Are you ready for another pandemic?
No, you are not. And this one has the potential to be worse than COVID.
Cases of H5N1, the bird flu, are on the rise. Bird flu is bad — the cases are limited right now, because most of the transmission is from birds/cows to humans, and not human to human, and most of us don’t cuddle chickens that often. Please don’t start.
We’re definitely not at the point where we should panic and shut everything down, but we are at the point where we should be preparing, building up stockpiles of vaccines, and developing new vaccines (there is no commercially available RNA vaccine for bird flu yet). If the virus mutates, as viruses are wont to do, a variant could spread with stunning speed.
But don’t count on those vaccines saving us if this virus does what flu viruses sometimes do, and turns into a pandemic form. It won’t oblige humanity by slowly mutating, giving people a chance to ramp up vaccines quickly.
“It is going to happen fast,” says Ali Khan, dean of the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health and a veteran of numerous disease outbreaks, from influenza to Ebola.
The world just saw this happen. COVID appeared suddenly and spread globally before alarm bells rang. Even with the new, quick-turn technology of mRNA vaccines, it took just about a year after SARS-CoV-2 started its global spread to get the first doses into arms. By that point, 300,000 people had died in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands more—possibly millions—died around the world before vaccines were fully deployed.
Viruses reproduce at a phenomenal rate, faster than we slow clumsy vertebrates can adapt. You just know, though, that the guy Trump wants to appoint to run the NIH is going to argue for “herd immunity” the instant a pandemic takes off. In fact, this country has been working to undermine even a minimally responsible pandemic response for the last few years.
When COVID broke out, people were largely open to vaccines. Then-president Donald Trump touted his government’s rollout of the vaccine, but he has since helped feed vaccine skepticism. Neither Trump nor his Democratic opponent for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, mentions pandemic preparedness in their respective campaign platforms.
Even uptake of routine childhood vaccines is falling. “The lack of trust around vaccines does put us in a very bad place. We do know that people are dying because they are not getting vaccinated against COVID,” Khan says. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that only 11 percent of adults and just 7 percent of pregnant women have received the latest COVID vaccine.
Some states have loosened vaccine requirements and recommendations, something that worries Khan and other public health experts. Vaccines cannot help anyone if people don’t get them. Politicians who don’t promote the need for pandemic preparations are gambling that the next one won’t hit during their terms in office. “This is all going to potentially come home to roost with the next pandemic,” Khan says.
I got my COVID vaccine. It won’t help against bird flu, though. Meanwhile, the idiots are pushing the public to take greater risks. Remember all the fools touting raw milk for some absurd reason? That had consequences in California.
The source for all those bird flu cases in California was a few cow herds, herds specifically raised to produce raw milk, from a company called Raw Farm, run by a guy named Mark McAfee. Remember that name; it could go down in history, just like that of Mrs O’Leary. McAfee has some political opportunities in the current climate.
As bird flu has spread among poultry and cattle in the US this year, raw milk has seen a new wave of interest and some high-profile supporters, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Raw milk was on a laundry list of items that faced “aggressive suppression” by the US Food and Drug Administration, Kennedy said in a post on X in October. In a fact sheet shared with CNN on Monday, Raw Farm said its CEO, Mark McAfee, “has been asked by the RFK transition team to apply for the position of ‘FDA advisor on Raw Milk Policy and Standards Development.’ ” CNN has reached out to the Trump transition team for comment.
Imagine a pandemic with RFK jr and Jay Bhattacharya in charge. Or don’t, if you don’t like nightmares. We are so screwed.
Oh, and for those people who look at a table listing a mere 57 cases, who think that’s minor and nothing to worry about, that’s just human cases. The virus is thriving in herds of cattle and flocks of birds, you know, those animals most of us eat.
In updates since November 27, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) confirmed 14 more H5N1 outbreaks in dairy cattle, all involving California herds. The latest additions push the state’s total to 475 and the national total to 689 across 15 states.
Also, APHIS confirmed more H5N1 outbreaks in poultry in six states. All involve commercial farms. In California, the virus struck poultry farms in three counties—a duck breeder and a broiler facility housing more than 266,000 birds in Fresno County, a turkey farm in Merced County, and a commercial hatchery in Tulare County.
In Minnesota, the virus hit two more turkey farms in Meeker County, one of which has nearly 242,000 birds.
Similar outbreaks were confirmed at turkey farms in North Dakota (Ransom County), South Dakota (Beadle and Faulk counties), and Utah (Sanpete County).
In the south, the virus was confirmed at a broiler farm in Tennessee’s Gibson County that houses 37,200 birds. The outbreak is Tennessee’s first since October 2023.
Think of those as vast culture dishes where H5N1 is proliferating and mutating at a furious rate. Give ’em time, we’ll get a deadly variant popping out eventually.
Yikes!
Yes.
Fuck. 8
It will go away by itself, as these things will, by Easter….
Of course nobody brought up pandemic preparedness. President Biden (and VP Harris as a bonus) got slammed for his post-COVID efforts. President Trump’s work got dumped into a memory hole and elicited either yawns or cries of “Moar Please!”
