"This may be our last chance to halt bird flu in humans, and we are blowing it," Zeynep Tufekci said in The New York Times.
Mainly because the US government is apparently not doing anything.
Farmers are "increasingly worried about the health of our animals, the safety of our farm workers, and the outlook for our markets," Ken Nobis said at Agri-Pulse.
They seem even more concerned about potential losses from having to suspend operations or sacrifice infected cattle.
The onslaught was unexpected. This means that "farmers currently have few options for treating the virus or containing its spread."
Especially if they won't consider culling cows, isolating cows, or even stopping the transport of cows, or improving the sanitary nature of their milking operations. As to treating the virus in cows, what does he propose? There are no approved antivirals for H5N1 in cattle, as it is a novel infection.
The virus has "ravaged the US poultry industry" since 2022, Kenny Torrella said at Vox. Despite that, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has offered a "tepid and opaque" response to the spread — slow to track the jump from birds to cows, and similarly unhurried to share information about the virus' genetic sequencing. The challenge: The agency is responsible for both regulating and promoting American agriculture. That's an "irresolvable conflict" which results in an approach that's "heavy on the promotion and light on the regulation."
We were told that the secrecy and the lethargy of the Chinese response in the early days of Covid was due to its communist totalitarian nature. However, it looks like in the democratic USA there are still perverse incentives that prevent effective action.
It's time to "demonstrate that we've learned the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic," Jaime M. Yassif said at CNN. That means ramping up vaccine funding, increasing livestock surveillance and stepping up emergency response planning. There is no time for governments — in America and around the world — to see what happens next: "If they wait for a confirmed outbreak among people, it will be extremely difficult to prevent the uncontrolled spread of the virus."
What are the chances of them doing anything, though?
"We shouldn't panic if bird flu becomes the next pandemic," Leana S. Wen said at The Washington Post. The federal government has improved access to "personal protective equipment such as masks, gowns and goggles" and stockpiles of medications like Tamiflu. There are also structures in place to ramp up vaccine production quickly, if necessary. So be reassured: The U.S. is in a "better place to respond compared with the start of the Covid pandemic."
Most Covid deaths were well after the first wave, when PPE issues had been resolved. So even if there is adequate PPE, that is still reason to be worried. Especially because H5N1 has the potential to be much deadlier than Covid ever was.
There are signs that the federal government is picking up the pace. The Biden administration last week announced a new requirement that "all dairy cows receive negative flu tests before they can be transported over state lines," Axios said.
That is not promising. The problem they are trying to address dwarfs that measure as a mountain dwarfs a mole hill. If an infected cow is barred, but it is travelling with other cows, do they bar the whole consignment from crossing state lines, or just the one cow? What about movements between farms within a state? They could seed more and more herds with H5N1 could they not? And then they provide more and more opportunities for the virus to develop the ability to spread within the human population, and then what are they going to do? Prevent people crossing state lines without a negative flu test? Hardly grounds for optimism, or a demonstration that the federal government is taking the issue seriously.
(They're also encouraging Americans not to worry too much: "Based on information currently available, our commercial milk supply is safe," said Don Prater of the federal Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.) Officials also said this week they will test beef for the H5N1 bird flu virus.
They will get around to testing beef some time or other. What is the worst that could go wrong if they put it off just a little bit longer? Meanwhile, the rest of the world is asking why this was not done a month or more ago.
Even if the virus is contained to animals, the bird flu is "shaping people's lives," Lora Kelley and Katherine J. Wu said at The Atlantic. More than 90 million poultry have died from the flu or been killed to contain the spread. "When you have that many chickens dying, egg prices are going to go up."
How many cows have been killed to contain the spread of bird flu? Zero? Why the disparity between 90 million chickens, and zero cows? If there was something like bovine foot and mouth disease spreading (which has no health consequences for people), then they probably would be slaughtering herds left and right.
