This is an existing, widely used vaccine, not a new one.
Now that the disease has jumped to humans, humans can apparently transmit it to other poultry. Avian flu is apparently not too dangerous to humans, but people can be unwitting carriers.[1]
> Avian flu is apparently not too dangerous to humans
There are multiple strains. So far the strain circulating in cows seems to be mild in humans, but the strain in birds seems to be very deadly to humans.
> From 1 January 2003 to 27 September 2024, a total of 261 cases of human infection with avian influenza
A(H5N1) virus have been reported from five countries within the Western Pacific Region (Table 1). Of these
cases, 142 were fatal, resulting in a case fatality rate (CFR) of 54%
> Globally, from 1 January 2003 to 27 September 2024, 904 cases of human infection with avian influenza
A(H5N1) virus were reported from 24 countries. Of these 904 cases, 464 were fatal (CFR of 51%)
Anecdotally, a teenager in Canada was recently infected with the strain being carried by birds. She lived, but after being in the hospital for a month, and an extended period of time on ECMO. Who knows where her quality of life is at the moment. That level of care would not be available to many people if the rate of infection were to rise.
Thank you. That said, CFR’s denominator is those who show up to a hospital in bad enough shape to be tested for H5N1. All we can conclude is this appears more deadly than the flu. That’s concerning, but not what I’d consider “very deadly.”
I think the available evidence supports calling it very deadly to humans. As you said though, it's possible and even likely the CFR is overestimating. However I doubt you would see a 50% CFR equate to something low enough that wouldn't effectively be a disaster if human to human transmission began, and at a rate similar to the flu or covid. Let's pray that never happens or that we have an effective vaccine by that time.
There was a post just a day or two ago about the surprising finding of people with antibodies who never got sick. Hopefully they'll chase that down and we'll get a more correct denominator soon.
I am appalled by any organization that resists consensus-driven scientific method proven facts. Falsehoods based on pseudoscience should not have a place in our society.
>> Although many influenza researchers contend that vaccination can help control spread of the deadly virus, the U.S. government has long resisted allowing its use because of politics and trade concerns that many contend are unscientific.
There are countries that do not allow the importing of the products of vaccinated chickens because they are concerned the chickens may have asymptomatic bird flu.
The scientific merit of that is irrelevant. It is a fact that US agricultural policy has to take into account. Bird flu is an economic problem, primarily, and vaccination might not be worth it if the cost is killing the poultry export industry.
>> But, Cardona explained, the industry no longer relies on diagnosing sick poultry based on visible signs and symptoms but on strict protocols that utilize molecular testing.
>> “Markets have been negotiated based on not using vaccination ... based on, frankly, older data [that] there could be a chance that you would import the virus in an animal or in a product that has vaccine in it,” Cardona said.
Seems like vaccination is more of a cost or negotiation issue:
>> The National Turkey Federation says unilateral vaccination “would have a severe impact on exports” but that it has urged — and continues to urge — the federal government to “move as rapidly as possible to try to develop new agreements” with trading partners.
One of the common poultry vaccines in the US is for Marek’s disease, which has arguably been a disaster.
Over time, the disease has evolved to be more virulent so that it can spread in vaccinated flocks.
As a side effect, its mortality rate in unvaccinated flocks has been increasing, and some strains of it are approaching 100%. Normally, such a contagion would burn itself out instead of spreading.
The mortality rate in vaccinated flocks is non-trivial and also increasing. I think it’s still lower than the unvaccinated mortality rate before the vaccine was introduced, but I’m not sure.
(I am by no means an anti-vaxxer; the currently available human vaccines are effective and safe, as is the Marek’s vaccine. Marek disease’s is a worst case scenario outlier, and enabled by the conditions in modern poultry farms, which are atrocious.)
Unvaccinated people die, unvaccinated poultry is an existential risk to the ag industry. Different incentives making the palatability of solutions malleable when pushed through mental models and belief systems, like making sausage.
Actually, the last I checked, this vaccine will be bad for the industry. It prevents exports, which will lead to a supply glut.
So, in addition to the hit from culling chickens last year, paying for the vaccine, the big producers will see their income tank way more on average than if they just culled a few states worth of chickens and then sold the remaining at market rates.
On the other hand, this action should lower the price of eggs in the US, and makes it less likely that Trump will have to deal with pro-vaccine folks that don’t want their loved ones to needlessly die. I’m guessing they don’t want to distract their propaganda machine by making it explain that everything is great again, and your personal experience with flu deaths is an outlier.
Also, it will help further isolate the US economy, which should reduce the economic shock if Trump follows through with his plan to launch a four front invasion of Canada, Greenland, Panama and Gaza.
I’m hoping the “they did it so less people will die” theory is correct, to be clear.
If it’s that big of a risk that poultry industry will die, shouldn’t we also be concerned about the fact that the birds in the wild will also die off? Wouldn’t that threaten the broader economy much more?
The wild is where these diseases tend to originate. But the distribution of populations over thousands of square miles ensures some groups will avoid even the most virulent strains.
The risk and impact to domesticated flocks is increased due to the sheer density of modern poultry operations.
High density agricultural facilities provide perfect conditions for producing novel diseases. You have a bunch of stressed animals living right on top of each other, and each one ends up testing out large number of minor variations of the disease until they breed one that’s good enough to escape containment.
> then the rubes die and the right-wing support evaporates (like how there were 1e6 fewer republican voters in 2020)
“Overall, the excess death rate for Republican voters was 2.8 percentage points, or 15%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters (95% prediction interval [PI], 1.6-3.7 percentage points). After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from −0.9 percentage point (95% PI, −2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. The gap in excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates and was primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio [1].
Somewhat morbid, but one more pandemic would probably permanently shift some swing states’ partisan balances.
>unvaccinated poultry is an existential risk to the ag industry
The number of chickens killed by bird flu is miniscule compared to the amount that have been culled by hyperventilation bureaucrats. Chickens have survived thousands of years without being rendered extinct by a virus, that's not going to suddenly change, because that's how evolutionary dynamics work.
There's a difference between going extinct and having enough of a mass die-off to temporarily but significantly impact our economy and food supply. I think any regulatory policy would be trying to avoid the latter more than the former.
Chickens have survived for thousands of years, but not in quantities and conditions that we cultivate them in today to feed ourselves.
Pandemics became a thing among humans when we moved into cities because the increase in population density meant the disease could spread faster than the population’s immunity could build. Chickens in the wild (insofar as “wild chicken” is a meaningful concept) indeed may not succumb to a pandemic, chickens in a factory farm spread disease rapidly amongst themselves.
Factory farms have been around for almost a century and that hasn't happened. Nothing's changed now, there's absolutely no empirical evidence that such a thing is happening.
you cannot be serious. disease among husbanded animal populations has been a problem since mankind began keeping animals. before vaccines, the only options available were cleanliness, inoculation, and culling, to include killing entire herds when even a single individual was found to carry a disease.
I'd be careful with that - in the past there were no "mega-chicken-factories" that you'd find nowadays. So you can't quite compare spread of viruses in chicken today with the last "thousands of years" without very large asterisks
Population density matters for disease spread, and population density of animals in any agricultural settings will be orders of magnitude higher than in natural state.
There might be more chickens in one mega-farm than there used to be in the wild in their original homeland in Southeast Asia.
Clearly you misunderstood GP. Bird flu in a farm mean at worst 5% death rate for them, so clearly death isn't why GP talked about the danger for big ag.
In my country, if any factory farm is hit by any virus, the meat is considered tainted and cannot be sold (wouldn't be bought by big retailers anyway) until the virus is cleared.
For poultry it can means 3 months of throwing eggs away. It's more economical to kill all the chickens and start from scratch. If the contamination reach your neighbours, they will do the same thing (so you want to do it early, and radically).
Current strains are hitting 100% mortality rates in unvaccinated chickens, and it can spread over a mile on the wind. Wild turkeys are asymptomatic carriers.
> apparently our gov't thinks vaccines are fine for chickens
Egg prices are a meme. Our egg prices are high while our vaccinating neighbours’ aren’t. We don’t want to import their cheap eggs. We don’t want to trash our export prospects by loosening culling requirements. So the only choice left is vaccination.
Because of science. There is zero evidence that viruses like H5N1 survive through cooking. So if the vaccine is using a dead virus, there is almost zero chance it will have any affect on cooked food.
Says “Because of science” and fires off a single article from the government of Canada that has nothing to do with the issue of whether the vaccination itself causes problems in humans with consumption of animals vaccinated.
Apparently, we have a different idea what science is. I’d like to leave it at that. Any other takers?
"Nothing"? The link states that "is no evidence to suggest that the consumption of fully cooked poultry, beef, game meat, organs or eggs can transmit the influenza A(H5N1) virus to humans". The vaccine is made of a dead virus. Thus, heat kills virus, heat kills vaccine.
>> Apparently, we have a different idea what science is.
There is more than just “dead” virus in the vaccine. Byproducts like formaldehyde, antibiotics, aluminum, salts, soaps, and other adjuvants are present.
Your simplistic and dismissive look at this issue is the one that’s arrogant. Hand-wavy comments such as yours deserve to be challenged.
Even a paracetamol can kill you if you're unlucky enough. You have to look at the big picture.
Anyway, I strongly believe that your vaccine didn't cause any problems, you're just hallucinating a link, probably because you need a link to justify something else.
The vaccine causes your type of health problem with probability p, and someone who didn't take the vaccine during the pandemic would've developed health problems of similar severity with probability q. The vast evidence shows that p is orders of magnitude smaller than q. And you're saying that you would've preferred not to take the vaccine?
I'm saying I would have preferred to have more time to make an informed choice rather than facing the consequence of losing a job in a single-income family with several dependents. And now, after the fact, seem to have inexplicable symptoms after taking the vaccine, which leads me to question if they originate from it.