Any policy announcement during the campaign would have been a “Concept of a Plan” from Trump (bold and audacious the media would cry) or ignored in the case of Kamala Harris’ policy work (“You should be focusing on other things” the activists would yell.)(“Harris has no Policy!” and “Where is the Harris campaign policies?” the media would whine while looking at the policies sent out from the campaign.)
Besides, Trump already showed his hand on pandemic policies for the next term. I am uncertain how it can be missed.
As soon as the NHS offers it I’ll take it. I already had the standard influencer* injection with my Covid top up in mid October.
What will they suggest this time? Calomel?
* deliberate
It sounds like the new administration is going to enthusiastically embrace conflict of interest.
covid started with trump as president
bird flu could start with trump as president
coicidence?
We have no idea how many people around the world died from the Covid-19 virus.
It was certainly in the millons by the time the vaccines came out.
.1. In most of the Third World, their public health care systems are so minimal that they have to way of even counting how many of their citizens died from the Covid-19 virus. They are bogged down dealing with serious infectious diseases like malaria, TB, hepatitis, HIV etc..
AFAICT, they didn’t even bother to guess.
.2. In other countries that could actually acquire and keep statistics, they didn’t do it based on political reasons. It looks bad when millions of people die suddenly.
That would include China, India, and Russia.
.3. Even in the USA, several states and regions of states stopped counting Covid-19 deaths early on.
That would include Nebraska, Florida, parts of Ohio and Missouri that we know of.
The US death toll is listed as 1.2 million deaths. It’s more like over 1.4 million. We know this is an undercount and many deaths from Covid-19 virus weren’t reported as such. I’ve seen two people in the last year or so who died from Long Covid complications. They weren’t counted in those totals either.
So many people said that they voted for Trump this time because the prices of milk and eggs were too high. Well, this is what’s been driving the price up and it sure isn’t going to get cheaper with these buffoons in charge.
Look mat the bright side, if many people die from the bird flu, there will be less people eating food, eventually there will be a surplus of food, and the prices will go down. That is if you survive.
Helpful as ever, the CDC is currently advising handwashing against birdflu. Farming conglomerates are refusing to equip their workers with PPE. Even Maria van Kerkhove from the WHO, who gaslighted us for 4 years seems to be getting nervous about this. The mortality in the infected humans so far was not 50% as previously reported, but we are literally 1 or 2 mutations in the sialic acid receptor away from that thing being able to more effectively infect human lower airways, and then it will be game over.
You can’t get anyone to wear a mask anymore, US health agencies are about to be run by lunatics, and tragically Americans still do get on airplanes,and will quickly share the fun around the world. Everyone blamed China for Covid (wrongly), but this one will be on the US. It’s criminal how the situation with infected livestock esp.in California is being handled. It’s as if these people all have a death wish.
Personally I haven’t stopped masking. I need to stock up.
The good thing is that so far, cow and human infections are mild. The bad thing: cat infections (and mustelids) are extremely deadly.
Also, for humans we only have relatively healthy farm workers being infected at the moment. It might be terrible in the elderly, or in babies.
@12,
“It might be terrible in the elderly, or in babies.”
The latter, not the former. The elderly will be the ones best off in a birdflu pandemic, because they have protection from not only more vaccinations, but also previous exposure to H5 influenza. This would be mostly a pandemic of the young.
Jay Bhattacharya is a particularly disturbing crank straight out of the Deepak Chopra School of Hindsight Medicine. He appears to have a giant chip on his shoulder that his idiotic notions were ignored during COVID and is now on the talk circuit braying that he was correct about masking (they don’t work – according to him), lockdowns (same thing), social distancing (same thing) and the general alarm about seeing dead bodies being loaded into freezer trailers.
He’s a very dangerous person to be advocating how we should take on the next respiratory pandemic.\
I will rely upon my personal group of scientists, doctors, researchers, etc for how to protect myself, and not cranks and nutjobs. May the odds be ever in your favor.
Herd immunity turned out to be an unobtainable delusion.
Here we are at year 5 of the Covid-19 virus pandemic and how is that herd immunity working out?
It’s not. There have been multiple waves of Covid-19 virus variants this year.
People I know who are old and have underlying health problems that managed to avoid the virus so far, all got infected in the last few months.
Fortunately they’ve been vaccinated 5 or 6 times so most had mild cases, although one guy ended up in the ICU anyway.
With this type of virus, that mutates often, herd immunity will never be possible.
#11: anat
Thanks for reminding me. Imma stock up on masks this December , (and will be consulting my personal Doctor about this issue in January.)
Just ran across this article-
https://apnews.com/article/congo-unknown-disease-kwango-11c96d7073ae4a0bc8ef9b2575f8d226
143 deaths from an “unknown, flu-like disease” in the Congo.
California fattens up most for-eating cows from the entire country (they are all shipped here for this on trains, thousands of miles) and also has the country’s largest for-milking dairy herds (these cows are shipped to other states that do much less regulation, thousands of miles and back, in preparation for this).
They don’t dare blame those other states because their business model depends on this.
