During the peak Covid years, our public-health establishment vastly expanded its scope. Officials took it upon themselves to micromanage which aisles could stay open in stores and which playgrounds and skateboard parks must close; they ordered landlords not to evict tenants who stopped paying rent; and they leaned on social-media companies to censor whatever they defined as disinformation about the disease. But one thing the authorities didn’t focus on very much was preparing for the next pandemic.

That pandemic may already be here. An avian flu virus is currently raging through America’s poultry and dairy farms and sporadically infecting people. The virus could be evolving into a strain that more easily transmits to and between humans, causing a mass outbreak. Or the whole thing could blow over. We just don’t know. But we do know that our country’s efforts to stave off a potential epidemic have been a sad joke from the start. “The Biden administration has failed, utterly, to react and respond to the avian flu outbreak,” Richard H. Ebright told me via email. Ebright leads a microbiology lab at Rutgers University and is a leading critic of the U.S. response to Covid (and of the gain-of-function research that likely led to the outbreak in the first place). “The same errors that were made early in the Covid-19 pandemic are being made again,” he said.

What’s particularly damning is that, while Covid came seemingly out of nowhere, the potential for a human breakout of avian flu has worried epidemiologists for decades. As Princeton University data scientist Zeynep Tufekci writes, “If there is an avian flu epidemic it will rank among the most foreseeable crises in history.”

The virus H5N1 is a subtype of the influenza A virus, a species that includes the seasonal flu bugs we humans are all too familiar with. H5N1 seems to linger in certain types of waterfowl, usually with no obvious ill effects, but it sometimes infects and kills entire flocks. From wild birds the virus easily passes to chickens or other poultry and, less frequently, to pigs, cows, cats, or other animals. Occasionally—and, fortunately, very, very rarely—the virus can jump from one of those species to humans, usually farm workers. In 1997, H5N1 roared through poultry farms and markets in Hong Kong. Eighteen humans also caught the virus and six of them died. Over subsequent decades, occasional outbreaks hit poultry farms around the world, and in scattered cases, the virus infected people as well. In some of those instances, more than 50 percent of the known victims died. Three years ago, a highly pathogenic strain of H5N1 began to spread more widely among wild birds, including ducks, hawks, sparrows, and pigeons. Inevitably, the strain soon began showing up in farm animals.

In the U.S., farmers have been forced to destroy roughly 100 million infected chickens and turkeys since early 2022. Last year, the virus began sweeping through dairy farms as well. At the end of 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture determined that some 901 dairy herds have been infected in 16, mostly Western, states. (A pig in a backyard farm in Oregon has also tested positive.) The rapid spread of H5N1 among farm animals is scary for two reasons. First, as Tufekci explains, influenza viruses have a worrisome ability: “If two different types infect the same host—a farmworker with regular flu who also gets H5N1 from a cow—they can swap whole segments of their RNA, potentially creating an entirely new and deadly virus that has the ability to spread among humans.” The so-called Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918–19 probably began when avian and human virus strains commingled at a Kansas pig farm. By the time that pandemic was over, an estimated 25 million people were dead. The more animals that are infected—and the more times human and animal viruses pass back and forth—the more chances the virus gets to evolve into a form that’s more infectious to people.

The second reason concerns the nature of farming itself. Raising animals for meat, eggs, or milk demands close repeated contact among farm workers and food processors and the beasts they tend or handle. That means many opportunities for the virus to make the cross-species leap. Moreover, the virus travels in animal secretions, saliva, waste, blood, and…milk. This gives the pathogen multiple paths to infect humans, including people who never set foot on a farm. And it makes H5N1’s current rampage through dairy herds especially ominous. Historically, milk has been a vector for many deadly diseases. One of the first great breakthroughs in public health was the late-19th-century campaign—inspired by French scientist Louis Pasteur’s research into microorganisms—to heat-treat milk before sale.

Today, about 99 percent of the milk sold in the U.S. is pasteurized. But not all. Since the 1960s natural-food fanatics have fought to keep raw milk available, despite the risk that it might be contaminated with E. coli, listeria, or other microbes. Normally, I would argue the libertarian position, that people should be free to take the personal risk of drinking whatever they want. But with bird flu racing through dairy herds—and when every interaction between a human and the virus puts the rest of us at greater risk of a mass breakout—perhaps this isn’t the time to be standing on libertarian principles. At the very least, states that allow raw-milk sales should demand that all products be tested for H5N1. (In November, the virus was detected in raw milk sold at retail in Fresno, California.) In fact, to help track the outbreak, all milk should be bulk-tested when it is pooled for pasteurization.

Despite the blaring warning signs, the Biden administration took a laid-back approach to the emergency. “A limited initial outbreak on U.S. farms—one that easily could have been contained—has been allowed to expand into an immense outbreak in U.S. agriculture,” Ebright says. The Department of Agriculture deserves much of the blame. Last April, when just 33 dairy herds had tested positive for H5N1, Ag issued an order for dairy cows to be tested prior to being transported across state lines. But the department quickly relaxed the order after pushback from industry groups. Over the next several months, the outbreak spread to hundreds of farms, likely through transported cattle, experts say.

