Pod Insights Decoder Capitalism vs. the bird flu About this episode Today we’re talking about bird flu, but in a pretty Decoder way. Science journalist Lauren Leffer, who recently wrote a piece for The Verge about bird flu and how it’s becoming a forever war, is joining me on the show. We’re going to talk about the systems, structure, and culture that might control bird flu — and those that might make it worse.
Links:
We’ve entered a forever war with bird flu | Verge
Kennedy’s alarming prescription for bird flu on poultry farms | NYT
First bird flu death in US reported in Louisiana | NYT
Bird flu found in sheep in UK, a world first | NYT
Shell shocked: how small eateries are dealing with record egg prices | NYT
Animal Farm: eggflation’s monopoly problem | The Lever
At the ‘Wall Street of Eggs,’ Demand Is Surging | WSJ
How to protect your pets from bird flu | Popular Science
What to know about the bird flu outbreak in wild birds | AP
Bird flu continues to spread as Trump experts are MIA | Ars Technica
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Transcript 8,575 words · 10 speakers
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1:32 Speaker 04 Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai 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 Lefter, 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
2:17 Speaker 04 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.
3:02 Speaker 04 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. But 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.
3:45 Speaker 04 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.
4:28 Speaker 04 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.
4:49 Speaker 04 Lauren Laffer, 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.
4:55 Speaker 05 Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here, even if we're talking about something not so great.
5:00 Speaker 04 Love talking about influenza viruses and potential pandemics. Obviously, in the election, the price of eggs became this like 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.
5:36 Speaker 05 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 what I was trying to get at is there might be an expectation when you see a news 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 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
6:20 Speaker 05 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.
6:29 Speaker 04 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 that 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. But 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.
7:04 Speaker 05 Right now, the current state of bird flu, specifically highly pathogenic bird flu or H5N1 in the US 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 US, 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, 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
7:48 Speaker 05 like this major news story, big concern. But it's been a virus with known propensity to cause damage among like poultry flocks since like 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 flock.
8:32 Speaker 05 In every state and 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've been multiple cases of it going from birds to mammals, potentially back to birds from other mammals. And it's just this, this like 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 reservoir in wild birds that just sticks around.
9:15 Speaker 04 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 on 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?
9:52 Speaker 05 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. 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.
10:37 Speaker 04 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.
10:57 Speaker 05 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. I think 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 like, 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
11:40 Speaker 05 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 or what accounts for that. I've even seen some speculation that because we're monitoring a US outbreak where seasonal flu is like 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.
12:17 Speaker 04 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 a 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.
12:52 Speaker 05 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 on to a host and spread and multiply. And avian influenza H5N1 has this particular type of cell receptor it has an affinity for. 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've been cases in non-lactating cows in herds. But yeah, where the spread is kind of, it's a big point of confusion and a debate.
13:34 Speaker 05 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 like 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,
14:18 Speaker 05 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.
15:00 Speaker 05 You know, no matter, 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 like all sorts of different interactions. And like 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
15:44 Speaker 05 that spreads readily between people, of this becoming something that we have like no way of monitoring or controlling for.
15:53 Speaker 04 We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
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17:37 Speaker 04 We're back with science journalist Lauren Lefter 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?
18:10 Speaker 04 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? And are those still the mechanisms that we would use to control it today?
18:25 Speaker 05 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 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.
19:06 Speaker 05 It's led to the increase of, you know, so-called biosecurity measures on poultry farms. So you have really tight controls on like, who can go in and out of like, 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 like, these like, free pasture-raised chickens that you're getting in the grocery store in the vast majority of cases. That's not, that's not what life is like for, for farm to poultry. And honestly, in, in terms of past outbreaks, I mean, the biocontrols have been a big thing. In, in some countries, not the US, but in, in a lot of countries in Southeast Asia, in
19:51 Speaker 05 China, for instance, they administer vaccinations to poultry as well to actually minimize the risk that this happens. And, and those have kind of been the, 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, in wild populations. If it's confined enough, it might just hit enough accidental dead ends that it, it stops spreading. And I think at the beginning of the outbreak in the US, that's what a lot of epidemiologists were hoping would happen, or were kind of expecting would happen, because there's precedent for it.
20:34 Speaker 05 But this time, the virus got lucky and we were unlucky.
20:38 Speaker 04 What we learned from COVID is that we had all of these response systems built up. We had all of these public health laws and controls and CDC that 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, in 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 are fighting comes from. Are farmers treating this differently?
21:19 Speaker 04 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?