McAffee may or may not be responsible for some of this. I grew up with alternative health, and most raw milk makers and raw milk drinkers are utter fanatics about cleanliness. The whole ship them away and ship them back thing isn’t something they’d usually do IME.
There are dead cows on the side of the roads of California RN because there are too many for the farmers to have hauled away. It is not just a few herds. It is not just milk herds. What is true, or at least what Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times (a buddy ol’ pall of Musk’s from SA, and whose paper which did not endorse Harris) reports as true and is saying, is that workers of all kinds are not using PPE on their own choice (?) and that neither California or the herd owners are enforcing this.
The article quoted by PZ blames this on the milk, but there are definitely workers who do not drink the milk and who are not working with milk-herds but meat-herds who are getting this. They need their jobs and might be illegal, so they are keeping on working sick and they are not reporting just what they are sick with when they take their days off.
I recently contracted pertussis, AKA whooping cough, which is having a big resurgence, thanks to the efforts of antivaxxers. I am fortunate in that I got a booster only a few years ago, so the malady came and went in only 6 weeks, instead of 3 months. But I still coughed so hard I tore myself a hernia. Without the vaccine, I would have had a much worse experience, continuing until about Xmastime. Get your vaccinations updated everyone! There are undoubtedly more plagues on the way.
The UK has just contracted to buy 5 million doses of the existing H5 vaccine https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-secures-h5-influenza-vaccine-to-boost-pandemic-preparedness
rorschach@13 — Not so. With influenza, children up to 3 years old have a slightly higher risk of death, largely as you say from lack of immune experience, but it is nowhere near the risk in the elderly because the benefits from prior exposure are far outweighed by the impact of comorbidities such as heart disease, COPD, and diabetes.
I used CDC Wonder for the data crunching. I won’t paste the whole table here, but in summary:
age … influenza deaths per 100,000 population
<1 … 4.2
1 … 1.3
2 … 0.9
3 … 0.6
— stays much the same through to the mid-20s, then —
30 … 1.3
40 … 2.9
50 … 4.9
60 … 12.2
70 … 28.5
80 … 83.2
That is, 80 year olds have almost 20x the risk for infants.
raven@15–
Herd immunity is not an unattainable delusion. Depending on the strain of COVID-19, I’ve seen estimates from 70% to 90% immunisation cover to achieve it. Here’s one review that discusses the concept and the difficulties in achieving it for COVID-19.
The problem is malicious or misinformed actors misusing the term as an argument for inaction, completely ignoring that (1) herd immunity is only created two processes: mass immunisation or mass infection, (2) herd immunity wanes without regular immune boosting, which brings us back to mass immunisation or mass infection, and (3) herd immunity can be washed away by new mutations and can only be re-established by mass immunisation or mass infection, and (4) even for those diseases where full herd immunity is impossible, immunisation can still provide relative herd resistance on top of individual protection.
The peculiarity here is that one of the biggest barriers to herd immunity is vaccine misinformation…which has a near-complete overlap on the Venn diagram of people saying we should rely on herd immunity instead. That is, saying we should rely on herd immunity by itself makes it more difficult to achieve herd immunity.
Just popped in mention that MedCram exists. Here is their latest on H5N1.
Masking works, at least against flu.
chrislawson @21
Your influenza death rates related to age brackets may hold as a rule of thumb, but I think rorschach @13 is misapplying the apt notion of cohorts. Groups exposed to certain HAs in the distant past may exhibit an immunity to that HA that would be lacking in younger people. When that group dies of old age that immunity goes too perhaps and the pandemic may recur. That’s my fuzzy take on Offit’s summary of Hilleman‘s periodicity notion in Vaccinated: “Hilleman saw two patterns in these outbreaks. First, the types of hemagglutinins occurred in order: H2, H3, H1, H2, H3, H1. Second, the intervals between pandemics of the same type were always sixty-eight years—not approximately sixty-eight years, but exactly sixty-eight years.” There’s an alleged 68 year gapping. “Using this logic, Hilleman predicted that an H2 virus, similar to the ones that had caused disease in 1889 and 1957, would cause the next pandemic—a pandemic that would begin in 2025.” Wouldn’t that be a kicker if the currently salient cattle flu didn’t hit us but some H2 instead. Or why not both? There also seems to be a dogma against H5 developing into a major threat. As in: “Hilleman reasoned that bird flu wouldn’t become a pandemic virus until it spread easily among people. H5 viruses have circulated for more than a hundred years and have never been very contagious. Hilleman believed that they never would be.”
I dunno. Also: “He noted that only three types of hemagglutinins had ever caused pandemic disease in humans: H1, H2, and H3.”
At least based on that rorschach‘s assertion on “previous exposure to H5 influenza” of elderly seems sus. And none of the previous vaccinations would have contained H5, right?
On the cohort angle there’s this paper looking at H1N1 and swine flu vaccinations in the mid 70’s (“Vaccinees against the 1976 “swine flu” have enhanced neutralization responses to the 2009 novel H1N1 influenza virus”):
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20415539/
And from 2014: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3928226/
So I think rorschach was getting at something real but maybe not applicable in the elderly per widespread H5 exposure in the past?