Awkward Bird Flu Notes
Why We Post This Stuff
We handle big emergencies better if we’re willing to be honest about risks, realities, possibilities, and hard truths.
This page is not going to become All About Bird Flu, but it is also not going to hide from uncomfortable truths — especially about those relating to very real risks on the horizon.
With that said, here are three quick bird-flu-ey notes.
1) A Medical News Note
There’s unsettling medical news out of Canada in this publication, with the end quote saying,
“Highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1) virus infection acquired in North America can cause severe human illness. Evidence for changes to HA [H5 hemagglutinin] that may increase binding to human airway receptors is worrisome.”
2) An Excellent Summary Of How We Got Here — With Unsettling Facts
I read a post recently that is the best summary I have read yet on what’s been happening with bird flu in the federal government.
The post by Julia Doubleday is called, “Biden's USDA Let H5N1 Spread. Now Bird Flu is a Loaded Gun in Trump's Hands: The Biden Administration never had any plan to control the H5N1 outbreak on dairy farms; now, it's spreading widely in a country ill equipped to understand or control airborne disease.” The link is at the end of this section.
The post references the terrible set-up from the Trump Administration’s obstruction of and damage to public health institutions and practices.
At the same time, the post is extremely critical of the Biden Administration on both handling Covid-19 and on addressing bird flu or not. Yet I’ve read it several times and do not find where the facts are wrong. Much of the post is stuff I’ve wanted to address but didn’t have the bandwidth to track down and research.
Here’s an excerpt —
“Successful Farming reported in June that, per Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, ‘the USDA’s strategy against bird flu in dairy cattle is to identify infected herds and wait for the virus to die out within the herds.’ At the time, 80 herds had been infected. That number has since 10x’d. Farmers continued to ‘decline’ to test their herds, despite funding being available to compensate farms for losses. Why was testing a recommendation to be declined, rather than a mandated practice? Similarly, the CDC put out PPE recommendations, but these are little more than suggestions. Why, once again, is a public health crisis being treated as a personal choice rather than a collective threat that affects us all? We are talking about a highly pathogenic disease that countries all over the world have worked to keep under control for decades. Across the globe and across the years, drastic measures have been taken by governments in Asia, Europe, and yes, even the US too, to keep H5N1 away from humans. But now, when this virus is threatening not only the American people, but all of humanity, we are leaving major public health decisions to random dairy farmers. That’s not a shot at farmers; the reality is that no individual outside the very specific domain of pandemic management should be making decisions about how to contain a virus that will, by definition, affect every human on Earth. Certainly not individuals with financial conflicts of interest, who are also considering factors like the public image of their dairy as well as the profitability of their products. If this virus does mutate and achieve human to human transmission, it will be because federal agencies in the US government decided, once again, that a global pandemic response is a personal choice.“
Another excerpt —
“The advantages of the ‘let it rip’ model are obvious: zero disruptions to business as usual, zero angry tantruming [sic] capitalists raging that they wanted to ignore the virus and pretend it wasn’t happening, zero lost profits, zero panic, zero problems! The disadvantages being that we are moving ever closer to a human-to-human bird flu pandemic because those with the scientific know-how are completely disempowered to stop it, while those with the power to stop it either don’t understand the science or are simply too cowardly to act.”
Only now we will see widespread disruptions to business as usual. Supply chain interruptions. Widespread culling/depopulation of livestock and poultry operations and/or illness in those populations if depopulation is discontinued. Shortages of eggs, poultry products, beef products, dairy products, etc. The lists really go on and on, because there are so many cascading effects from animal/bird epidemics that go unchecked.
Finally, here’s one last excerpt, with yet another hard truth:
“As far as we’re aware, H5N1 hasn’t yet achieved human-to-human transmission. But by allowing humans to interact with the virus daily- something public health officials worldwide have spent decades working to avoid- we’ve made such a scenario increasingly inevitable. As news of a severe human case broke in Louisiana last week, California declared a state of emergency. With 61 human cases reported in the US so far, the infections are a trickle that constantly threaten to become a flood. For now, they’re being reined in by a fragile biological limitation, not a sturdy policy firewall. We’re being protected, not by the FDA, CDC or USDA, but by the genetic structure of the virus itself, which currently doesn’t transmit between human hosts. H5N1 could achieve the ability to do so with a single mutation. It’s not a government body preventing the next pandemic, nor a quarantine, a testing requirement, or mandatory PPE for farm workers. It’s just a single protein.”
Facts.
Uncomfortable, unsettling, awkward, facts.
Here’s the post link for ”Biden's USDA Let H5N1 Spread. Now Bird Flu is a Loaded Gun in Trump's Hands,” by
at .3) Concern Is Growing
The author in the post cited above is not the only person or publication critical of the Biden Administration’s actions or inactions. A quick online search indicates that whatever’s happening with bird flu, it’s not going well. Even the conservative-leaning Washington Examiner states that “Trump faces a big bird flu problem.”
A quick search for articles over the past week shows increasing media attention and scrutiny on both Biden’s outgoing administration, and concern about Trump’s incoming administration.
Here’s a screenshot of the top articles this past week with the search words “Biden Trump avian influenza" —
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Onward and forward —
Vanessa Burnett is the Executive Director of Shift the Country, an unusual nonprofit promoting increased civic action & public pressure to help communities pull together, to navigate increasing disruption, & to work toward a more resilient, sustainable, caring, just, & equitable US. Vanessa is a former homeland security professional with 25+ years experience in resilience, big disasters, wildland fire, emergency management, land management, project management, continuity of operations, public communication, and disaster information sharing.