21:34 Speaker 05 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, 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, a 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, for better solutions among poultry farmers. One of the problems, though, with the idea of vaccination is that a lot of US trade partners
22:16 Speaker 05 and the US 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 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. But for it to be like an economically reasonable choice for farmers in the US, we would probably
23:01 Speaker 05 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 unresolved, 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 cow's 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
23:46 Speaker 05 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 on to these farms. I think a vaccine makes a lot of sense for cows. But 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
24:31 Speaker 05 lies about vaccination.
24:33 Speaker 04 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, I don't think that's a great mechanism to run public health against, but I can see how it'd operate 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.
25:19 Speaker 04 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.
25:43 Speaker 05 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, 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 in their like natural pasture, never mind
26:24 Speaker 05 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? Like all of, all of human history can tell us that like 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, 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
27:07 Speaker 05 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. I 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.
27:43 Speaker 04 There's a lot there. I think there's an entire secondary episode of Dakota and 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 do band 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. Like that, I'm just making that on the show. It's just very obvious that's where he will end up.
28:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, we're like a week away from that. Unlike a major Fox and Friends appearance, he's going to say that like the raw milk will enter your body and promote antibodies to it'll strengthen your immune system. So.
28:35 Speaker 04 And we've gotten there with measles in 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.
29:21 Speaker 04 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?
29:31 Speaker 05 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,
30:16 Speaker 05 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 product of some sort of manipulation tactic. I think a lot of people wish that certain things during COVID had been talked about differently, 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.
31:00 Speaker 05 It's wonderful that like we don't have cholera circulating in major cities. Like, it's wonderful that there's no malaria in the US, but a single person has a severe side effect to a vaccine, it becomes a national news story. And so you're you're up against this like conundrum of of storytelling, right? Like 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 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 and try and figure
31:42 Speaker 05 out how to push back against it. But I I just don't think we're there yet strategy wise.
31:46 Speaker 04 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?
32:05 Speaker 05 Farms aren't reporting cases in 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 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 the incentives aren't like totally aligned yet on the cow side.
32:50 Speaker 05 Again, for chickens, it's different because the disease makes the choice for you, right? All those birds die. But I think we just haven't really figured out on the on the dairy side how to fix the incentive model.
33:05 Speaker 04 We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
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34:49 Speaker 04 We're back with science journalist Lauren Leffler. Before the break, we were discussing how various parties are approaching the bird flu outbreak, 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 that?
35:36 Speaker 04 The data piece of it is really interesting. The Trump/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 are we, do we have independent sources of data that we can rely on?
35:57 Speaker 05 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 of weeks later until News Stories report on this mysterious disappeared report that happened in February with this really unsettling report about like cats among dairy worker households. The 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.
36:40 Speaker 05 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 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 like direct lines of contact with the CDC or with the USDA. They get, you know, weekly or even daily updates about what is being seen out on the ground
37:24 Speaker 05 with the virus, and then they'll also have like regular expert briefings where they're sitting in the same Zoom room and talking with government scientists about what they've learned. And, you know, it's really critical information sharing to make informed decisions from a policy standpoint. 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 like what
38:07 Speaker 05 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.
38:30 Speaker 04 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?
38:43 Speaker 05 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 homogeneous, 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
39:27 Speaker 05 of super homogeneous, like very immunocompromised birds that we keep in these like very tight conditions, then only live for a very brief period of time before we call 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 like some sort
40:10 Speaker 05 of useful genetic change that we could then harness. It's a terrible strategy. I haven't heard a single, I haven't heard like a single respected scientist say that they think that that is sensical.
40:25 Speaker 04 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?
40:38 Speaker 05 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, 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 under reporting of cases.
41:20 Speaker 05 But I think some of the concern with vaccinating humans is that once you take the leap to actually like 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, in bulk. So it's kind of like you have to deploy at 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.
42:03 Speaker 05 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.
42:47 Speaker 04 Lauren, this has 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?
42:57 Speaker 05 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
43:38 Speaker 05 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,
44:22 Speaker 05 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 stage. 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,
45:06 Speaker 05 and your interactions with with wild animals and your pets' interactions with wild animals.
45:11 Speaker 04 Lauren, thank you so much. We'll have to have you back for the longer episode of The Price of Eggs.
45:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, for sure. Thanks so much, Nele.
45:20 Speaker 04 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 [email protected] . We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky, and we have a TikTok and an Instagram. Check them out. They're @decoderpod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with that five-star review. Decoder is a production of The Verge, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
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