Birx and others appear to be reincarnating the infamous 2020 US strategy of “chasing silent spread,” whereby asymptomatic Covid was used to justify expensive mass sentinel testing, environmental (wastewater) sampling as an indicator of human infection, and misuse. massive contact tracing.
Yet another problem with the bird flu narrative, repeated since Covid, is the misrepresentation of what we know about the risk. The media likes to repeat the “fact” that more than 900 human cases of H5N1 have been reported since 1997, with a 50% mortality rate. However, this is not at all the real number of infections. Even within this highly selective data, the majority of cases were reported before 2015. Given the enormous scale of spread and current mortality of wild and domestic birds and mammals since 2021, including the culling of 500 million poultry to treat To control H5N1, the lack of reported human deaths is a good thing.
This week’s round of media stories stems from H5N1 being found on nearly 100 farms in 12 US states, as well as in cats and mice. The (so far) three human cases had conjunctivitis, cough and other flu-like symptoms and recovered. Anecdotal reports from dairy workers suggest much wider circulation of mild flu-like symptoms. Two mild cases were recently reported in children in Australia (H5N1) and India (H9N2).
In short, spillover effects are much more widespread than our evidence suggests and are certainly not limited to the US dairy industry. However, the narrative of fear continues. Last week, the international media jumped on the news from the World Health Organization about what they called “the first death” from H5N2 avian flu in Mexico. Two days later, Mexico’s Health Minister responded by stating that the WHO statement “wasn’t accurate… and it’s pretty bad,” as the 59-year-old man had died of other, unrelated causes. He went with H5N2 and not H5N2.
Leaving aside the fact that the mass testing program promoted by Birx and others is completely unrealistic (and undesirable), what would it likely achieve? What would happen when more H5N1 are inevitably found and some chains of human-to-human transmission extend beyond the dairy industry and into the broader community?
As we learned during 2020-22, mass testing is not neutral. We now risk returning to the flawed logic and harmful knee-jerk reaction of the Covid era. We must put this behind us and ensure that any legacy of pursuing the asymptomatic spread approach to respiratory viruses, Covid or bird flu, disappears with it.
