Biden's USDA Let H5N1 Spread. Now Bird Flu is a Loaded Gun in Trump's Hands

The Biden Administration never had any plan to control the H5N1 outbreak on dairy farms; now, it's spreading widely in a country ill equipped to understand or control airborne disease.

H5N1 need not be circulating in dairy cows. It could and should have been eliminated months ago. It still might be with aggressive action.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration hasn’t made any serious attempt to halt the virus, nor does it look likely to take the kind of bold action needed now. But that will hardly surprise anyone who has paid attention to the unprecedented illness normalization and public health vilification that has occurred since 2020.

Outbreaks of H5N1 in agricultural animals are concerning; however, they’re also something governments across the globe have been successfully handling with aggressive elimination tactics for decades.

But this is 2024. Over the last four years, we’ve watched as disease minimizers took the reins of public health, prioritizing corporate profits and day-to-day business activities over human lives. Now, we’re watching our metaphorical and literal chickens come home to roost as their laissez-faire “strategies” move us ever closer to another global pandemic. Each step of the way, strong, sensible public health interventions could have halted H5N1 in its tracks and ensured it never crossed into the human population. Instead, business interests were prioritized.

As far as we’re aware, H5N1 hasn’t yet achieved human-to-human transmission. But by allowing humans to interact with the virus daily- something public health officials worldwide have spent decades working to avoid- we’ve made such a scenario increasingly inevitable.

As news of a severe human case broke in Louisiana last week, California declared a state of emergency. With 61 human cases reported in the US so far, the infections are a trickle that constantly threaten to become a flood. For now, they’re being reined in by a fragile biological limitation, not a sturdy policy firewall.

We’re being protected, not by the FDA, CDC or USDA, but by the genetic structure of the virus itself, which currently doesn’t transmit between human hosts. H5N1 could achieve the ability to do so with a single mutation.

It’s not a government body preventing the next pandemic, nor a quarantine, a testing requirement, or mandatory PPE for farm workers. It’s just a single protein.

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H5N1 was first detected in US dairy cows back in March of this year, although it had been silently spreading for some time prior. As weeks turned into months, it’s become clear that the virus will not be eliminated or even controlled in that animal population. Instead, public health officials are embracing the same failed model that has left humanity marinating in year-round COVID-soup; the let-it-rip model.

Half-assed quarantines, don’t-ask-don’t-tell testing policies, minimizing messaging about how “most” cows recover- stop me if any of this is sounding familiar. Vanity Fair thoroughly reported on the USDA’s decision to prioritize industry profits rather than pursue an elimination strategy. And as with COVID, “let it rip” in cows has only amplified the problem, spreading the virus far and wide. Early claims that the outbreak would simply “burn itself out” have been proven exactly wrong. From a few herds in the spring, the outbreak has spread to a whopping 880 herds in 16 states and counting.

KFF Health News quoted UK bird flu researcher Tom Peacock as saying, “The US knows the risk but hasn’t done anything to slow this down,” referring to our ongoing refusal to stop the spread.

Echoing Peacock’s assessment, virologist Jeremy Rossman of the University of Kent told Newsweek, “I do not think they are doing a good job at containing the outbreak, and put simply, they are not containing the outbreak.”

The advantages of the “let it rip” model are obvious: zero disruptions to business as usual, zero angry tantruming capitalists raging that they wanted to ignore the virus and pretend it wasn’t happening, zero lost profits, zero panic, zero problems! The disadvantages being that we are moving ever closer to a human-to-human bird flu pandemic because those with the scientific know-how are completely disempowered to stop it, while those with the power to stop it either don’t understand the science or are simply too cowardly to act.

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Let’s start with the basics. H5N1, a highly pathogenic avian influenza, was first identified in Hong Kong back in 1997. From Rob Wallace’s book Big Farms Make Big Flu:

By mid-December, poultry begins to die in droves in the city’s markets, and it now seems most humans infected had handled birds. Hong Kong acts decisively on that information. Authorities order the destruction of 1.5 million poultry and block new imports from Guangdong…the outbreak is broken.

In other words, a great disruption to business as usual, but a necessary one to ensure the virus was eliminated. Although these measures may sound extreme- and admittedly, macabre, as is industrial agriculture generally- the short-term disruption of culling was ultimately easier and cheaper than the long-term disruption of a global pandemic. This is the conventional wisdom undergirding the typical public health and safety decision to cull agricultural animals with a potentially pandemic disease.

