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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, we're talking about bird flu, but in a pretty Decoder way. Lauren Leffer, who recently wrote a piece for The Verge about bird flu and how it's becoming a forever problem, is joining me on the show. And we're going to talk about the systems, structure, and culture that might control the bird flu and those that might make it worse.
Now, you've most likely heard about bird flu in the context of egg prices. Eggs are expensive and hard to find right now because the bird flu has kicked off an old-fashioned supply and demand problem. The virus kills almost every single chicken it infects. Fewer chickens means fewer eggs, and fewer eggs means higher prices. You'll hear Lauren say it's a little bit more complicated than that, but that's the basic shape of it.
But the thing is that the bird flu is actually quite a bit more serious than just the egg supply. The first confirmed human death linked to the virus happened in January, and now we're facing down some uncomfortable questions with no easy answers. Like how rapidly the new strains of bird flu, known collectively as H5N1, might be spreading from birds to dairy cows and other animals. And just how deadly those new strains are among both birds and mammals, including human beings.
If you're like me, you're starting to feel some uncomfortably familiar feelings, and you're not wrong to feel them. There are some real echoes of COVID-19 here. And the Trump administration, with RFK Jr. as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, is not at all equipped to handle a fast-moving pathogenic virus. RFK himself...
is an anti-vaccine activist who peddles junk science with abandon. Just last week, he went on Fox News and suggested that one way to deal with the bird flu was to simply let it spread and kill all the birds. which is a purely stupid idea for a variety of reasons you'll hear Lauren discuss. On top of that, the messy aftermath of the pandemic and the damage done to institutional trust across the board would make this job difficult for even a credible leader.
of our public health services. Like I said, I wanted to talk about this in a decoder framework. And there's one big difference from COVID that I really wanted to push on. Industrial agriculture in America is a big business. And the bird flu is a threat to that business. Millions of dead birds represents millions in lost revenue. And if the virus becomes more deadly to dairy cows, it's even more money on the line.
So if the government isn't capable of mounting a response, is the industry capable of seeing and solving this problem before it becomes even worse? The answer, as you might expect, is a resounding question mark.
But as you'll hear Lauren explain, different parts of the market are reacting differently. And right now, there still appears to be time. Scientists are not yet raising the kinds of alarms that we started to see in the months leading up to March 2020, when COVID changed all of our lives forever. But one thing is clear.
The bird flu is not just going to go away, no matter how much RFK Jr. might wish that that's how it works. We need to learn to live with it and manage it, and so long as we can get everyone on the same page, we might even be able to fight it. Okay, the forever war with bird flu. Here we go.
Lauren Luffer, you're a science journalist. You've written for a bunch of places, including The Verge, the most important place of all. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here, even if we're talking about something not so great. Love talking about influenza viruses and potential pandemics. Obviously, in the election, the price of eggs became this big totem for a lot of people. People are still tracking the price of eggs.
And it seems to us here at Decoder that we're not doing a great job of talking about the reason for the price of eggs to be going up and down the way it is right now, which is the – bird flu. You just wrote a big piece for us explaining what is happening with the bird flu, where it goes from here, what the real dangers of it are. Your title was, we're about to enter a forever war with the bird flu. Explain what you mean by that.
Well, we've entered a forever war with bird flu, although I saw some Reddit commentary that suggests for it to be a war, we'd have to be fighting back. I guess... Well, what I was trying to get at is there might be an expectation when you see a new story about bird flu that eventually you'll stop seeing them, that at some point this will no longer be the story of the day. But we've passed kind of so many key things.
thresholds with this virus that I think it's important for the public to understand. It's not going away anytime in the immediate future, anytime in the foreseeable future. It's here to stick around for a bunch of reasons that I'm sure we'll get into. One quick note on the price of
eggs though. I haven't dug into this really deeply, but there has been some recent reporting that suggests, although bird flu is clearly related to what's been going on, that there might also be some like egg monopoly shenanigans going on there too. I've definitely seen a story about the one clearinghouse for surplus eggs in America that modifies prices. We'll try to get them on the show. For the sake of this conversation, I think the thesis here is if you dramatically lower the supply of birds.
