Truthout – We might have just rung in a new year, but it feels like an epidemiological Groundhog Day.
Nearly five years since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, public health experts are once again sounding the alarm. This time, it’s the H5N1 virus — also known as avian influenza, or bird flu — that’s causing concern.
Even though federal officials have had ample time to stymie the spread, the last 10 months have seen the virus jump virtually unabated from state to state, infecting cattle herds, poultry, pigs and people.
There’s still no proof that bird flu can be transmitted between humans, but if the virus continues on its current trajectory, experts warn that we could be facing a devastating pandemic of COVID-19 proportions, at minimum.
And, just as in 2020, the U.S. stands to face the next major viral outbreak with none other than President Donald J. Trump at the helm.
It didn’t have to be this way. H5N1, which has been around for decades, was first observed infecting humans in 1997.
But last March marked a new turning point: The U.S. reported its first confirmed bird flu outbreak in dairy cattle. Since mammal-to-mammal transmission of the virus is rare, its spread among cows raised immediate red flags for epidemiologists.
Still, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched a containment effort that critics called slow and fragmented. Within a month, more than 30 dairy herds across eight states had tested positive for the virus.
In April 2024, Zeynep Tufekci, a Princeton University professor who wrote a series of columns on the government’s poor COVID-19 response in 2020 and 2021, published a new op-ed titled, “This May Be Our Last Chance to Halt Bird Flu in Humans, and We Are Blowing It.”
“There’s a fine line between one person and 10 people with H5N1 … ”