H5N1 has been cropping up across the world sporadically in the decades since, sometimes in wild animal populations (usually, but not always, birds), other times in agricultural operations. And typically, as is established practice, these animals are culled. Because as gruesome as large culls may be, they are nothing compared to the potential cost - not just economically, but in animal and human lives alike - of letting a virus like H5N1 spiral out of control. It is simply too dangerous to let a highly pathogenic, highly deadly virus remain in such close proximity to humanity.

But wait a minute; why is H5N1’s proximity to humans so dangerous? The virus has only infected 61 humans in 9 months! To answer that question, we need a pinch of Darwin.

When a host is infected with H5N1, the virus copies its genetic material trillions of times. Each time it copies itself, there’s a chance it may make a mistake; these mistakes are called mutations. Some of these mutations make the virus less fit; these copies go on to die out. But some of the mutations make the virus more fit or give it new capabilities. These copies may flourish. That’s evolution, baby!

In the case of H5N1, scientists get nervous when they note that the virus has acquired mutations enabling it to spread to mammals. Via random mutation, H5N1 has (repeatedly) acquired the ability to spread to mammals. After that, we run the risk that it may mutate again and begin to spread among and between a population of mammals.

Typically, governments are highly interventionist in this scenario. As soon as H5N1 takes off in agricultural animals, especially mammals, red flags go up. When minks in Spain contracted H5N1, 50,000 were culled. When H5N1 cropped up last August in Finland, 120,000 minks and foxes were culled. Denmark culled an incredible- and incredibly tragic- 17 million mink during their H5N1 outbreak.

In the US, we, too, have complied with this standard practice in the past. We continue to cull chickens and turkeys by the million when bird flu hits poultry and egg producers. Farmers are compensated for these losses.

(You may be shocked to know that the much-vaunted hot-button egg-price issue in this year’s Presidential election was almost certainly driven to a large degree by these massive culls, which have been going on for several years).

Any outbreak of H5N1 represents an encroaching threat to humans. But an outbreak in agricultural animals represents a particular threat. That’s because unlike animals in the wild, animals on farms interact with humans each day. When the virus directly interacts with humans, there’s a risk of what is called a “spillover” event. A mutated copy of the virus is able to infect human cells, and spills over from the animal into the human. That is what we’re seeing now, with cases of farm workers across the US popping up with infections. Each one of these infections is a “spillover” event, as far as we know. A human who was directly infected by an animal.

Every time a farm worker is infected with H5N1, it’s like a game of Russian Roulette for the rest of us. The virus is making trillions of copies of itself, and many of them carry random mutations. If any of those copies carry mutations that allow it to achieve human-to-human transmission, it will likely be passed on to a contact- or contacts- of that worker. You’ve just witnessed the potential birth of a new pandemic.

So basically, you really, really don’t want this thing- this Spillover Event- to happen even a single time. Every time you do, you’re potentially gambling with 8 billion people’s futures. The Biden Administration has allowed it to happen 61 times in less than a year. And instead of treating it like an emergency, which they almost certainly would’ve before COVID, the USDA, FDA, CDC and White House keep treating their Russian Roulette “wins” like permission to play another round.

Like most of the conclusions the White House appears to have drawn about public health, this betrays a poor understanding of statistics. When you win a round of Russian Roulette, it doesn’t mean you’re “good” at Russian Roulette, or that the game is easy, or that you’re on a hot streak, although gamblers believe these sorts of things about gambling all the time. It just means you got lucky. It shouldn’t be taken as an invitation to go around again.

Where Hong Kong, Finland, Spain and many other governments took immediate and drastic action to avoid spillovers, the US has watched the virus spread and worsen, looking the other way as infections among farmers crop up. Through negligence and incompetence, the US government is creating the conditions for another global pandemic, despite having had months to avert it entirely.

Allowing the virus to replicate in an animal population while in close proximity to humans means that we are rolling the dice daily, making ourselves sitting ducks while the virus patiently waits to hit pay dirt. The longer humans work in close proximity to the virus, the higher our odds of encountering a version of H5N1 we really don’t want to meet.

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When dairy cows fell victim to the virus, the industry didn’t want to cull their animals; that’s certainly understandable. But federal agencies neither suggested a cull, nor offered any alternative path to get the outbreak under control at all. As the USDA took over management of the outbreak, the familiar logic of the COVID non-response seeped in.

Instead of immediately looking for the most effective way to end the outbreak- dramatic measures like the ones taken in Hong Kong in 1997, which would be disruptive in the short-term, but end the crisis quickly- the USDA looked for the least disruptive measures they could take. In public health, the least disruptive measures often equate to the least effective.