By killing them with the bird flu, you will have fewer eggs and thus egg prices will rise. And that is a mechanism I think we can just hold on to whether or not there's monopolistic price gouging on top of that I think for a later show. You mentioned we've already entered the war, right? We've passed the key thresholds. Describe where we are now and what those thresholds are.
Right now, the current state of bird flu, specifically highly pathogenic bird flu or H5N1 in the U.S., is we've had an ongoing outbreak since 2022 in wild birds, farmed poultry, and then since 2024 in... cattle or dairy cows.
And there have been 70 confirmed human cases in the U.S., at least three of which have been severe enough to require hospitalization and one which has resulted in death. That was a case in Louisiana where a person caught it from a backyard flock, actually not associated with a farm. So H5N1, highly pathogenic avian influenza is actually...
was first detected in the 1950s. But in the 90s is when we had the first human cases. And so that's kind of when outbreaks became like this major news story, big concern. But it's been... a virus with known propensity to cause damage among poultry flocks since the mid-1900s. On paper, just a couple of severe human cases might not sound that alarming, but...
What's really been the key point of concern is just how widespread the virus is, not just among humans, but among wild animals. So it's in wild birds, obviously, which is where it originated in this outbreak, but also in like all sorts of different wild mammals. If you look at like the USDA tracking of avian influenza cases across states, it's been found in wild birds in every state. It's been found in wild mammals in most states. It's been found in poultry flocks in every state.
I think it's like 17 states with cases in dairy cows. So it's just profoundly widespread. And the thing that is most new in this outbreak is that... It's spreading among all of these different animals, and there have been multiple cases of it going from birds to mammals, potentially back to birds from other mammals. And it's just this really crazy, wide...
chaotic, uncontained spread that we have no real way of eradicating. It's not going to be like past outbreaks where if we just get things under control on poultry farms that we can expect the virus to go away for a period of time. There's going to be this major... and wild birds that just sticks around. I hate to make this entire conversation about COVID, but just as you describe the problem of spread today, I can't help but make the comparison.
to the very controversial origins of COVID debate where we were told that it leapt from animals to humans in a wet market in Wuhan, China. There's obviously an enormous number of people who believe that it was. gain-of-function research in a lab in China. But you're talking about here's a very pathogenic virus in birds today, and we can see it leaping to other species in the wild. There's no evil mastermind turning the knob. Is that a fair comparison?
If the comparison is that viruses jump species, and so COVID likely started as a non-human virus and became one, yeah, I mean, I think it's fair to say it's always a concern when we see these so-called spillover events, when viruses are able to change from one host to another. another. Influenza has caused a lot of human pandemics in the past. And in basically every case where that happened, it was some sort of avian virus that admixed with another form of flu virus. I mean...
Most recently, there was like the 2009 swine flu influenza epidemic. And anytime you have a virus... that starts in one species, especially a species humans have a lot of contact with, and shows a propensity to be able to go into humans, it's like a major epidemiology concern.
I think the comparison is important because it is, unfortunately, I think the frame most regular people are familiar with nowadays. And the idea that if H5 poses a serious risk to birds, does that mean it's also going to spread as quickly to humans? That's a scary prospect. And if this outbreak progresses, then we might have another full-blown pandemic. I mean, even with COVID, I mean, we don't have any great sense of how deadly it was in other... species prior to becoming a human virus.
Knowing that a virus can move between species concerning, it means you can have wild reservoirs. It means you can have rodents or pests that spread it from place to place. But I don't think there's necessarily any reason to assume that just because a virus is... almost 100% deadly in domestic chickens, that it's going to end up being that dangerous or that deadly to humans. And in fact, the question of how deadly... avian influenza is at this point in humans is kind of like...
up for debate. It's been a big point of confusion in this outbreak because in past human outbreaks of bird flu, we've seen like up to 50% or even over 50% human mortality. And that's just not the case fatality rate we're seeing now.
