We’re Dropping The Ball on Avian Flu Preparedness—Dangerously

Danielle Nierenberg

Danielle Nierenberg

You don’t need me to tell you Covid-19 changed the world. While the pandemic did help expose structural inequalities and disparities, especially in the food system, the loss of life and livelihood has been one of the greatest tragedies of our lifetimes.

I’m bringing this up because, if we ignore the lessons we should’ve learned from this pandemic, future disease outbreaks will be much, much worse. And I’m deeply concerned that, when it comes to avian flu—a.k.a. Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A (HPAI) H5N1—we’re on a dangerously wrong path.

We’ve talked about avian flu before: It’s a virus that typically affects birds and poultry, and there’s a current outbreak that has affected close to 150 million birds and devastated farms since 2022. Also concerningly, scientists have detected the virus in mammals in recent years—including dairy cows and humans—and learned it can spread between mammals, which significantly raises the outbreak risk. And since 2024, 102 cases of avian flu and 10 deaths have been reported in humans globally, a potentially staggering fatality rate.

The majority of those global cases over the past year and a half—about 70—have been in the U.S., which means the world’s eyes are watching. And so far, this country’s response has been nearly the polar opposite of what scientists call for, which puts everyone around the world in greater danger.

“We have so many tools, but they're not being used optimally—and they're not being used optimally by choice,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an expert in global public health, told me on this week’s episode of the Food Talk podcast. “We can change the trajectory of this if we actually take those best practices, take those tools, and use them optimally.”

We’re not fearmongering: To be perfectly clear, there is currently no known person-to-person spread of avian flu and experts say the current public health risk is low, per the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

What this means, though, is that the time to prevent and contain this virus is right now.

There’s a very real possibility that avian flu could pose a greater threat in the future, and we can’t be caught unprepared. The correct course of action involves vaccination, investments in public health, and global collaboration—all of which appear to be under threat given recent U.S. policy developments.

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins’ original plan to combat avian flu included US$100 million in research and vaccine development. But shortly after announcing it, she reversed course and told right-wing site Breitbart that vaccines were “off the table.” Meanwhile, in May, the Trump-Vance Administration cancelled a massive contract with Moderna to develop a vaccination for humans against bird flu, and this month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 members of the advisory committee that helps develop vaccine policy and recommendations for the CDC. 

“I’m optimistic that they will continue to support the development of these vaccines. It would be a crime right now to stop it,” said Scott Hensley, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who worked on an avian flu vaccine for cattle.

Vaccines save lives. Just last month, early results from that experimental bird flu vaccine for cattle came back promising. The U.S. Department of Agriculture conditionally approved a vaccine for poultry this spring, and some countries, like China and France, already vaccinate poultry against H5N1. Even in humans, Finland last year became the first country to roll out bird flu vaccines among its population.

Alternative courses of action, rather than vaccines, are devastating: In March, Kennedy suggested farmers “should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds and preserve the birds that are immune to it.” This, as former Kansas state veterinarian Dr. Gail Hansen put it, is a “terrible idea” and a “recipe for disaster.”

Dr. Adalja did not mince words. If the past year has been a trial run for how the government might respond to the actual emergence of an avian flu pandemic, he said on the Food Talk podcast, “we've failed this trial run.”

Optimistically, on a global level, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been taking positive steps toward international collaboration: WHO’s Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System closely monitors avian and other animal influenza viruses, and in May, member states approved an agreement to better prevent, prepare for, and respond to outbreaks and learn from mistakes made at the height of the Covid pandemic.

But remember, the Trump-Vance Administration pulled the U.S. out of the WHO effective in 2026, and has revoked a variety of investments in global and domestic health programs. These decisions are not abstract, Dr. Adalja told me: they “make these types of events much harder to prepare for and much harder to control.”

As Covid-19 made abundantly clear, viruses don’t stop at national borders. Keeping the public healthy and preparing for pandemic risks simply must be more important than politicking. And when we’re heading in the wrong direction, I believe we have a moral obligation to sound the alarm—and to illuminate a better path forward. 

(Danielle Nierenberg is the President of Food Tank and can be reached at danielle@foodtank.com)