https://www.nature.com/articles/438406b

This is from 2005

China claims to be well on the way towards vaccinating every domestic bird in the country against avian flu. The bold scheme — which would mean inoculating some 14 billion birds — was announced on 15 November and comes in response to outbreaks that animal-health officials say are dangerously widespread. On 16 November, China confirmed its first two human cases of bird flu, one of which was fatal.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8327827/

A new strain developed in 2013 and was essentially eradicated by developing a new vaccine for the birds.

Why aren’t we doing so in the US??? We have an effective vaccine!

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24155545/bird-flu-vaccines-h5n1-avian-flu-cows

However, despite seemingly having an effective vaccine in hand, as of late April, the USDA is still not pursuing bird flu vaccination as a disease control strategy. “While USDA is exploring the possibility of developing a poultry H5N1 vaccine to stock and use in an emergency, we are not moving forward with a HPAI vaccination program at this time,”

The biggest sticking point is around trade. The US exported more than $5 billion in poultry meat and products on average every year for the past three years. The USDA enters into trade agreements with each individual country it trades with, explained Upali Galketi Aratchilage, a senior economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Each agreement outlines specific biosafety and production requirements that both countries agree to follow. The USDA said, in an email to Vox, that many of those agreements do not allow bird flu vaccination.

Every single bird that is infected gives the virus another million chances to mutate into something 100x worse than COVID. And we are not doing it because of the fucking cost to GDP.

    • Sulvor [he/him, undecided]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      15·
      2 months ago

      I know it might be naive of me, but I atleast expect our non-partisan governmental agencies to do their fucking jobs and take a longer view of the world than the current news cycle.

      If they think temporarily stopping poultry trade to sign new trade deals is gonna cost the economy, wait until COVID 2 hits you fucking buffoons.

      And depending what kind of bird flu becomes human-to-human and how it mutates, we’re looking at muuuch higher fatality rates than COVID. Winter is right around the corner too.

      • ThermonuclearEgg [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        25·
        2 months ago

        wait until COVID 2 hits you fucking buffoons.

        They don’t care about that, only short-term gain.

        We know this because COVID already is number two (that’s why it was named SARS-CoV-2 when it got an actual name). We were warned with the initial contained SARS outbreak in 2003, and could have had vaccines ready to go for 2020 (which had about 85% similarity and still would have helped) but nobody would fund it even though we had 17 years!