No one's 100% sure what to attribute that to. There's questions about whether or not the new strains are a little bit less virulent. There's questions about whether or not the conditions of exposure are what accounts for that. I've even seen some speculation that because we're monitoring...
a U.S. outbreak where seasonal flu is very common, that people just have a little bit more immunity or resistance to flu strains than in Hong Kong or Southeast Asia, where some of the other big human outbreaks have happened.
I think the reason I asked it that way is because it is easy to have a framework based on the thing we all experience, but that framework doesn't seem to be directly applicable here. And in particular, the parts of the framework that are breakdown for me are... is this thing going to be as deadly for humans as it is in the animal populations that we can see and then i think more importantly how it spreads
Obviously, with COVID, it took us such a long time to get to its respiratory. We need to do masks and ventilation and all the COVID mitigations that we ended up doing. Here, there's all these other ways, right? It can spread in a variety of different ways. Yeah, and it seems to depend on the species. Just big step back. Viruses like flu are kind of dependent on specific receptors in cells and tissues to latch onto a host and spread and multiply.
influenza H5N1 has this particular type of cell receptor. It has an affinity for it. In birds, it's kind of all over depending on what type of bird. In ducks, it's kind of like a systematic. Protein in dairy cows, it's like really concentrated in the udders. The main way it's spreading in dairy cows, they think, is through the milking equipment, although there have been cases in non-lactating cows in herds. But yeah, the spread is kind of, it's a big point.
of confusion and a debate again. In COVID, like you said, it took us a long time to hone in on. It wasn't fomites or objects people were touching. It wasn't, you know, just mucus and stuff like that. It was... airborne it was respiratory we don't necessarily have a good handle yet on how h5n1 is spreading or even like can it spread between all of the animals it's infecting
I think with any emerging pathogen, it takes time and the dedicated resources and research to figure out exactly what's going on. And especially because H5 is in so many different species, the... terms of spread are probably different in a lot of those cases. And actually, you know, COVID came up with a lot of the sources I spoke to for this story, and all of them...
kind of rejected the idea that where we're at right now with H5 is similar to where we were in, say, February or March 2020 in the lead up to COVID. And some of that was for like... positive, encouraging reasons. Like we know how to treat flu a lot better than we knew how to treat what was at the time a completely novel virus with COVID. And we have like candidate vaccines for H5 in animals.
And then part of it was for less encouraging reasons, like we truly are seeing this in like an endemic wild reservoir and we're just not going to be able. to ensure that future spillovers aren't happening. You know, no matter where you are on like COVID conspiracy theories and like was it made in a lab or whatever, the overwhelming consensus is that with COVID, it ended up a human virus because of like a single spillover event. It went from like one source.
into the human population. With bird flu, people are being infected from all sorts of different interactions. Every human infection at this point of bird flu is a spillover event on its own.
And so the fact that we're setting ourselves up to have so many potential more spillovers and so many interactions with sources of virus is... I think a big concern for epidemiologists who are always trying to think of ways to mitigate the risk of this becoming something that spreads readily between people, of this becoming something that we have no way of monitoring or controlling for. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Alex Partners.
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Today Explained here with Eric Levitt, senior correspondent at Vox.com to talk about the 2024 election. That can't be right. Eric, I thought we were done with that. I feel like I'm Pacino in three. Just when I thought I was out. They pull me back in. Why are we talking about the 2024 election again? The reason why we're still looking back...
is that it takes a while after an election to get all of the most high quality data on what exactly happened. So the full picture is starting to just come into view now. And you wrote a piece about the full picture. for Vox recently, and it did bonkers business on the internet. What did it say? What struck a chord? Yeah, so this was my interview with David Shore of Blue Rose Research. He's one of the...
biggest sort of democratic data gurus in the party. And basically, the big picture headline takeaways are on today explained, you'll have to go listen to them there. Find the show wherever you listen to shows, bro. We're back with science journalist Lauren Leffer discussing the bird flu outbreak and what happens next.
