Original article
The spread of bird flu in the United States raised alarm bells this week with the media, the WHO and scientists saying rising infections in livestock and dairy workers are an ominous sign of a pandemic. emerging human.
Articles of American scientist, Time, The conversation, Fortuneand many others implored the US government and the dairy sector to quickly implement mass testing and develop a variety of biosecurity measures to “prevent” viral evolution and human-to-human transmission.
The EU commission has reportedly signed a deal for 40 million doses of human vaccines to protect agricultural workers. And two dozen vaccine manufacturers are working on creating a bovine vaccine.
However, as with Covid, mainstream media and health authorities are rapidly becoming propagators of misinformation, motivated by the politics of fear, the illusion of control, and the biases inherent in the response industry. to the pandemic.
Grab a quote from leading science reporter Amy Maxman today on American scientist: “To become a pandemic, the H5N1 bird flu virus would have to spread from person to person. “The best way to control that possibility is to test people.”
Earlier this month, Deborah Birx, a former Covid response coordinator during the Trump administration, advocated for mass weekly testing of “every cow” and “every dairy worker” in the United States. She claimed the US was repeating the mistakes of the Covid era by not increasing testing to track asymptomatic and undetected cases.
Such a policy proposal, from the former US Covid coordinator and a veteran of the global health diplomatic corps in Washington, is worrying for several reasons. First, at last count there were 87 million head of cattle and calves in the United States. Around nine million are dairy cows, distributed in herds of different sizes on some 25,000 farms and with more than 100,000 dairy workers.
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.
Follow Kevin Bardosh on X (formerly Twitter) @KevinBardosh
