Bird Flu: It May Be Worse Than We Suspect

The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) just published a report on the bird flu with a pretty scary title: "How America Lost Control of the Bird Flu, Setting the Stage for Another Pandemic." What?!?

A few salient quotes:

• "Nearly a year into the first outbreak of the bird flu among cattle, the virus shows no sign of slowing. The U.S. government failed to eliminate the virus on dairy farms when it was confined to a handful of states, by quickly identifying infected cows and taking measures to keep their infections from spreading. Now at least 875 herds across 16 states have tested positive."
• "Experts say they have lost faith in the government’s ability to contain the outbreak. 'We are in a terrible situation and going into a worse situation,' said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. 'I don’t know if the bird flu will become a pandemic, but if it does, we are screwed.'"
• "To understand how the bird flu got out of hand, KFF Health News interviewed nearly 70 government officials, farmers and farmworkers, and researchers with expertise in virology, pandemics, veterinary medicine, and more. . . . Together with emails obtained from local health departments through public records requests, this investigation revealed key problems, including deference to the farm industry, eroded public health budgets, neglect for the safety of agriculture workers, and the sluggish pace of federal interventions."
• "Far more bird flu damage is inevitable, but the extent of it will be left to the Trump administration and Mother Nature." No comment.
• "[T]the outbreak poses the threat of a pandemic. More than 60 people in the U.S. have been infected, mainly by cows or poultry, but cases could skyrocket if the virus evolves to spread efficiently from person to person. And the recent news of a person critically ill in Louisiana with the bird flu shows that the virus can be dangerous. . . . Just a few mutations could allow the bird flu to spread between people. Because viruses mutate within human and animal bodies, each infection is like a pull of a slot machine lever.
• “Even if there’s only a 5% chance of a bird flu pandemic happening, we’re talking about a pandemic that probably looks like 2020 or worse,” said Tom Peacock, a bird flu researcher at the Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom, referring to covid. “The U.S. knows the risk but hasn’t done anything to slow this down,” he added.