USDA certainly never dreamed of culling the infected animals; they didn’t even halt travel for the affected herds; rather they began “researching”. As the days ticked by, cows were transported across state lines without being tested. A testing requirement for interstate travel wasn’t passed until April 29, a month after the declaration of the outbreak. Why? These are animals literally bred and owned by agricultural producers regulated by the US Government, yet testing couldn’t be mandated?

Early on, Think Global Health covered the concerns of veterinarians, noting that action was slow and piecemeal with little coordination between states, that reporting sick cows was voluntary, and that farmers were “in denial” about the “seriousness of the threat” to the industry.

Even when the test requirement did go into effect, it only applied to interstate travel; cows traveling from farm-to-farm within a state are still not required to test. Again, why? Perhaps this is how over half of farms in California- 660 of 1300 - have ended up reporting cases. These are decisions driven, not by the logic of disease elimination, but by that of minimizing disruption to business-as-usual.

Successful Farming reported in June that, per Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, “the USDA’s strategy against bird flu in dairy cattle is to identify infected herds and wait for the virus to die out within the herds.” At the time, 80 herds had been infected. That number has since 10x’d.

Farmers continued to “decline” to test their herds, despite funding being available to compensate farms for losses. Why was testing a recommendation to be declined, rather than a mandated practice? Similarly, the CDC put out PPE recommendations, but these are little more than suggestions. Why, once again, is a public health crisis being treated as a personal choice rather than a collective threat that affects us all?

We are talking about a highly pathogenic disease that countries all over the world have worked to keep under control for decades. Across the globe and across the years, drastic measures have been taken by governments in Asia, Europe, and yes, even the US too, to keep H5N1 away from humans. But now, when this virus is threatening not only the American people, but all of humanity, we are leaving major public health decisions to random dairy farmers.

That’s not a shot at farmers; the reality is that no individual outside the very specific domain of pandemic management should be making decisions about how to contain a virus that will, by definition, affect every human on Earth. Certainly not individuals with financial conflicts of interest, who are also considering factors like the public image of their dairy as well as the profitability of their products.

If this virus does mutate and achieve human to human transmission, it will be because federal agencies in the US government decided, once again, that a global pandemic response is a personal choice.

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Here, we clearly see the legacy of the failed COVID response. The US government- and all world governments- have gotten away with inflicting so much death and disabling illness, not to mention just regular old sickness, on the world, that they’re reasonably sure accountability will never arrive for mass death by pathogen.

They’ve seen that people are more than willing to treat viruses like acts of God and PPE like the Devil himself. They quite simply don’t plan to respond to this pandemic at all. We should take the cows as our canaries. Stacked in piles by the side of the road rotting, the decision to spare the initial herds from a cull was surely not done with their dignity in mind; only their market value.

To halt this outbreak in its early phases would’ve required a disruptive elimination strategy. And over the last several years, in a sort of enraged backlash to lockdowns, public health has been pushed to sacrifice anything resembling disruption- and efficacy- at the altar of money and business as usual.

I wrote about this reality back in January of this year. Billions of dollars went into the disinformation campaign that pushed people to think of public health as an individual responsibility, and to reject all collective measures as repressive. Now, our government apparently cannot even regulate the behavior of cows that we eat to halt onward disease transmission.

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The ongoing lack of transparency about airborne transmission is another COVID legacy that will leave the public twisting in the virus-laden wind should H5N1 mutate.

Had President Biden used the last four years to implement airborne mitigations in public spaces, we’d be in good shape to beat an incipient outbreak. The campaign for pandemic-proof indoor spaces could have begun in 2021 with a public education campaign about the importance of clean air for reducing transmission of airborne viruses like COVID, RSV, flu, and every other bug people have been continually catching since lockdown ended.

As public support for the idea built, we could’ve collectively fought for and won upgraded ventilation in public spaces, CO2 monitors, and HEPA filtration. We could even have pushed for Far UVC technology in crowded indoor spaces like airports, schools, and hospitals. People could’ve learned the significance of high CO2 indoors with the introduction of monitors, been empowered to advocate for open windows and better ventilation, and collectively kept one another safer.

Since 2021, we could and should have been implementing strict airborne infection control protocols in all healthcare spaces, so that patients and healthcare workers would be protected from airborne infections. If we had done so, a new pandemic wouldn’t easily and immediately begin spreading through hospitals and ripping through doctors, nurses, and vulnerable patients the second it hits the ERs, as any new airborne virus inevitably will.

Instead, President Biden and his administration lied to the public, claiming that COVID was over and no longer dangerous. His CDC has failed to replace outdated droplet infection control guidance for healthcare settings, resulting in rampant hospital-acquired infections and deaths among patients and sky-high absences and understaffing among HCW.

