Holman Jenkins had this to say in Thursday's WSJ Political Journal:
Without counting heads, it's safe to say that among beltway types now sounding the alarm about avian flu are advocates of intelligent design. What they're fretting about is the workings of evolution, also known as natural selection. Not only would a human-transmissible bird flu virus have to emerge through mutation, but it would have to be hardy enough to surivive and reproduce in its animal host, and also versatile enough to find its way to a human host and reproduce there, without killing off its host so quickly as to snuff out its own spread.These are high hurdles for natural selection to overcome by accident. Any forecaster who cared about his reputation would have to predict, given these odds, that a worst-case pandemic won't occur. Flu is inevitable; a particular mutation of a particular virus is not. Thank the Lord, then, for giving us a nature that operates on principles of unintelligent design.
One excellent sign is that the flu has already migrated to people, yet the outbreaks have been limited in scope, so perhaps it does kill too quickly. While that's not much consolation to the guy testing positive, it's much better for the person standing next to him.