It's the US government who's ignoring it. They're acting as if they have inverted priorities—putting agricultural industry interests first, as well as short-term politics and optics.

The federal vaccine effort seems to at the token-effort level, on track to repeat 2020 all over again. I'm inferring this from looking at budget figures: Warp Speed spent (I think) $18 billion in 2020, while the current efforts total just 1-2% of that [0] (mostly one single grant to Moderna). That looks to me on track to repeat 2020: a year or more without a (fully deployed and mass-produced) vaccine—tens of trillions in losses in the future, because government leaders aren't proactive-thinking enough to invest a few billion today.

(Here's a remarkable figure from [0]: the federal government is currently spending 7x more subsidizing livestock farms for their economic hardship from HPAI than on developing vaccines for it).

Another major failing is the lack of effort (again mirroring 2020) on monitoring early outbreaks. The pandemic strain of HPAI doesn't yet exist. It's likely to come into existence, if there's large numbers of HPAI human infections, simultaneous with infections with human-adpated influenza strains—that's where you'd get the highly transmissible pandemic strain, from genetic crossover with ordinary flu.

But: most farm worker HPAI outbreaks are going unnoticed [1,2]. There's very little concerted effort to monitor and prevent crossover infections in the high-risk sectors, on livestock farms. (Again, I feel we're repeating 2020: prioritizing short-term industry considerations over public welfare—as if it's more important to minimize hardship to the dairy industry, than to prevent a pandemic). Sure; there's token government efforts that look like they're helping keep farm workers safe—but empirically they're simply not working. A complication is that this industry hires large numbers of undocumented/illegal farm labor: people who deliberately avoid interactions with government officials; as well as people who avoid or are priced out of healthcare access.

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/24/health/america-bird-flu-n...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/health/bird-flu-diaries-f...

[2] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-11-26/bird-fl...

* Mandatory N95 (or better) PPE for farm workers in high-risk large facilities.

* Mandatory testing for bulk milk tanks.

We're living in a crazy surrealist theatrical performance when we charge animal activists with bioterrorism charges (despite wearing head-to-toe PPE[2]), but meanwhile farm worker in these high-risk facilities (who are around sick poultry constantly) aren't required to have any sort of protections.[3]

Unfortunately half of American are currently anti-science enough to oppose these sensible, minimal measures tooth and nail. If this really is an adversary nation bot psyop to divide Americans[4] and get us act against our own self-interest... well played, adversary nation!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42248570

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42292384

[3] https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/10/bird-flu-virus-dairy-far...

[4] https://old.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1gouvit/youre_being_t...

Cheap political quips aside, it makes me uneasy and frustrated that vaccination is currently very popular but is being turned into a political issue just for a big grift.

The overwhelming majority of research shows vaccines are safe and effective. While I personally think it’s worth verifying research to the contrary, too many people make contrarianism with cherry-picking against science-backed norms their entire personality.

Cherry-picked Contrarianism as a personality is tolerable in limited doses, like from a certain batch of folks on HN, but not something I’d want from policymakers.