It’s been five years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. But there may be another potential pandemic on the horizon: bird flu. Against the backdrop of growing anti-vaccination sentiment, exhaustion from COVID, and a new administration, The Atlantic’s Katie Wu explains that the U.S. is perhaps less prepared to deal with a widespread outbreak than it was when COVID hit—and bird flu, if it spreads to humans, could be worse. Read more from Wu’s reporting at The Atlantic here and here. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/podsub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the early signs of a bird flu outbreak?
Last year, on the day before Easter, America's most egg-centric holiday, Greg Herberk lost 70 hens. Now, to lose several chickens on a large-scale farm, not that big a deal, just part of the process, which Greg knows because he's the CEO of the largest egg producer in Michigan and the 10th largest in the country. His family's been in the business for more than three generations.
So Greg knows his chickens. I love talking about my hens. Yeah. Greg has known chickens his entire life.
When I was in college, we had 200,000 hens at that time. And I used to tell my buddies, I said, I know 200,000 chicks, but I only got one phone number.
But losing 70 hens in one day, that was unusual. And then the next day, that number went up.
The next day, that barn was over 700. And the day after that? And that next day, that barn had 10,000 dead. By Thursday, another one of our farms about five miles away went positive. Ugh. And then the following week, our third site in Ionia County was confirmed positive. And so within right around a week, our three large farms in Michigan were all positive.
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Chapter 2: How many hens were lost in the recent bird flu incident?
How many birds did you lose since that Easter Day weekend?
Just in about seven, eight days, six and a half million.
Six and a half million?
Yeah. Wow. It's a fear. But then the reality of it happening, that's I mean, it's just like, oh, my goodness. They're all going to die.
This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hannah Rosen. By now, you don't have to be the CEO of an egg farm to know about bird flu. It's all over the news and possibly showing up at your local supermarket.
There's a shortage on eggs happening and the bird flu is to blame.
The Department of Agriculture says eggs are about double the price from January of 2024. The average price of a dozen large Grade A eggs jumped 65%, while overall food prices rose just 2.5%.
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Chapter 3: What is the current impact of bird flu on egg prices?
Both Costco and Trader Joe's have put restrictions on how many eggs you can buy. Other grocery stores have, too, depending on the location. Last month, Waffle House put a 50-cent surcharge on every egg it sells, which seems like a new tier to the Waffle House disaster index. If it hits a dollar, we are officially in the bad place. But it's not just about the cost of eggs.
Bird flu has been spreading to mammals. Cows have been dying. Some farm workers have been getting ill.
And then in January... On the bird flu, America's first death from this illness has now been reported from the state of Louisiana.
Scientists are starting to talk about a pandemic worse than COVID lurking. So I asked staff writer Katie Wu, who covers all things science for us at The Atlantic, to make me feel better. So basically, I want you, Katie, to just tell me it's going to be okay. No, I'm just kidding. I just say it's going to be fine. Everything is going to be fine.
I was kind of kidding, although she never explicitly said everything was going to be okay. I did want to ask Katie, though, about how concerned we should actually be on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 being like, don't worry at all, and 10 being we are canceling the NBA Finals.
I think about this a lot, and I think we're probably still in the middle ranges here, you know, like depending on... All else that is going on, because I think also relative threat is important here. You know, five, six is fair, but I think much more important is the fact that that number has ticked steadily up since this time last year.
Ah, okay.
And I think that is really telling. It says that the threat is growing and that there's not necessarily anything stopping it from ratcheting upward closer to 10%. And the other thing is that we had time to contain it and keep it at a two or three and never let it get beyond that. And we did not.
Okay. So what would avoiding it have looked like? What could we have done in that critical moment?
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Chapter 4: How prepared is the U.S. for a potential bird flu pandemic?
And now there's just this general sense of, oh, a lot of stuff is wrong, but I don't have anything to worry about yet when this is exactly the time to be doing something about it so things don't get catastrophically worse. And I think, you know, from the federal government side, there absolutely has not been enough of a response. And I don't know how much of that is...
Issues with resources being drained from COVID and that still being an ongoing threat. You know, changes in leadership that are introducing maybe ideological barriers to being more prepared. And also, you know, maybe some sense of, well, we don't want to...
over alarm people and be accused of overblowing this threat it's a really tough balance to strike and i certainly feel for the people who are trying to communicate those messages but i would not argue that the national response has been adequate yeah okay so we are journalists and it's our job to help inform people so why don't we try and bridge the gap as best we can what is bird flu
So it is a flu that has originated as far as we can tell in birds. So hence the name bird flu. That's kind of how these things are named. And, you know, it is a flu virus. So it is related to the seasonal flus that pass through our population every year.
But because this is primarily a version of the flu that is really well adapted to birds and that's where it spent most of its time evolving, it is not yet the kind of flu that is going to pass really easily from person to person. But the reason that this is scary is we have seen this particular version of bird flu jump into mammals, including mammals that interface a lot with humans, like i.e.
dairy cows. And the fact that this virus is making those moves, jumping across those species barriers, like huge species barriers. I'm not talking, you know... duck to pigeon, I'm talking birds to mammals, that's a massive jump in terms of biology and the type of host that this virus can manage to infect and spread between.
So the possibility that the virus will keep evolving and become a real threat to humans is really just growing every day.
