The spread of bird flu in the United States raised alarm bells this week in the media, the WHO, and scientists who claimed that rising infections in cattle and dairy workers are an ominous sign of an emerging human pandemic.
Articles from Scientific American, Time, The Conversation, Fortune, and many others implored the US government and dairy sector to rapidly deploy mass testing and develop an assortment of biosecurity measures to “prevent” viral evolution and human-to-human transmission.
The EU commission reportedly signed a deal for 40 million human vaccine doses to protect farmworkers. And two dozen vaccine manufacturers are working on creating a bovine vaccine.
Yet, as with Covid, mainstream media and health authorities are fast becoming spreaders of misinformation themselves, motivated by the politics of fear, the illusion of control, and inherent biases in the industry of pandemic response.
Take a quote from notable science reporter Amy Maxman today in Scientific American: “To become a pandemic, the H5N1 bird flu virus would need to spread from person to person. The best way to keep tabs on that possibility is by testing people.”
Earlier this month, Deborah Birx, former Covid response coordinator under Trump, advocated for the mass weekly testing of “every cow” and “every dairy worker” in the United States. She claimed that America was repeating Covid-era mistakes by not ramping up testing to track asymptomatic and undetected cases.
Such a policy proposal, from America’s previous Covid coordinator and a veteran of the global health diplomatic corps in Washington, is concerning for a few reasons. First, at last count there were 87 million heads of cattle and calves in the United States. About nine million are milk cows, distributed in different herd sizes over about 25,000 farms and with over 100,000 dairy workers.
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