Before the break, you heard Lauren and I discussing the big picture, when the recent outbreak started, what makes it so different from past outbreaks, and of course, how we might compare it to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Because H5N1 isn't an entirely new kind of avian influenza, we do have some knowledge as to how it spreads, and what tools we have at our disposal to control it. So I wanted to know, what have we done before, and how much of that is relevant for the situation we're dealing with today?
Let's just talk about it in birds for one second, and then I want to get to that bigger picture. It's come up in birds since the 50s, you said. We've monitored spillovers to humans since the 90s. How have we controlled it in the past? Those are still the mechanisms that we would use to control it today. So in the past, it's been the most relevant sites of control have been poultry farms. And the way of controlling them, the...
outbreaks there have been, you cull the birds. Bird flu is incredibly virulent and deadly when it gets into domestic chickens. It's like 99.9% of the chickens die very, very quickly when they get it. It's like a devastating system.
systemic virus for them. And so the human response to that has always been like, you have some infected chickens on your farm or in your flock, you cull the flock because you know it's going to kill them anyway. And if you don't contain the spread that way, it'll just spread to more. In the past... It's ended up in chickens because of exposure to wild birds. So it's led to the increase of...
so-called biosecurity measures on poultry farms. So you have really tight controls on who can go in and out of the poultry housing. You have protective equipment that people wear to prevent... bringing outside dirt into inside chicken zone you have
basically completely enclosed facilities in a lot of cases where these chickens are kept via the kind of idea that you have these free pasture-ranged chickens that you're getting in the grocery store. In the vast majority of cases, that's not what life is like. for farmed poultry. And honestly, in terms of past outbreaks, I mean, the biocontrols have been a big thing in some countries, not the U.S., but in a lot of countries in Southeast Asia and China, for instance, they...
administer vaccinations to poultry as well to actually minimize the risk that this happens. And those have kind of been the main... strategies is the biosecurity, the vaccination, the culling. But a lot of these past outbreaks that have happened
In some cases, they just kind of petered out on their own. It's kind of just an interesting phenomenon. You know, viruses aren't always successful, even if you have them circulating in wild populations. If it's confined enough, it might just... hit enough accidental dead ends that it stopped spreading.
And I think at the beginning of the outbreak in the U.S., that's what a lot of epidemiologists were hoping would happen or were kind of expecting would happen because there's precedent for it. But this time the virus got lucky and we were unlucky. What we learned from COVID is that we had all of these response systems built up. We had all these public health laws and controls and CDC.
We'd seen in movies and we were going to assume that the people wearing the jackets knew what they were doing. And the result of all of that was massive distrust in things like vaccines and things like public health experts at all. And now we're faced with, oh, boy, instead of hitting dead ends, maybe this thing is going to grow. Just listening to you talk about it, it feels like that's where.
The scientific community is starting to be really worried, right? That's where we've not entered a war that implies we're fighting comes from. Are farmers treating this differently? Like there's a part of me that wants to believe that like raw capitalism will overcome vaccine hesitancy.
Because watching all your birds die means that you won't make any money that year. Is that playing out differently with that community? I think that's a really good and a really important question. I think the answer differs depending on if you're talking about poultry farmers or...
dairy farmers. So for poultry farmers, I think they're almost certainly desperate for a way to stop their flocks from getting sick. Because like I said, it's super deadly. Once it hits your flock, there's basically nothing you can do except kill your birds. And that's...
you know, major income loss. Granted, you can replace chickens relatively quickly. They grow up fast. They have quick generation time. They lay a bunch of eggs. But yeah, I think there's certainly like an appetite for better solutions among. poultry farmers. One of the problems though with the idea of vaccination is that a lot of U.S. trade partners and the U.S. itself
restrict imports of birds that are vaccinated for avian influenza. And that's because if a bird is vaccinated, it's really hard to test it to see if it's currently infected because, you know, the vaccine prompts the production of antibodies, which are the same sort of things you might. might see in a bird with avian flu. Although, again, these birds die really quickly when they actually get the flu. And so is that necessarily like a great...