Okay. You've mentioned a few times the jumps and the sort of ratcheting up. What's the rough timeline of events? As someone who's tracking this, I just want to understand, is it very fast? How has it gone? Has it been over the course of 30 years or five years? What's the timeline?
So there are probably two relevant timelines here. The first is just to remind people that this particular version of bird flu that scientists also call H5N1, you might hear about other bird flus, but this is a very specific one that we're talking about right now. Scientists have known about this for decades, and it has for most of that time stayed primarily in birds.
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Chapter 5: What has changed in bird flu transmission to humans over time?
Like unless there's a fundamental change in the composition of that ball, it's not going to stick to that wall permanently. But in this case, we are throwing a ball that won't necessarily stay bouncy. That ball is changing constantly and randomly, and it's totally possible that it will get sticky on its own.
After the break, what happens when the ball sticks?
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Now that I understand better, I'm going to ask you a very I'm your friend at the party kind of question. So in my current profession, I don't work with birds. I'm not a dairy farmer. But you read things like, oh, you could get it from a bird feeder or it might be in food products. Like what is the kind of thing you would tell your average friend to do or not do? Are there any such things?
Your average friend who's not a dairy worker.
I'd say most people still don't have to change their day-to-day behavior. I would certainly encourage everyone to continue paying attention to the news and to take things like seasonal flu vaccines seriously. We can come back to that in a moment. But I don't think people generally have to worry about what they're eating or the local birds that they see in the park.
The two exceptions I can think of to that is if you are a raw milk drinker...
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Chapter 6: What does it take for a virus to spread between humans?
I think from the start, you know, even when this was starting to spread among mammals over the past two and a half years, the response from the federal government was pretty muted. That was especially the case when this started to be detected in dairy cattle. That should have been a huge, huge, huge red flag. This was not typical that hadn't happened before for this particular bird flu.
And that is, you know, an animal that is in really close proximity to us, shares a lot of biology with us. That is kind of the moment that a lot of experts told me should have been the most clear inflection point, the point at which the government should have really, really cracked down on this issue and been able to do something about it.
But because they didn't, you know, at the time there wasn't enough testing, there wasn't enough outreach to farm workers who were in close proximity to the virus, because they sort of let that moment go and allowed the virus to spread to more and more dairy herds, the situation has now become so much more difficult to contain.
And some researchers are worried that we might never be able to really get rid of this virus on this continent.
So are you saying these conversations aren't happening or that there isn't necessarily a strategy in place? Because I saw in one of your stories that the government has disputed that its response was too slow or inadequate.
I mean, I'm sure conversations are happening. I'm sure someone in the government would argue that that is the case, but definitely not enough. And I think one really challenging space to be talking about right now is still vaccines, not just because there aren't obvious answers there about how and when and to whom and in what species to deploy those vaccines.
That's certainly controversial even among scientists who have worked in this field for a very long time. But also because, you know, our new HHS secretary doesn't have the best track record with vaccines and certainly not with advancing the most important public health narrative, which is collective action for the public good.
Right now, everything I am hearing from HHS is about personal choice, individual liberty, and just kind of letting things flow naturally and hoping for the best.
Yeah. A person seeing this train coming down the tracks, like what I think about is the sort of general anti-scientific establishment sentiment, this mistrust of the scientific establishment, which is not just in certain members of the administration, but spread among the public during COVID, as you mentioned. You know, what happens if the train crashes and we still are living in that moment?
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Chapter 7: What are the symptoms of bird flu in humans?
I worry that those differences will make it even more difficult for misinformation to seep through and for people to, you know, take their cues from the government and really run with them in the event of a flu pandemic. It could get so much worse so much more quickly.
Right. So with COVID, there was a day, you know. Will we know when we've reached the tipping point? Like, will it be totally obvious to us, like there'll be giant headlines in the newspaper, or it won't be totally obvious?
I think it depends what we consider the tipping point. Arguably, there is kind of a biological tipping point when the virus starts spreading from person to person. that won't be noticed in real time, or at least it's highly unlikely, right? Like the virus would have to start doing that and then scientists would catch it because it has already started happening.
And we may never know the day that that starts happening, if it ever does. Then I think there is kind of the... public consciousness tipping point, which is going to just have to be the more relevant thing. Like, to draw the comparison to COVID, we still don't know exactly how, exactly when, you know, what animal first passed it to a human and what exactly happened after that.
And we probably will never know. You know, that stuff is gone. Scientists learn that information retroactively, and they can't go back in time and recreate that timeline. What we do know is public attendance started focusing on the pandemic in the months that followed, and that's what I would expect here. But I think the most important takeaway here is that
That inflection point, the one that would command public awareness, hasn't yet happened, which means there's still time to act. And I think that requires people to hold two realities in their brain at once. One is about the present moment, during which the risk to most of the public is still low. But the second thing that people have to hold in mind is that won't necessarily stay true.
Katie, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.
By the way, after we taped with both Katie and Greg Herbrook, the poultry CEO, we heard the news that RFK Jr. was suggesting that instead of culling chickens who were sick, farmers should maybe let bird flu, quote, run through the flock so that we can identify the birds and preserve the birds that are immune to it. Basically, let the virus run its course.
We asked Greg what he thought of that plan, and he told us this via email. Quote, "...letting an outbreak run through the flock in an uncontrolled manner is not a practical or humane solution and would lead to needless suffering while increasing the risk of AI, meaning avian influenza, spreading to other species and animals and ultimately putting humans at greater risk."
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