On right this moment’s episode, we’re speaking about chicken flu, however in a fairly Decoder approach. Lauren Leffer, who lately wrote a piece for The Verge about bird flu and the way it’s changing into a without end warfare, joined me on the present, and we talked in regards to the methods, construction, and tradition that may management chicken flu — and people who may make it worse.
You’ve more than likely heard about chicken flu within the context of egg costs. Eggs are costly and onerous to search out proper now as a result of the chicken flu has kicked off an old fashioned supply and demand problem: the virus kills virtually each single rooster it infects; fewer chickens means fewer eggs, and fewer eggs means greater costs. You’ll hear Lauren say it’s a little more complicated than that, however that’s the fundamental form of it.
However the chicken flu is definitely fairly a bit extra critical than simply the egg provide. The primary confirmed human death linked to the virus occurred in January. Now, we’re dealing with some uncomfortable questions with no simple solutions. Like how quickly the brand new strains of chicken flu, recognized collectively as H5N1, is perhaps spreading from birds to dairy cows and different animals, in addition to simply how lethal these new strains are amongst each birds and mammals, together with human beings.
In the event you’re like me, you’re beginning to really feel some uncomfortably acquainted emotions, and also you’re not flawed to really feel them. There are some actual echoes of COVID-19 right here — and the Trump administration, with Robert Kennedy Jr. as the pinnacle of the Division of Well being and Human Companies, is under no circumstances geared up to deal with a fast-moving pathogenic virus. Kennedy himself is an anti-vaccine activist who peddles junk science with abandon.
Simply final week, Kennedy went on Fox News and steered one solution to cope with ongoing chicken flu outbreaks was to easily let it unfold and kill all of the birds, which is a purely silly concept for a wide range of causes Lauren and mentioned. Definitely not serving to the matter is that on Thursday, only a few days after Lauren and I talked for this episode, Kennedy announced a serious workforce discount of HHS, with layoffs hitting 10,000 workers in a transfer Kennedy stated would a “a painful interval” for the division that might contain doing “extra with much less.”
If all that wasn’t sufficient, the messy aftermath of the pandemic and the injury completed to institutional belief throughout the board would make the job tough for even a reputable chief of our public well being providers.
However like I stated, I wished to speak about this in a Decoder framework, and there’s one huge distinction from COVID-19 that I wished to push on right here: industrial agriculture within the US is an enormous enterprise, and the chicken flu is a menace to that enterprise. Thousands and thousands of lifeless birds symbolize thousands and thousands in misplaced income, and if the virus turns into extra lethal to dairy cows, that’s much more cash on the road. So if the federal government isn’t able to mounting a response, is the business able to seeing and fixing this downside earlier than it turns into even worse?
The reply, as you may anticipate, is a powerful query mark, however as Lauren defined, totally different elements of the market are reacting in a different way. And proper now, there nonetheless seems to be time: scientists will not be but elevating the sorts of alarms that we began to see within the months main as much as March 2020, when covid modified all of our lives without end.
However one factor could be very clear: the chicken flu is not only going to go away, regardless of how a lot Kennedy may want that was the way it labored. We have to discover ways to stay with it and handle it. And as long as we will get everybody on the identical web page, we would even be capable to battle it.
In the event you’d wish to learn extra on what we talked about on this episode, try the hyperlinks under:
- We’ve entered a without end warfare with chicken flu | Verge
- Kennedy’s alarming prescription for chicken flu on poultry farms | NYT
- First chicken flu dying in US reported in Louisiana | NYT
- Fowl flu present in sheep in UK, a world first | NYT
- Shell shocked: how small eateries are coping with document egg costs | NYT
- Animal Farm: eggflation’s monopoly downside | The Lever
- On the ‘Wall Avenue of Eggs,’ Demand Is Surging | WSJ
- The way to shield your pets from chicken flu | Popular Science
- What to know in regards to the chicken flu outbreak in wild birds | AP
- Fowl flu continues to unfold as Trump specialists are MIA | Ars Technica
Questions or feedback about this episode? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We actually do learn each electronic mail!
Decoder with Nilay Patel
A podcast from The Verge about huge concepts and different issues.