Reason to limit vaccination? A lot of countries don't think so. Some European countries, including France, have actually started applying existing avian flu vaccines in some of their poultry farms. So it seems like an idea that's gaining more momentum. For it to be like an economically reasonable choice for farmers in the U.S., we would probably need to see a shift in the trade policy.
And then among dairy farmers, this question of whether vaccination is something that kind of capitalism itself would sort out. It feels a little bit more But like each individual cow, way bigger financial investment. So if you could give a single vaccine to a cow, the cost of that vaccine is like way offset by like the lifespan of that cow's production value.
And although in the cows H5 isn't killing them, what it does do is it leaves like a lot of scar tissue in their udders that can actually reduce their milk production capacity like down the line, even after they've totally cleared the virus and recovered. So I think if I were a dairy farmer and the folks I've talked to like at the state of Michigan who are interfacing with a lot of dairy farmers.
I think if the virus kind of persists and proves really difficult to contain on dairy farms, if we keep seeing these wildlife spillovers, that means it keeps coming onto these farms. I think a vaccine makes a lot of sense for cows. Will consumers be interested in buying milk or dairy products from...
farmers who are vaccinating their cows. It depends, I think, on the messaging. And when you have someone like RFK Jr. sitting at like the helm of the nation's largest health agency, it's difficult to figure out how we might. tackle like the hurdles to vaccination and to public opinion because we have this man who is vocally and repeatedly spreading lies about vaccination.
There's a reason I started with capitalism. I understand how that mechanism works, the United States of America. I understand that if you can't make money, you will do things to make money. I know how that works, and it's very hard to break. There's one thing I know about living in this country, and it's very hard to break that.
People want to make the money and people want low prices. And I don't think that's a great mechanism to run public health against, but I can see how it operates here. The thing that is challenging that, I think, in the realist way is the cultural pushback.
across the board so it's rfk jr at the at the head of health and human services which we should definitely talk about at length but it's also things like the demand for raw milk and unpasteurized eggs and the cultural movements that have come up around those products in particular that feel very connected to the COVID backlash and the idea of public health and the idea that we would.
institute some top-level control of the food supply or what we put in our bodies. How are those things interacting here? Do you see a bunch of raw milk farmers like proudly saying, that their cows have the bird flu. That's the part where it seems really messy to me. I live in Maryland and there is like a much loved local dairy that for years now has been selling.
raw milk kind of under the table as like raw milk for pets. And it's like a very transparent buy your raw milk here thing. I've kind of been following what's been going on with them because I had this idea in my head that the spread of H5 might...
change some of their marketing or some of their ideas around the product they're selling. And what I've seen on a lot of the messaging from these farms and farmers that like espouse this idea of raw milk as a health food is they basically just say, my cows aren't sick. I treat my cows great. My cows live in perfect, pristine conditions and they're like natural pasture. Nevermind the fact that like.
they share that pasture with whatever birds happen to be traveling by. So there's this idea that because it's a natural product derived from natural sources, it couldn't possibly harbor anything harmful, which is like a complete... fallacy, right? All of human history can tell us that natural things can be profoundly harmful. To their credit, I haven't seen anyone advertising
the bird flu as an upside of raw milk consumption. But I have seen kind of this pervasive denial that what they're selling could... be part of this harm. There have been some H5 related recalls of raw dairy products, but many of the recent recalls have actually been in pet food products. I haven't talked to or really seen any interviews with any of the people.
who market those raw pet food products, but I don't know that that's meant people are no longer purchasing those things. I don't think it's necessarily trickled down to the public consciousness quite yet. And I actually, I had a... friend who was like feeding her dog freeze-dried raw duck heads as a treat and didn't realize that that could be like a potential
source of disease. I know that people use freeze-dried treats, but I didn't know that you could buy just like a whole duck head to feed your dog. That was kind of wild to learn. There's a lot there. I think there's an entire secondary episode of Decoder in the market for freeze-dried duck heads for dogs. You mentioned RFK. This is where the messaging would come from, right? The head of the top health agency in the country.
