Experts are harvesting a mutant strain of wolbachia bacteria, infecting male mosquitos with it, and then releasing those infected male mosquitoes into Hawaiian airspace, in the hopes that these infected male mosquitoes will find hot female mosquitoes to mate with, and, during such mating, infect the females with the mutant bacteria, which might sterilize the females.
Why? Because—I am saddened to report—“climate change”.
The best part is the princely sum they will charge for this Act of The Science.
I learn all this from reader LH, who sent me this email (edited for length):
Aloha Mr. Briggs from Maui,
…Maui is facing a new ‘forever war’ health threat currently being rolled out. It quietly launched last fall. This is a big problem for us, eventually possibly very severe, and likely to be sold wherever mosquitoes live.
The short story is this: claiming that because approximately 50% of Hawaii’s endemic birds became extinct shortly after contact with colonialism…some clever salesmen sold a perpetual contract for manufactured mosquitos carrying manufactured bacteria to the Maui County Council. Under this perpetual contract, large quantities of male mosquitoes will be manufactured and imported for release each week for the next 20 years (thereafter into perpetuity). And of course it’s sold as an ’emergency,’ a perpetual war on mosquitos…
…It’s obviously such a gullibility-busting dumb idea that it can only be a brand new type of trojan horse: modified unnatural mosquitos carrying unnatural modified payloads in a highly unique, fragile, and already diminished environment. Where would this lead? What could go wrong? Nothing the salesmen have disclosed.
A few smart people here have begun to fight, Tina Lia, our local hero is one. Check out Tina in this excellent interview, beginning at 7:50. She’s a powerful voice of intelligence.
The Maui agenda is a trial run we need to nip in the bud. It will be first Maui, then the rest of the world. This first iteration is just to establish precedence and work out how to finesse this scam and make it sell well. In the current iteration, its stated goal is to release billions of experimental male mosquitos each week that are infected with wolbachia lab bacteria which they hope will render native female mosquitoes sterile.
Among every batch of males, the manufacturers know at least 3,000 experimental bacteria infected females will be accidentally released per week for the next 20 years.
This species of mosquitoes is not native to Hawaii. The bacteria species is not native to mosquitos. Just guessing, but I’ll bet the mosquito oil salesman know the bacteria will fail, so they’ll have a follow-on contract. That’s the point, a highly profitable forever war generating weekly revenue. Profits from Maui first, then the world!
Tina has a site called Hawaii Unites.
She has a page with research and legal resources here.She already tried using the court to stop it…[Here is] the court recording. The court transcript. She also has a lot of other interviews and resources on her site.
LH then provided some potential harms from the program. Here are three choice ones:
B – Loss of bee species and flower species where bacterial invasive species and their mutants kill off pollinating insects. There are beekeepers expert in die offs due to poisoned gut.
C1 – Loss of commercial and backyard crops where the digestive tracts of crop pollinators become compromised with invasive and mutant bacteria…
H – Loss from fishery die off due to a mutant form of pelagic leprosy caused by altered gut bacteria in fish. Calculate the hit in mahi mahi and ono sales…
Given Hawaii has in times past already lost a lot of birds to mosquitos, it seems there wouldn’t be the opportunity to lose much more, since things by now have settled down and mosquitoes are now ordinary. And indeed whoever is behind a pro-release website tacitly admits as much on some Trust Us page. This page says the birds could be in trouble when “climate change” hits: “As our climate warms, mosquitoes are moving to higher elevations, and the available habitat for our native forest birds is disappearing.”
Problem is, Hawaii isn’t where much, if any, projected warming will occur, which, models say, will mostly be in mid-latitudes, and mostly in moderating diurnal temperature swings (warmer nights). And, as you and I have seen innumerable times, these models exaggerate when they are not just plain wrong.
There thus does not seem to be a compelling reason to implement this program, since it is anticipatory and not reactive. Even apart from considering any harm it may cause—of course, there could be much. The Trust US page swears no genetic modification is being done, and promises Top Experts have certified the program’s safety.
Ignore all that and let’s think about how we’d prove the program was useful.
The only true test is in measuring the number of birds’ lives saved. And not in anything else like numbers of mosquitoes, dead or alive, or with or without some trait. You have to count birds before and after. But you can’t count birds without some measurement error—your count has to be a guess—so the signal has to be huge. Will it be? One shudders at the thought of some official wee P-value being announced in favor of success.
We have seen lots of these kinds of programs, including those meant for humans (“Where’s your vax passport, citizen”). Without fail, positive claims are exaggerated and harms are played down. It is therefore rational to suppose that will be the case here. Which is not proof it will be. But that’s where to start.
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I was under the impression that mosquitos were actually a major food source for a variety of birds. Perhaps none of the species of concern is native to Maui, but it seems like anything ingesting these infected mosquitos could be potentially infected. My own belief is that the biosphere is so complex that this kind of meddling has the potential for a whole range of unexpected side effects.
Not that long ago (one BBC article on the subject is dated 2020), a mass release of genetically modified mosquitos was done in Florida with a similar aim--reducing the mosquito population. No mention I can find in the press reports on the effectiveness of this experiment. It's possible that not enough time has passed for its impact to be felt throughout the local ecology, but I'd bet it's more likely that if the news is bad, we'll never see that report in the media.
There's two basic types of scam:
Type A focuses only on the benefits of doing what the scammer proposes, and never mentions the costs.
Type B focuses only on the costs of doing what you're already doing (and/or what the scammer doesn't want you to do) and never mentions the benefits.
Every student should be taught to recognise these scams, and that every honest argument includes (A) the explicit admission that every choice is a trade-off of possible cost/benefit ratios, (B) the costs of both the recommended action AND the alternatives (including the null proposition), and (C) the benefits of same as well.
In the medical profession this used to be called "Informed Consent" and no medical action was considered legitimate without it.
Anyone trying to get their mark to practise ignorant consent is a scammer.