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My name is Zeynep Tufekci. I’m a columnist at “The New York Times.” I’m also a professor at Princeton University, and I study science, society, and technology.
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Bird flu is circulating in the United States among poultry, and also among cows. And so far, there has been one known human case.
Now, four years after COVID began, obviously, it’s really frightening to think that we could potentially face another pandemic. One of the things that comes up a lot is whether to panic or not panic. And I find that uncomfortable. I think for public health officials, that’s not even the right question. I want them to tell us what’s going on, their information, and I want them to demonstrate competent response in a timely manner.
And when it comes to that, I have to say, I’m a little panicked because even though we have not had a major human outbreak with H5N1 yet, I think the way US institutions and US Public Health have been so behind the curve and so reluctant to share information with the scientific community and so late to try to get this under control has me a little worried.
The first known case was announced among cows on March 25, right? It’s been about a month. And we’re still lacking really important answers, like how widespread is it, really? When I started investigating this question, I talked to many, many US government officials, and I just couldn’t get really good answers from them. I would be hearing that it had spread from cattle farms back to poultry farms, and they don’t know how.
There have been very few genomes released until recently. And after a lot of pressure, they released a bunch of them. But they released it in this really unwieldy format, like raw sequences, and they don’t have any geographic information, like the time and date, which is really crucial. It’s been a month, and we don’t have these basic pieces of information. And I kept running into these, “we don’t know,” “we’re working on it,” “we’re going to release it.”
So I started calling up people on the ground. I started talking to people in Texas. I started talking to farm workers and public health officials on the ground. And when I called the Texas Commissioner of Agriculture, he just straight up told me this has been around probably since February. He said that our herds were getting really sick, and we couldn’t figure it out.
And then they had a scientist called by a vet on the ground who kind of suspected this might be bird flu. And that initiative by these people on the ground a month later, at least maybe two, is what led to the detection that it was even the bird flu. And my jaw kind of fell on the floor because he was very straightforward, and he just was giving me all this information.
And he thought like, oh, this is just exaggerated because our cows have probably all had it. He thought 40 percent to 50 percent of the herds in the panhandle, which is where dairy cattle are, were already infected and had gotten over it, which is good news for the cows, but for people, that’s an incredibly dangerous moment because February is also a peak human influenza season.
So it means that just when human influenza was widespread, we had avian influenza among cows also widespread. And the influenza virus has a very interesting evolutionary trick. When two types of influenza viruses co-infect in the same host, they’re able to swap segments with each other, and then they swap their parts and become adapted to the other species.
On the one hand, it made me feel a little better about this virus because if it had been that widespread then and hadn’t had a major human spillover or an outbreak, that’s good because it probably means it’s not very prone to getting into humans, which is good to know. But if it had been, we would have been in such deep trouble. We wouldn’t even know what was happening until way later.
But the fact that after COVID, after all the criticisms we made of China for its delay in responding, not getting this under control, we could have unleashed something new into the world. I mean, it’s not just us because it would be terrible for us, but we have a responsibility to the whole world that we didn’t even share the information we had in a timely manner. So I found that really disappointing. And whatever’s going on there really needs to be fixed because luck is not a good plan when it comes to dealing with pandemic potential viruses like this.
Now, I have to say there is some good parts of our readiness. I talked to people in the vaccine readiness programs, and they really seemed like most on top of it. They had a lot of plans, and there’s already vaccine candidates match and there’s stockpiling. That’s great, but that’s a process that would take months to reach the population. And that’s a little like having great fire insurance, but that comes into play after your house is burnt down.
The most important thing is to prevent this from happening. So a big tool in our kit should be widespread testing because we had this criticism of the Trump administration. “If you don’t test it, it doesn’t exist,” was a motto of sorts. He even said it explicitly. And I’m thinking, what are we doing now? We are not testing widely until very recently. Just a couple of days ago, testing was almost entirely voluntary and only recommended for symptomatic cows. And we know that some of them aren’t showing symptoms.
A lot of the farm worker population in this industry is undocumented immigrants, Hispanic, poor, afraid of stigma, probably can’t just take 10 days off work. So we have to do things like really find a way to encourage the farm workers to report. And that has to include guarantees that they’re not going to be in legal trouble. It has to have compensation if they stop working. And we would also have to have a plan and that we should start right now to have rapid tests.
So these are the things that people who run these things, they know. Something’s not coming together between the CDC, the USDA, which oversees the animals, with the FDA that looks at food safety. The White House is leading it. It’s an election year.
A lot of things have to come together to make the response work. It has to come together into one coherent, united, synchronized response. And I think that’s what we’re missing, which is really frustrating because we’re a really wealthy country with large amounts of expertise. But things have clearly been damaged from the COVID pandemic, and we may be seeing the results of that play out.
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