would say, these are real problems. I'm taking them seriously. Here's the list of ways we're mitigating the spread. Here are the steps you can take as an individual to protect yourself. Here's what you can demand from your local communities to protect yourself as a group. And he is not doing that. In fact, if I had to make one prediction about RFK is that he will somehow find himself recommending people drinking raw milk and unpasteurized eggs in order to protect themselves from bird flu.
I'm just making that on the show. It's just very obvious that's where he will end up. Yeah, we're like a week away from that, like a major Fox and Friends appearance. He's going to say that the raw milk will enter your body and promote antibodies. It'll strengthen your immune system. And we've gotten there with measles and people in Texas where the claim that the measles is good for you, which makes no sense, has already started entering the sort of weird anti-vaxxer discourse there.
That's another pressure on I understand how capitalism works in America. Capitalism is pretty good at anticipating some of these pressures. Very straightforwardly, if businesses are going to lose money and there's going to be significant harm, the government often steps in and does something about it, or at least acknowledges the problem.
What we've not really seen before, what we're not ready for, is the government saying, this isn't actually that bad of a problem. Or even, this doesn't exist, it's not real. The government straight up denying the bad thing that's happening.
That's not built into capitalism as we know it. So how are scientists reacting to this pressure, specifically what RFK Jr. is out there saying, and the ways he started to interfere and undermine the public health and public safety systems and how they're supposed to work? Well, I think the scientists are understandably infuriated by RFK's messaging.
I think it's a major point of concern because as much as epidemiologists understand the hard science of how viruses spread, as much as virologists can analyze a genetic sequence and say what that might mean for how deadly something is, I don't think... the scientific community has great tools for understanding like what's happening in the public psyche and how to combat like this really pervasive and top-down fear-mongering about
basic medical public health interventions. I think epidemiologists acknowledge that like some communication... errors during covid you know like initially saying that masks weren't effective then saying they were some of that flip-flopping wasn't communicated in a way that people really understood that it was sourced from new information as opposed to sourced by you know the But I don't think that means they necessarily know how to combat what's become like such a...
strong through line of public health mistrust. Part of the problem is that when public health is functioning, it's... essentially invisible right like no one goes around every day thinking about like it's wonderful that i didn't get sick from my water today it's wonderful that like we don't have cholera circulating in major cities like it's wonderful that there's There's no malaria in the U.S., but a single person has a severe side effect to a vaccine. It becomes a national news story.
And so you're up against this conundrum of storytelling, right? Narrative is so strong when you have these scary outliers, but it's way harder to make a story out of something where nothing happens. And I think they're really just kind of... grappling with that now. I think there's been a lot more discussion and collaboration between like
psychologists and sociologists and public health experts and epidemiologists to try and one unpack like why it is that the RFK style anti-vax messaging is spreading and try and figure out how to push back against it. But I just don't think we're there yet strategy wise. So that's the scientific community's response. And how the general distrust built up over many years and arguably totally broken by COVID is making it really complicated.
But what about the farmers? How is the farming community reacting to some of these conversations around mitigation measures and making really tough calls about sick animals? Farms aren't reporting cases. in a lot of instances, right? Like, especially in dairy cows, I would say that the amount of reporting in many states is lower than it actually is. And part of that is capitalism, right? Part of that is if you...
don't report your cases, then you'll still be able to transport your sick cows. You'll still be able to distribute your milk. You'll still be able to make the money in the normal way. And so I think until there is like sufficient support to offset the losses that come with having to institute like way tighter biosecurity protocols and having to dump out a bunch of milk and having...
