The World Health Organization (WHO) again sounded the alarm about bird flu last week, warning it has an “extremely high” mortality rate among humans.
The disease, the H5N1 avian influenza virus — also known as “highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A,” and simply as “bird flu” — can pass among some animals, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
However, it has never passed from human to human, and there have been extremely rare reports of animal-to-human transmission, the agency said.
Still, WHO Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar said there is “great concern” that the disease will evolve and develop “the ability to go from human-to-human transmission.”
Reports of bird flu outbreaks date back to the 1880s, according to the CDC. Since 2014, there have been periodic and increasingly alarmist media stories about the virus.
Earlier this month reports again began circulating that bird flu was detected in wild birds, poultry, a variety of mammals including cats and dolphins, and a small number of humans.
News outlets like The New York Times reiterated Farrar’s warnings that the virus is mutating and could begin passing between people, and the Daily Mail warned it could be “100 times worse than COVID.”
Farrar kicked those warnings into high gear during a news conference announcing the WHO’s new definition for airborne pathogens.
“It’s a tragic thing to say, but if I get infected with H5N1 and I die, that’s the end of it,” Farrar said. “If I go around the community and I spread it to somebody else then you start the cycle.”
“We have to watch, more than watch, we have to make sure that if H5N1 did come across to humans with human-to-human transmission that we were in a position to immediately respond with access equitably to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics,” he added.
Farrar’s own past research focused on this particular strain of bird flu.
Since Farrar’s comments, headlines like: “The next pandemic threat demands action now,” “Bird Flu Is Infecting More Mammals. What Does That Mean for Us?” “The Evolving Danger of the New Bird Flu, and “U.S. Could Vaccinate a Fifth of Americans in a Bird Flu Emergency” have asked whether this is “the next pandemic.”
News reports are calling for public health agencies to prepare accordingly by ramping up interagency biosurveillance, emergency response planning, stockpiling personal protective equipment and of course, expanding existing stocks of bird flu vaccines and developing better ones.
The U.S. government currently has three U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved H5N1 vaccines stored in the Strategic National Stockpile. The vaccines are manufactured by Sanofi, GSK and CSL Sequrius.
According to federal officials, if H5N1 were to spread widely among humans the U.S. government could distribute enough vaccines within four months to inoculate a fifth of the U.S. population, Barrons reported.
But media reports raised concerns about how effective those vaccines — developed as far back as 2007 — would be and urged the development and testing of new vaccines.
Farrar did the same in his statement, warning that vaccine development is “not where we need to be.”
Bolstering these claims, a recent research report posted in an April 20 press release found that an influenza pathogen is most likely to trigger a new pandemic in the near future — followed by “Disease X.”
However, the findings aren’t based on a study of any empirical data on actual disease.
Alarms sounded as WHO ‘Pandemic Treaty’ negotiation deadline looms
News reports about a “next pandemic” come just ahead of the WHO Pandemic Agreement meetings scheduled for May.
Member countries will meet to vote on a new Pandemic Agreement andamendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) to grant the WHO wide authority over pandemic management, with an annual budget estimated at $31.1 billion.
The proposed treaty and the IHR would give the WHO unprecedented executive powers to declare an international health emergency at its own discretion, and then organize and mandate a response that overrides any response an individual nation might want to deploy instead.
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