Here are some things you should know but would probably rather not. First: avian flu H5N1 is spreading in North America, having passed from birds to cows and other animals. Second: some variants of this virus can cause serious illness and even death if they infect humans. And third: a pandemic in the United States would be handled catastrophically, worse even than was Covid-19.
H5N1, a type of influenza virus first identified in farmed birds in China in 1996, is widespread in wild bird populations. It is “zoonotic”, capable of passing from animals to humans. The fatality rate for infected humans is not known, because there isn’t good data on how many people have caught the virus but incurred only mild symptoms – but it could be quite high. The variants of concern currently in the US are denoted B3.13, which is spreading in cows, and D1.1, found in wild birds and farmed poultry. (At the end of January, D1.1 was reported in cattle in Nevada, too.) Domestic and wild cats have also tested positive for H5N1, as have some pigs.
At least 40 people have been confirmed to have caught the virus from cows (it can be passed on in milk), but have suffered only mild symptoms; two of the 24 infected from birds, however, got severely ill, and one died. These infection numbers could be serious underestimates, given that testing has been patchy. So far, H5N1 generally doesn’t seem very transmissible between people. But as the number of human cases rises, so does the chance of a new, highly transmissible variant appearing.
Right now it is concerning but no cause for panic – most Americans will be aware of the situation only, if at all, because egg prices are soaring. However, US experts are saying that the situation has certainly worsened in the past few months.
The US is in a far worse position to handle an outbreak of a lethal infectious disease now than it was in early 2020. Put simply, this Trump administration is madder, more extreme and fanatical, and more anti-science. Trump has already taken an axe to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which would coordinate any public health response. Trump’s nominee as CDC director is Dave Weldon, a former Republican congressman who has previously promoted vaccine scepticism and disinformation, particularly regarding the wholly disproven link between vaccines and autism.
The president’s nominee as director of the National Institutes of Health, which oversees much of the country’s medical research, is Jay Bhattacharya, who opposed masks and lockdowns during the Covid pandemic and advocated the discredited “anti-Covid” drug ivermectin. And of course the Department of Health is now helmed by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy. To combat a new pandemic, the US might be offered little more than prayers and snake oil.
Does that sound bad? I’m afraid it’s worse. Among the thousands of staff dismissed from government agencies such as the CDC by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), on February 18 the US Department of Agriculture admitted that it had fired several employees who were working on the response to H5N1 avian flu. Their dismissal, however, was an accident. “We are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters,” a representative said.
Other firings have included workers involved in ensuring the safety of the US nuclear stockpile – another decision quickly recognised as rash, but which has proved hard to reverse because no records were kept of the workers’ contact details.
Meanwhile, studies of bird flu cases by the CDC have been withheld from publication in the organisation’s official weekly journal (which had previously appeared without interruption since 1952) because of the freeze Trump imposed on all communications from federal health agencies immediately after taking office. Such reports now have to be first approved by a presidential lackey, or rather, appointee. A former CDC director likened the situation to “your local fire department [being] told not to sound any fire alarms”.
Like most of what has happened so far under Trump’s reign, this is all horrific black comedy, a combination of malice, stupidity, control freakery, and blind ideology. Not only are these positions immune to evidence; they are actively antagonistic to it.
Here, then, is a final thing you should know, a lesson taught by the Covid pandemic: mass death will not bring this ideological extremism to its senses. On the contrary, demagogues and their followers are all too ready to embrace a cult of death.