to quarantine cows, the incentives aren't totally aligned yet on the cow side. Again, for chickens, it's different because the disease makes the choice for you, right? All those birds die. I think we just haven't really figured out on the dairy side how to fix the incentive model. We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back. We're back with science journalist Lorne Leffer. Before the break, we were discussing how various parties are approaching the bird flight break.
from the farming community responsible for keeping their flocks healthy and their farms safe, to officials like RFK Jr., who are supposed to be in charge of helping manage the public health response at the federal level. But the Trump administration in general is a hard pivot away from everything the Biden administration ever did. And it's run by people who are pretty sloppy with an alarming disregard for norms and scientific expertise.
which puts us in a pretty confusing spot when it comes to the federal approach to trying to contain the spread here. So I wanted to ask Lauren, what parts of the bird flu response strategy from the past several years remain intact now that Trump is in office? And how much is someone like RFK Jr. complicating all of that?
The data piece of it is really interesting. The Trump slash Musk administration is messing with all kinds of government data, how we collect it, how we measure it, how it's distributed. It feels like that is coming for HHS. And the USDA, has that had an impact yet? Or do we have independent sources of data that we can rely on? I would say for now, at this present moment, like the...
CDC and USDA are still putting out reliable data on H5. It's just a question of like, how quickly are they publishing it and how often are they updating it? So there have been cases so far where like the CDC will publish and then unpublish a report and then not publish it for a couple weeks later until news stories report on this mysterious disappeared report that happened in February with this really unsettling report about like... among dairy worker households.
Information that gets put on these sites still seems to be accurate. You know, none of these websites are saying like the vaccines caused the bird flu or anything that's completely, totally off base. It's just like the speed. of information sharing has slowed down to the public.
And the schedule has become a little bit less reliable. But the biggest point of concern for information sharing is not necessarily the public facing information sharing, but it's how these agencies have been communicating with like all of the non-governmental organizations. governmental experts that they have like had communication with in the past, like epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins and virologists at Emory, like all of these.
experts who've been working on flu virus for their entire professional careers have usually had direct lines of contact with the CDC or with the USDA. They get weekly or even daily updates about what... is being seen out on the ground with the virus. And then they'll also have regular expert briefings where they're sitting in the same Zoom room and talking with government scientists about what they've learned. And it's really critical information sharing to make informed decisions.
And what I heard from the sources I spoke to is that that's almost entirely disappeared. So it's not that the public information sharing is first on the chopping block, but there's been just way less interfacing between. federal agencies and the scientific community, that's particularly scary for researchers because if you're making the decision about when it's time to start...
poultry vaccination campaigns, if you're making the decision about how to test milk, if you're making the decision about what the best biosecurity protocols are, you need that back and forth. You need everyone from every facet of... the table kind of coming together to discuss, to figure out what makes the most sense. And without those platforms for information sharing and without any promise that that's going to restart, I think people are left pretty afraid by that.
RFK's position is that we should just let it burn through all the birds and then the ones who survive will be super birds. I feel like I just have to ask, is that a viable strategy? I'm going to say no to that one for all sorts. I mean, the list is maybe too long to get into, but just baseline. Again, this virus kills. Almost every chicken it infects, and the ones who survive are not better off for having survived.
And domestic poultry are like super genetically homogenous. Like all of the birds that we're eating, all of the broiler chickens are like almost the same bird genetically we've bred them to, you know, to like... crispy juicy perfection and then that's what makes them all kind of equally vulnerable so the idea that we're going to have
immunity emerge in this population of super homogenous, like very immunocompromised birds that we keep in these like very tight conditions that only live for a very brief period of time before we cull them or kill them, it doesn't make any sense. And the more that...
you let this spread among flocks, the more immediate economic losses there's going to be for farmers, the more workers are going to be exposed to the birds. You're setting up more and more chances for the virus to evolve in more ways, like every single... animal that this virus gets into is an opportunity for it to discover new tricks, for it to figure out ways to be more spreadable and more deadly. It's really dangerous. There's absolutely no guarantee or even...
probability that it leads to some sort of useful genetic change that we could then harness. It's a terrible strategy. I haven't heard a single... I haven't heard a single... respected scientists say that they think that that is sensical. Last question. I know that there's a vaccine. There's a small stockpile of vaccines for humans who are worried about the bird flu.