Likewise, health officials have been slow to test farm workers for several reasons. First, just as in the early months of the Covid pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control failed to rush out test kits. Second, as the Johns Hopkins Center for Outbreak Response Innovation delicately notes, infections among workers are probably “vastly underreported due to the complex relationship between farm workers and owners, and may be impacted by stigma [or] fear of government involvement.” Do you follow that circumspect wording? Let me translate. A 2015 study found that more than half of U.S. dairy workers are foreign-born, and experts cited by the New York Times believe the majority of those are here illegally. This problem has undoubtedly been compounded by four years of Biden’s porous-border policies. So now we have a dairy-farm epidemic in which undocumented farm workers are afraid to talk to government health agents. That’s just one of many pandemic risk factors. But it’s a good example of how a bad policy in one area undermines the government’s ability to act effectively when a crisis emerges in another sphere.

Finally, neither the USDA nor the Food and Drug Administration has cracked down on some gross practices that turn farms into virtual petri dishes for breeding new pathogens. For example, many states allow farmers to “recycle” the litter that accumulates in chicken cages—bedding, spilled feed, feathers, and droppings—as food for dairy cows. Yes, you heard that correctly: They’re feeding chicken poop to dairy cows (and I wish I could bring back comedian Sam Kinison to say the following words with appropriate emphasis) in the middle of a bird-flu pandemic! Here again, I’m not an advocate for lots of federal regulation. But maybe the same administration that defended its Covid eviction ban all the way to the Supreme Court could have bestirred itself to stop farmers from (Sam Kinison voice again) feeding chicken poop to cows during a bird-flu pandemic!

Will the incoming Trump team do better? Well, as the old Magic 8 Ball used to say, “Reply hazy.” Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health, inspires confidence. An outspoken (and oft-censored) critic of Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates, he is a good choice to clean house at that out-of-control agency. But he is also a serious scientist who will understand the medical and policy tradeoffs involved in fighting a new pandemic.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on the other hand, inspires nothing but nail-biting as Trump’s nominee to run the massive Department of Health and Human Services. Like many kooks, RFK Jr. is right about a few things (yes, overprocessed food is bad) and wrong about most things (no, vaccines don’t cause autism; no, Covid wasn’t designed to “target” white and black people while protecting Jews and Chinese; no, Wi-Fi doesn’t give you cancer… I could go on). Oh, and did I mention that Kennedy is a big raw-milk advocate? He has already floated the fever-swamp notion that bird flu might be a Big Pharma plot. In other words, just because our public-health bureaucrats were a disaster during Covid doesn’t mean RFK Jr. would be an improvement. Things can always be worse.

And then there is Trump. Our returning president is capable of bold action, but he also tends to be swayed by whoever has his ear at a given moment. (People forget that during Covid, Trump rarely overruled Anthony Fauci’s edicts.) If bird flu becomes a crisis, who will the president listen to, Bhattacharya and his fellow rationalists, or conspiracy monger Kennedy?

The biggest battle would be fought over vaccines, of course. A vaccine matched to the current strain of H5N1 exists, but at best, the government has only  enough doses to vaccinate about 2 percent of the U.S. population. Operation Warp Speed, which rushed out several Covid-19 vaccines in record time, was perhaps Trump’s greatest first-term success. If a bad strain of bird flu takes off in people, would the president try to repeat that triumph with a rush program to mass-produce vaccines? Or would he cater to his base, which has become hostile not just to the Covid-19 vaccine but to vaccines in general? Trump doesn’t like to pick fights with his loyalists, and he rarely mentions Operation Warp Speed these days. I suspect that if he backs any kind of vaccine program, that support will be muted.

A quick word to vaccine skeptics: I agree with you that the Covid vaccines’ benefits were oversold. The vaccines didn’t do as much as promised to prevent virus transmission; they carried small but meaningful risks of cardiac damage to young men; and children didn’t need the jab at all. Moreover, the federal vaccine mandates were unnecessary and abusive. But we shouldn’t forget that the vaccines proved effective at their main job: Multiple studies show they greatly reduce the risk of severe illness and death. They saved lives. Unfortunately, it has become almost impossible to make nuanced arguments like this—about vaccines or anything else—in the post-Covid era. With their dishonesty and overreach, Fauci and other health officials helped destroy whatever trust the public once had in the voices of experts. That’s one reason a charlatan like RFK Jr. finds so many credulous followers today.

In the end, of course, worries over bird flu could well be moot. There seem to be significant barriers to H5N1 becoming virulent among humans. And, unlike during previous bird-flu episodes, the disease has been surprisingly mild among most people who’ve acquired it during the current outbreak. (Although a Canadian teenager with the disease recently spent a scary month in intensive care.) But if we do dodge the avian flu bullet this time, Ebright says, “it will only be because of luck.”

Memo to the incoming administration: Luck is not a policy.

Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

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