Run your own double blind experiment on a large population to show a high enough correlation to suggest causation for similar symptoms? Peeked into parallel universe where you weren't vaccinated?
Logical deductions over four years. Thousands of dollars in medical payments to track down degeneration that is uncommon in my age range. Test after test with doctors shrugging, saying I'm perfectly fine.
Symptoms started a couple of months after I was vaccinated. Total coincidence? Some other undiagnosed underlying medical condition? Sure. It's easy to play devil's advocate when it supports your pre-existing beliefs.
FWIW, I wasn't labeled anti-vax until I made this statement. I've had pretty much every vaccine given to average residents, including flu shots. But alas, questioning the side effects of just one is enough to get you labeled by the extremists. Literally, _just questioning_ this one vaccine and I'm all of the sudden "against vaccines." It's a tribal level of insanity. The only people who don't see it are the ones perpetuating it.
Half of RFK’s platform is insane. The other half makes sense.
He claimed he’d focus on the reasonable half (like banning ultra processed foods). I’m hoping that’s true.
However, vaccinating the chickens creates a huge trade barrier (because you cannot sell vaccinated poultry products in most places), so this could just be another example of Trump’s isolationist trade policies.
I guess we can hope they did this to improve public health, but I suspect it’s more of “a stopped clock is right twice a day” situation.
I agree legislative work to precisely define UPF is needed.
However, scientists have repeatedly shown that they cause a statistically significant increase in all cause mortality.
If you take the random word generator that is RFK’s mouth, then filter it with reproducible scientific studies, the result is probably actually better than what previous political appointees have produced.
I’ve already expressed skepticism about the second step, where science is involved. Still, I can hope.
^—- Conclusions: The consumption of ultra-processed products (i.e. foods with low nutritional value but high energy density) has increased dramatically in Sweden since 1960, which mirrors the increased prevalence of obesity. Future research should clarify the potential causal role of ultra-processed products in weight gain and obesity.
So, the last one has a quantitative definition that could be used for a preliminary ban.
Also, all those articles link many more. One click deep will provide a dozen concurring studies. I didn’t feel like adding more links.
"foods with low nutritional value but high energy density" is not the definition of UPFs that I've seen most often. The definition I most see is the NOVA classification. NOVA doesn't require a UPF food to be of low nutritional value or high energy density.
Also the GOP opposed mere taxes on sugary drinks but now they want to ban UPFs? I don't believe it.
This website is trying to confuse people into thinking it is the Journal of Public Health Policy, an actual reputable source. It's just more antivax horseshit
Yeah, I've struggled to understand this, especially since it seems the belief goes hand-in-hand with a hatred of late-stage capitalism. How are people reconciling this? It's clear these companies continue to lobby to make money hand over fist with hardly no interest in the safety or health of their consumers.
I didn’t. You cited pharmaceutical profit motive as a reason to suspect vaccines. I’m pointing out that there is a similar motivation in pushing antivax material. The unregulated industry ruthlessly exploiting the masses is more one than the other.
But that wasn't my point? You picked a sentence and then went on a tangent. My point is that people seem to be somehow holding the competing views I mentioned without any issue.
I agree the supplement industry is a massive grift. It seems you assumed I didn't think that? Either way, you did change the subject, and I still have no idea why, other than to just put up a talking point.
The flagged comment implied thinking vaccines work is a religious belief. It’s not.
Instead it’s based in observable evidence. I’m reasonably sure quantum mechanics, relativity and chemistry work because my cell phone relies on them, and there are reproducible scientific experiments that test those theories. The same is true of vaccines.
If we were well into Trump’s 25th term in office, and no other living being had seen a cell phone turn on, but some underground cult worshipped broken iPhones, then you could argue they had a religious belief in things like relativity and quantum mechanics.
That’s not the world we live in. Hell, Mitch McConnell is apparently old enough to remember that Polio vaccines work. (Which is why they let him vote against RFK.)
> What insane is how people on the left have recently developed an almost religious level of faith in statements about pharmaceutical safety from media corporations for whom pharmaceutical companies represent the largest source of advertising income
I don't agree with the OP's partisan take on the issue, but nowhere was it said that it takes religious belief to think that vaccines work.
“religious level of faith” implies there is not a mountain of publicly accessible evidence showing vaccines are safe and effective, and that instead these people’s beliefs are neither provable nor refutable.
I know of no other reasonable definition of religious beliefs.
It's a lot simpler than that. The point of the argument is that some people take the word of these companies without questioning that there might be an alternative motive that doesn't take their safety into account. This would be a "religious level of faith" as it implies a dogmatic adherence to what some person is saying.
It has nothing to do with believing vaccines work. It's simply taking things they say with a grain of salt because capitalist forces often encourage them to do the wrong thing.
Now that the disease has jumped to humans, humans can apparently transmit it to other poultry. Avian flu is apparently not too dangerous to humans, but people can be unwitting carriers.[1]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html