Capitalism vs. the bird flu

On in the present day’s episode, we’re speaking about chicken flu, however in a fairly Decoder approach. Lauren Leffer, who not too long ago wrote a piece for The Verge about bird flu and the way it’s turning into a without end conflict, joined me on the present, and we talked concerning the methods, construction, and tradition which may management chicken flu — and people who may make it worse.

You’ve probably 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 hen it infects; fewer chickens means fewer eggs, and fewer eggs means increased costs. You’ll hear Lauren say it’s a little more complicated than that, however that’s the essential 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 straightforward solutions. Like how quickly the brand new strains of chicken flu, identified collectively as H5N1, could be 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 case you’re like me, you’re beginning to really feel some uncomfortably acquainted emotions, and also you’re not improper 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 Providers, is by no means outfitted 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 urged one option to take care of 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. Actually not serving to the matter is that on Thursday, only a few days after Lauren and I talked for this episode, Kennedy announced a significant workforce discount of HHS, with layoffs hitting 10,000 workers in a transfer Kennedy stated would a “a painful interval” for the division that may contain doing “extra with much less.”

If all that wasn’t sufficient, the messy aftermath of the pandemic and the harm accomplished to institutional belief throughout the board would make the job troublesome for even a reputable chief of our public well being companies.

However like I stated, I needed to speak about this in a Decoder framework, and there’s one large distinction from COVID-19 that I needed to push on right here: industrial agriculture within the US is a giant enterprise, and the chicken flu is a risk to that enterprise. Thousands and thousands of useless birds signify 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 drawback earlier than it turns into even worse?

The reply, as you may count on, is a powerful query mark, however as Lauren defined, totally different elements of the market are reacting otherwise. 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 may be very clear: the chicken flu isn’t just going to go away, irrespective of how a lot Kennedy may want that was the way it labored. We have to learn to stay with it and handle it. And as long as we will get everybody on the identical web page, we’d even be capable to struggle it.

In case you’d prefer to learn extra on what we talked about on this episode, take a look at the hyperlinks beneath: