bronwyn Holm, Founder, Earthfood®
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