No surprise. Bird flu didn't go away. It has its own trajectory.
It hasn't landed yet.

A lot of people sneered at the extensive precautions and immunizations a few years ago, because nothing happened. "It's all hype and hoax and BS, doctors and scientists are idiots, why did we spend all this money, we could have bought a lot of cheap beer with that dough."

Nope. We dodged a bullet the size of a large asteroid. But we only dodged the first bullet.

EDIT: Nature doesn't need a human agency to engineer and distribute the next version. So I don't ascribe to any related notions. There's already enough to be concerned about without politics.