The world is watching the U.S. deal with bird flu, and it's scary | Hacker News Reader

The world is watching the U.S. deal with bird flu, and it's scary

nytimes.com

28 pointsctoth10 comments

> None of us would want a new pandemic labeled the “American virus,” as this could be very damaging for the United States’ reputation and economy.

How touching to be so concerned about US reputation.

H5N1. Avian flu that people have been worried about for decades. There is a vaccine for it, but, of course, low stocks because because it was not mammal transmissible until recently. Minks and cows are known to have caught it. It’s believed to still only be transmissible through ingestion. Given current food practices, it could enter the US food chain similar to ecoli.

> There is a vaccine for it, but, of course, low stocks

Source?

The U.S. is working on a vaccine [1]. Given the human-transmissible virus doesn’t exist, it seems premature to start vaccinating the general population.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/php/severe-potential/candidate-...

Forgive me, I may be spreading incorrect information. I’m not sure the source I’m quoting, could be that the vaccine I’ve heard mentioned is not for humans? I’ve been hearing rumor of herds of cattle being put down to prevent the spread.

Could also be that the current outbreak doesn’t have a good candidate yet.

Wikipedia seems to think there was a human H5N1 vaccine approved in 2020.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H5N1_vaccine

Rich countries may well have stock of H5N1 vaccine following the dangerous situation in the 00s. For now it's believed that the antibodies those vaccines induce would be somewhat useful against the current virus, at least one could hope they will prevent disaster until an updated vaccine can be developed and deployed.

A couple of example articles here (Probably abstract only unless you're hooked up with a good library. Sorry!):

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03189-y

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03256-4

Influenza is an RNA virus and thus less stable and particularly prone to change. I find it somewhat remarkable that the old vaccines are not useless by now, but they're pretty tenuous protection against this problem, so developing better and specific measures against what we're up against now is urgent.

> The U.S. currently has fewer than five million vaccines matched to the H5N1 strain that is circulating among cattle and occasionally infecting people right now.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-bird-flu-vaccin...

Pretty sure the correct description is: “Fail to deal with bird flu”

Holy schmoley again?

Probably not at the level of COVID. A vaccine exists, but mass production needs to ramp up, preferably before human-to-human transmission occurs.

In contrast, with COVID, vaccination efforts against SARS had been abandoned in the mid-2010s due to budget cuts, and we had to start fighting the virus with nothing but isolation and hygiene measures until a vaccine was available ~14-18 months in.

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