Scientists and public health experts continue to be concerned about the highly pathogenic avian influenza (bird flu). They are saying it is something the general public should be afraid of, and worry it’ll become the next pandemic.
This virus typically infects birds, including poultry used for meat and eggs, and there’s a current outbreak that has affected close to 150 million birds. Due to culling policies in the United States and abroad, the bird flu has also devastated farms since 2022. Scientists are also now concerned that they have detected the virus in mammals in recent years—including dairy cows and humans—and learned it can spread between mammals, which significantly raises the outbreak risk. And since 2024, 102 cases of avian flu and 10 deaths have been reported in humans globally, a potentially staggering fatality rate, according to a report by Forbes.
HPAI Bird Flu Continues Its Spread To Mammals
“We have so many tools, but they’re not being used optimally—and they’re not being used optimally by choice,” says Dr. Amesh Adalja, a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an expert in global public health. “We can change the trajectory of this if we actually take those best practices, take those tools, and use them optimally.”
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins’ original plan to combat avian flu included US$100 million in research and vaccine development. But shortly after announcing it, she reversed course and told right-wing site Breitbart that vaccines were “off the table.” Meanwhile, in May, the Trump-Vance Administration cancelled a massive contract with Moderna to develop a vaccination for humans against bird flu, and this month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 members of the advisory committee that helps develop vaccine policy and recommendations for the CDC. –Forbes.
“I’m optimistic that they will continue to support the development of these vaccines. It would be a crime right now to stop it,” said Scott Hensley, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who worked on an avian flu vaccine for cattle.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an expert in global public health added that If the past year has been a trial run for how the government might respond to the actual emergence of an avian flu pandemic, he says, “we’ve failed this trial run.”
Bird flu has taken a backseat with the mainstream media since before the riots hit Los Angeles, and Israel preemptively struck Iran, igniting what could become World War 3. But is it still a concern? What do you think? Was it all just propaganda and games from the beginning?
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