The cookers have found their first pandemic since Covid, and they are treating a dead seabird like a cover-up
Australia's bird flu detections went from 28 to 175 in eight days, and the comment sections filled with people who have been waiting for this day.
The cookers are back, and they have never been happier.
Bird flu is the first thing since Covid that looks enough like a pandemic to hang the old material on, and they have hung all of it.
You can watch it happen under any bird flu story. The laugh reacts. The "here we go again". The bloke who has read one paragraph about PCR and believes he has cornered a virologist.
None of it is improvised. It is a cover band.
We know that because the same thing happened across the Tasman three weeks ago, and someone wrote it down.
The disinformation researcher Sanjana Hattotuwa documented the whole performance in New Zealand across 12 days in July. A brown skua washed up on Petone Beach on July 10. Testing confirmed H5N1 within days.
By July 16, four Facebook posts from RNZ and the New Zealand Herald had drawn 2475 comments, and the loudest current in them dismissed the confirmation as a hoax, a psyop, a plandemic, a propaganda operation.
Six days. One dead bird. Two and a half thousand comments about the World Economic Forum.
Hattotuwa catalogued the vocabulary. "Covid 2.0." "Con-vid 2.0." "Plandemic take 2." "Scamdemic 4." "Rinse and repeat." "Same old playbook." "Dust off the same script."
They are telling you themselves. It is a script.
Inside 12 days the commenters had got from a seabird on a beach in Lower Hutt to Wuhan, gain-of-function, the WHO, 5G, Bill Gates, synthetic protein, insect food and "you will own nothing". Some decided officials had planted the bird, because the testing happened near a university.
This is not scepticism. Scepticism requires you to look at the thing.
An analysis published this year of 544 social posts about H5N1 found 362 of them, 67 per cent, claimed the outbreaks were engineered.
That was New Zealand. Here, the numbers are worse and the script is identical.
At 3pm yesterday the federal agriculture department had 175 confirmed detections in Australian wild birds. On July 30 it had 28.
On Heard Island - Australian territory in the sub-Antarctic - the same virus killed 13,359 southern elephant seal pups, more than three quarters of the entire breeding cohort.
A federal assessment puts nearly 400 native bird and mammal species at high or extreme risk. Earthcare St Kilda expects to lose between 20 and 40 per cent of the 1400 little penguins living on Melbourne's doorstep.
Environment Minister Murray Watt has told people plainly that this is the beginning of a long and difficult journey.
And here is the part they have not noticed.
There is no mandate coming. There is no lockdown, no QR code, no vaccine passport, no one at the door. Nobody is asking these people to do a single thing.
Which is exactly why they love it. It is the safest thing they have ever been wrong about - no cost, no inconvenience, no test they can fail in public.
They get to feel clever for a season.
The penguins pay for it.