“I am anti-alarmist, but I would say that I have never been more worried in my career than by H5N1. Even when COVID-19 began spreading widely outside of China in 2019, I was not as worried about H5N1 as I am now. » — Dr. Matthew Miller, viral immunologist and director of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University
Around the world, in numerous interviews and articles written in reputable journals, scientists and experts are sounding the alarm about the growing danger that highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1 avian influenza) could spread to the human population and potentially become the next pandemic. If that happened, the resulting public health disaster would dwarf that of the current COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed nearly 30 million people and weakened hundreds of millions from Long COVID worldwide.
With a case fatality rate of over 50% in humans, approximately 50 times that of COVID-19, it is not an exaggeration to say that an H5N1 avian flu pandemic would be apocalyptic. It is of the utmost urgency to avoid this, and the demand for a global public health program against bird flu must be immediately taken up by the international working class.
H5N1 avian influenza was first discovered in farmed birds in southern China in 1996, with the first recorded case in humans detected the following year. Since then, the virus has been considered one of the most dangerous pathogens with pandemic potential due to its rapid mutation rate and high lethality.
Since 2020, coinciding with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the H5N1 virus has rapidly spread to dozens of species, including wild birds and poultry, cats, sea lions, polar bears and, more recently, dairy cattle and house mice in the United States. , with hundreds of millions of animals believed to have died or been slaughtered worldwide.
The spread of the virus to dairy cattle is of particular concern to scientists because of their proximity to farmworkers and the inherently greater dangers of transmission from mammals to humans. So far, three infections have been confirmed among US farmworkers, with the third raising alarms due to the onset of respiratory symptoms.
Scientists have warned that the key evolutionary pathway for avian flu to become a global pandemic would be the ability for human-to-human airborne transmission, as was the case with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID -19.
In a worst-case scenario, the virus would develop this ability, leading to a scene reminiscent of the initial spread of SARS-CoV-2 in a wet market in Wuhan, China. With an average incubation period of 2 to 5 days (and up to 17 days), increasing numbers of people are believed to be unknowingly spreading the virus in their communities and then around the world through airborne transmission chains. ‘expanding simultaneously across many countries. But this time around, the fallout is more likely to happen on a dairy farm in Michigan or Texas than in a wet market in Wuhan.
The growing threat of a bird flu pandemic is now focused in the United States, where the response from the dairy industry, in collusion with the Biden administration and all responsible federal agencies, has been nothing short of criminal. Sitting on an epidemiological time bomb, they act with complete disregard for the health and lives of the American and global population.
Over the past six months, the H5N1 virus has spread rapidly among dairy cattle in the United States and is now confirmed to affect 94 herds. The first case was in December 2023, with the virus spreading undetected among cattle until the end of March. Since then, the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other federal agencies under the Biden administration have gone out of their way to accommodate the dairy industry and ensure its steady flow profits to the detriment of the dairy industry. public health.
Far from learning lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, an attitude of indifference and concealment now prevails in official circles. Aside from a single statement from White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in early May, in which she repeatedly asserted that “the risk is low,” the White House has said nothing about the growing dangers of bird flu. Resuming their role during the COVID-19 pandemic, the mainstream media continually talk about the “low risk” facing the population, when in reality, the danger of an avian flu pandemic has never been higher .
Most importantly, the Biden administration has not imposed any requirements on the dairy industry to allow the CDC and other agencies to systematically test, report, or track infections in livestock and farmworkers.
To date, only 239 viral genomic samples have been made public by the USDA, despite numerous calls from scientists for the agency to release data on each infection. The published sequences date from the beginning of April at the latest and therefore do not clarify the evolutionary path of the virus.
Repeating one of the greatest crimes of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration and the CDC conducted the bare minimum of testing, a cornerstone of any public health strategy to prevent pandemics. Only 45 dairy farm workers or others in contact with infected cattle have been tested for the flu, meaning a growing number of cases risk going undetected, with farm workers left helpless and at risk. the mercy of their bosses.
In May, the The CDC discouraged wastewater surveillance testing for H5N1 when these were proposed by Dr. Marc Johnson, molecular virologist and wastewater monitoring specialist.
The latest USDA epidemiological study found that 28 percent of all U.S. farms transport their livestock using trucks shared with other farms that are not cleaned before use. The most basic public health measure of cleaning these facilities may not have been implemented over the past three months, and there is no indication that the Biden administration intends to change this status quo.
Despite the existence of a vaccine against avian flu, used on poultry in several countries and which could be tested on American dairy cattle, this vaccine has not been imposed due to the profit imperatives of the dairy industry. , because some countries prohibit imports of vaccinated products. animals.
Neither the Biden administration nor any of the responsible agencies have banned unpasteurized milk and other dairy products, despite the fact that consumers infected with these products would increase the likelihood that the virus would develop human-to-human transmission capability. They also have not mandated the use of ultra-pasteurization, despite a recent study that found that H5N1 can survive normal pasteurization.
Summarizing this process, Dr. Rick Bright, an immunologist and COVID-19 whistleblower under the Trump administration, said:
We don’t stop it. We are not doing anything to keep this infected milk and infectious milk on the farm. We don’t test these cows before they’re put back on the milking line or sent to the slaughterhouse… We’re letting that slide and putting it out there in a very naive way.
Most recently, the USDA revealed that 66 house mice in New Mexico tested positive for H5N1, which they said were near a poultry farm, but were not supported by data genomics. This only increases the risk of bird flu spreading among humans, as rodents are key vectors of the disease, including rats during the Black Death, which killed half of Europe’s population in the 14th century .
The response of the American ruling class to the threat of another, even more dangerous pandemic, amounts to a collective shrug. For these modern-day Malthusians, COVID was a boon to weeding out the elderly and infirm, the “surplus population” they view as an unnecessary drain on their profits. The last four years have seen nothing but windfall profits for the financial elite, who have pumped trillions into their own coffers.
The entire experience of the COVID-19 pandemic demands urgent action by the international working class to end the current and growing danger of a new pandemic. Immediate action must be taken to truly address this ongoing public health crisis, both in the United States and internationally. At a minimum, these include:
- Mass testing of all cattle and agricultural workers in the United States, combined with rigorous contact tracing and safe isolation of all infected humans and animals.
- Rank-and-file public health officials must monitor the CDC, USDA, and other federal agencies to ensure full transparency of all H5N1 data.
- For a vast expansion of public health funding and resources to contain the spread of H5N1 and other infectious diseases by socializing all aspects of health care.
- Worker control over the dairy and meat industries to ensure that safety, not corporate profits, is the guiding principle in responding to public health threats.
The fight for these demands can only develop in opposition to government, business and the media, which are determined to prevent any disruption to the stock market and the flow of profits.
The anti-science response to the growing threat of an avian flu pandemic parallels relentless attacks on scientists, including researchers involved at the center in the fields of pandemic preparedness and evolutionary biology, such as Drs. . Peter Daszak, Kristian Andersen and Peter Hotez. The scientific community and public health are paralyzed at their most critical time, as climate change and other factors fuel the threat of future pandemics.
The collapse of public health and the normalization of mass deaths from infectious diseases make it clear that capitalism is at a dead end. It must be replaced by the socialist reorganization of world society.