An H5N1-infected patient entering an ER today will encounter HCW without masks, in hospitals equipped for droplet infection control only, without ventilation and filtration standards that would prevent infection of fellow patients in the ER. None of the staff will be trained on airborne transmission because Biden’s CDC chose not to train them, despite having years to update infection control guidelines.

Biden’s team repeatedly encouraged the public to stop masking and failed to communicate the importance of respirators. Almost nobody understands what “airborne” means, that the 6-foot distancing guidance is outdated, or that covering a cough or washing your hands won’t prevent infection with airborne viruses like SARS-COV-2 or H5N1. The public was never educated about asymptomatic infections, virus lingering in the air for hours like smoke, or keeping windows open at home to reduce transmission risks. Misinformation about transmission, like that people are not contagious once a fever is gone, was spread by the CDC itself to force sick people back to work while they continued to test positive.

The public even began believing that illness was good for them and their immune systems, a right-wing pseudo-science idea first invented by anti-vaxxers. Members of the press chose to mainstream this idea when Biden’s Grand Reopening resulted in recurrent sickness in kids. As parents became concerned about their children’s illnesses, the idea that masks and lockdowns actually harmed kids’ immune systems, leaving them more prone to viral infections, was repeated in multiple liberal press outlets.

This idea, a corruption of the itself-controversial Hygiene Hypothesis which refers to beneficial microbes, not pathogenic viruses, was dubbed “Immunity Debt”. Parents stopped testing or avoiding illness entirely, chiding illness-avoidant peers that they needed to “build” their kids’ immune systems with “infections.” (Literally none of this is true and is, again, an anti-vaxxer idea). How do we think a public that has received four years of this messaging will react to more viral spread? What is the point of avoiding a virus now, if it just makes you sicker later? (To be clear, it doesn’t).

If H5N1 goes pandemic, millions of conservatives will have tantrums about the fact that they don’t believe in the virus, or they think it’s not bad, masks don’t work, and they won’t wear them. Liberals may - or may not- be more willing to mask. But they’re unlikely to want to stay home or accept shutdowns. They, like conservatives, are likely to believe that keeping a child home will harm them, weakening their immune system and making them more vulnerable to future illness. They, like conservatives, are unlikely to know how to effectively halt transmission in a home, unlikely to know when or how to properly isolate, unlikely to understand airborne mitigation, and likely to view public health as an individual choice, rather than a collective responsibility.

The “whole lotta nothing” approach to COVID was all in service to the Biden administration’s political agenda of memory holing the pandemic before the 2024 elections. No thought was given to the 800,000 Americans and counting who died of COVID on Biden’s watch, or the millions who developed Long COVID as their lies about COVID’s harmlessness were repeated in service to an election they ultimately lost to Donald Trump anyway.

Should H5N1 hit, we’ll be worse off than we were in 2020. People have heard years of radicalizing propaganda about masks, lockdowns, and protecting vulnerable populations. That public health measures don’t work, that they’re tools of authoritarian control, that they’re shameful and embarrassing. To the degree that they heard anything from President Biden, it was essentially in agreement with those right-wing messages. After his last positive COVID test, he appeared in public without a mask. When bragging about “ending” the pandemic, his go-to boast was to point to the lack of masks and reopened businesses.

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President Biden’s administration has done nothing to prepare us nor protect us since 2021. COVID spreads freely, not only because public health has been dismantled on his watch, but because the public itself has been purposely and painstakingly misinformed in support of his administration’s pro-disease agenda.

It wasn’t easy to get the entire country to abandon masks, begin mocking them, turn spiteful toward those who wear them, and accept a “new normal” of constant illness. It wasn’t overnight that parents accepted endless illness for their children, and stopped questioning the carousel of RSV, flu, pneumonia and COVID infections. It took years of wall-to-wall media messaging, arguing that there were no tools available to prevent this, that a better world was not possible, that vulnerable people must die for the rest of us to live, that lockdowns were the reason for the suffering wrought by a world-historical pandemic, that sickness is healthy and that illness avoidance is, well, crazy.

With this context, it’s easy to see why, when H5N1 was identified in dairy cows, there was no urgency to eliminate it. How can a virus in cows be an emergency, if nearly a million dead doesn’t trouble this administration? How can the threat of a pandemic be a concern, when an ongoing pandemic isn’t something they think about anymore?

How could disrupting business as usual ever be good policy?

Biden’s administration has loaded the gun, spun the cylinder one more time, and now hands it back to Donald Trump. We’ll be protected for as long as his luck lasts.