Opinion | A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/opinion/bird-flu-pandemic.html
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/11/28/opinion/28tufekci-image/28tufekci-image-facebookJumbo.jpg Almost five years after Covid blew into our lives, the main thing standing between us and the next global pandemic is luck. And with the advent of flu season, that luck may well be running out.
The H5N1 avian flu, having mutated its way across species, is raging out of control among the nation’s cattle, infecting roughly a third of the dairy herds in California alone. Farmworkers have so far avoided tragedy, as the virus has not yet acquired the genetic tools to spread among humans. But seasonal flu will vastly increase the chances of that outcome. As the colder weather drives us all indoors to our poorly ventilated houses and workplaces, we will be undertaking an extraordinary gamble that the nation is in no way prepared for.
We might be fine. Viruses don’t always manage to adapt to new species, despite all the opportunities. But if there is a bird flu pandemic soon, it will be among the most foreseeable catastrophes in history.
Devastating influenza pandemics arise throughout the ages because the virus is always looking for a way in, shape shifting to jump among species in ever novel forms. Flu viruses have a special trick: If two different types infect the same host — a farmworker with regular flu who also gets H5N1 from a cow — they can swap whole segments of their RNA, potentially creating an entirely new and deadly virus that has the ability to spread among humans. It’s likely that the 1918 influenza pandemic, for example, started as a flu virus of avian origin that passed through a pig in eastern Kansas. From there it likely infected its first human victim before circling the globe on a deadly journey that killed more people than World War I.
And that’s why it’s such a tragedy that the Biden administration didn’t — or couldn’t — do everything necessary to snuff out the U.S. dairy cattle infection when the outbreak was smaller and easier to address.
For the H5N1 outbreak among dairy cattle, however, the C.D.C. has limited powers. This show is run by the United States Department of Agriculture, led under Biden by Tom Vilsack, an alumnus of the Obama administration who in between those two postings took a turn in a powerful dairy industry position. The agency had already been weakened by attacks on its scientific side during the first Trump term. This time around, at a critical juncture, it has put a higher value on the short-term profits of the powerful dairy farming industry than on the health of billions of people.
Meanwhile, worrying signs keep cropping up.
It’s certainly true that taking on powerful industrial farming interests would have created political headaches for the Biden administration. Perhaps it’s even true that if it had done the right thing and acted aggressively to stomp out the cattle outbreak, it could have cost the Democrats the presidency, the House and the Sen — well, never mind.
I can only hope we continue to get lucky. We don’t have much else going for us.
Well, we do have one thing. Biden is president for another seven weeks or so. It’s not too late for him to give the nation a parting gift. He could start taking these risks as seriously as he should have when the cattle infections were first discovered. We could get serious about mandatory testing of cows, milk and farmworkers and about isolating infected cattle herds — as we already do for birds and pigs. We could speed up development of the vaccine that’s already in the works for cows — and expedite all precautions for humans, too. It’s true that one doesn’t get proper, timely credit for disasters averted. But history will, eventually, deliver its verdict.