Is that a reasonable strategy that we should all just embark on a new vaccination campaign? So we have candidate vaccine for H5. Candidate vaccine means that it's kind of been based off of. prior evolved strains, like they haven't necessarily updated it for the current circulating strains, it should still be relatively effective. And I do think there's been lots of talk about whether or not farm workers in particular should be given.
vaccine. I think uptake is a major concern with that, especially when you get onto farms where a lot of the workforce is undocumented. A lot of them are reticent to have. that much interaction with federal agencies or public health officials. Again, that's led to like underreporting of cases. But I think some of the concern with vaccinating humans is that
Once you take the leap to actually bottle up and distribute this big vat of candidate vaccine, you have a very limited period of time to use it. I don't think... production lines are in place to start making H5 vaccine in bulk. So it's kind of like you have to deploy it right place, right time. And again, I think
Uptake and communication with farm workers has been like a really big challenge. Some states are doing a good job of it. Michigan in particular has set up like a lot of communication through lines with farm workers and have like worked with translation services and they've done a lot. to try and make it something that farm workers are comfortable with. But I think the major problem is that if we have a vaccination campaign for H5, we need the infrastructure to keep that up and to keep doing it.
Just like with seasonal flu, any vaccine would have to be regularly updated with the latest. in scientific knowledge on the mutations the virus has undergone. And if we're not even having regular meetings right now between scientific experts and government agencies, the idea that they're going to start and upkeep a vaccination campaign and...
make sure that that vaccine is safe and effective against every new forthcoming strain. I think that's where it kind of breaks down. You can start vaccinating, but for it to be effective, you've got to keep vaccinating. Unclear if we're in a position to do that right now. Lauren, this is... Been unsettling, but wonderful. Thank you for the time. What should people be looking for? What are the data points you're monitoring to keep track of what's happening with bird flu?
The USDA and CDC sites all have regularly updating maps and stats on like how many cattle herds, how many chickens, how many wild birds, how many wild mammals, and of course, human cases. So those are all reasonable. and useful dashboards. The CDC is still publishing, albeit less regularly, these more in-depth reports on kind of the latest news. The last one came out on the 20th, so that's a good place to look for information.
But honestly, if you're a member of the general public, I would say, like... There's a few things you could be doing besides looking at information. And then there's a couple big information points that I would say, if you see news about those. know that things have progressed to an even more worrying point so basically if you have a pet dog cat any kind of pet do not feed it raw milk or raw meat products do not feed it freeze-dried raw
products. Freeze-dried products can also still carry live virus. If you have a cat that spends time outdoors, Maybe consider shifting it inside. I know that's a challenge, but like pets shouldn't be spending time unsupervised outside because there's so many wild animals that can spread the virus. If you have backyard poultry.
Institute as many biosecurity protocols as you can. Don't bring your boots or clothes inside your house. Wash your hands. Wear a mask if you're mucking out the coop. All that sort of stuff. Obviously, don't drink raw milk yourself. And then...
If you are, like, casually perusing the news and you start to see that there have been confirmed instances of human-to-human transmission of bird flu or... case clusters among humans with unconfirmed sources of spread, that's when every single scientist I talked to said that they would kind of raise the threat level to the next.
Because if we have human case clusters or confirmation that the virus is spreading between humans, that's when it becomes something like COVID that can take off like wildfire. But for now, if you're just a member of the general public and not a farm worker. Really keep an eye on the raw meats and raw dairy and your interactions with wild animals and your pets' interactions with wild animals.
Lauren, thank you so much. We'll have to have you back for the longer episode on The Price of X. Yeah, for sure. Thanks so much, Neelay. I'd like to thank Lauren for joining me on the show, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have thoughts about this episode, and I'm sure you do, you can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails.
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