He was warming up for the big one, trying it out a decade and a half before it.
In 2005, George W. Bush gave a press conference on the need to mobilize all national resources for a war on the Avian bird flu, which many people including Anthony Fauci predicted would carry a 50% mortality rate. Not just among the infected: “50 percent of the population could die,” the world’s leading authority on the pathogen told a gullible media always hungry for headlines and clicks.
They ran for the phones with that one. It’s what they do.
Blithe Spirit 