Three years ago, when it was trickling into the United States, the bird-flu virus that recently killed a man in Louisiana was, to most Americans, an obscure and distant threat. Now it has spread through all 50 states, affecting more than 100 million birds, most of them domestic poultry; nearly 1,000 herds of dairy cattle have been confirmed to be harboring the virus too. A full-blown H5N1 pandemic is not guaranteed—the CDC judges the risk of one developing to be "moderate." But this virus is fundamentally more difficult to manage than even a few months ago and is now poised to become a persistent danger to people.
The experiment of whether H5 can ever be successful in human populations is happening before our eyes," Seema Lakdawala, a flu virologist at Emory University, told me. "And we are doing nothing to stop it. The story of bird flu in this country could have been shorter. It could have involved far fewer cows. The U.S. has just chosen not to write it that way.
The USDA and the CDC have doggedly defended their response to H5N1, arguing that their interventions have been appropriately aggressive and timely. And governments, of course, don't have complete control over outbreaks. But compared at least with the infectious threat most prominent in very recent memory, H5N1 should have been a manageable foe, experts outside of federal agencies told me.
When SARS-CoV-2, the virus that sparked the coronavirus pandemic, first spilled into humans, almost nothing stood in its way. It was a brand-new pathogen, entering a population with no preexisting immunity, public awareness, tests, antivirals, or vaccines to fight it. H5N1, meanwhile, is a flu virus that scientists have been familiar with for decades, providing a significant opportunity for a more robust response.
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