US repeating Covid mistakes with bird flu as spread raises alarm, experts say
The US is making the same mistakes with the H5N1 bird flu virus as with Covid, even as the highly pathogenic avian influenza continues spreading on American farms and raising alarms that it could mutate to become a pandemic, public health experts argue in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“We’re closing our eyes to both the Covid pandemic and to a potential nascent bird flu [pandemic] on the horizon,” said Gregg Gonsalves, associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and co-author of the article. “Our ability to react swiftly and decisively is the big problem.”
Beyond the outbreaks – of Covid, bird flu, mpox, measles and other dangerous pathogens – the inability or refusal to learn the lessons of each crisis is the most pressing health issue facing America, he said. “The social epidemic of forgetting is probably the more worrisome public health event of 2024.”
A lack of testing, opaque data, political divides, poor healthcare access and a sense of hubris – all have plagued the Covid response, and now these errors are playing across the bird flu response, Gonsalves said.
