Amid ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East; the collapse of governing coalitions in Europe; the return of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States promising to downsize its federal government radically and end or pare down its commitments to Europe and Ukraine; the hottest year on record in 2024 and worse to come including more violent and destructive storms due to relentless climate change; amid all this turbulence, a tiny virus may break through to become the biggest story of 2025.
KFF Health News reports that “at least 875 herds [of dairy cattle] across 16 [U.S.] states have tested positive” for bird flu and that “the virus shows no sign of slowing.” As I discussed previously, for obvious self-interested economic reasons, the dairy and beef cattle industries did their best to thwart quick action to contain the virus when it began spreading earlier this year. Now, it seems, it is too late, and the foolish attempt to limit the economic damage to the beef and diary industries has instead turned the bird flu into a major and expanding calamity for both those industries.
There are two developments that could end up making this the biggest story of 2025. First, the availability of beef and dairy products may be curtailed as production declines due to sick and dying animals. So far, most dairy cattle survive the infection—only 2 to 5 percent die—but milk production declines by 20 percent. That kind of decline would be a big hit for the dairy market as the disease spreads to cattle practically everywhere.
For a number of reasons the size of the American beef cattle herd is now the lowest since 1961. (That’s NOT a typo!) Preferences for other types of meat such as chicken are in part responsible. The American beef herd is so small that the spread of bird flu could cause already high beef prices to skyrocket.
In addition, although cattle owners are supposed to take precautions when shipping animals around the world, it seems inevitable that the bird flu will spread across national boundaries making it a huge international concern sometime this year.
But the far more consequential development could be that bird flu—which has now adapted itself to thrive and spread in mammalian species—will evolve into a form that will be transmissible between humans. That would almost surely be the start of the next pandemic. A recent human case—in which there was no known contact with infected animals—has health scientists worried that a human transmissible form of bird flu may already be circulating under the radar. They are, not surprisingly, calling for far broader testing on cattle and more surveillance of humans working with dairy and beef cattle. Nearly all human cases of bird flu so far have been traced to exposure to sick animals.
So far human cases of bird flu in the current outbreak have been almost entirely mild, though the case just cited above is more serious. In the past such human bird flu cases have had a case fatality rate of 50 percent. (No, that’s NOT a typo, either.) That tells us that the bird flu is capable of evolving into a very lethal form.
This rapidly evolving bird flu virus may be difficult to counter with vaccines. Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm told NPR that the testing of two candidate human vaccines has not been sufficient to determine whether they will work “since the virus would have likely changed if it becomes a real threat to people.” (Bird flu is an RNA virus. For more on why rapid mutations of RNA viruses are a problem, see below.) And widespread availability of any vaccine might be delayed many months because of the methods of manufacture and the logistical hurdles of making and distributing hundreds of millions of doses. This, of course, does not take into the account the possible worldwide spread of human-transmissible bird flu.
On the issue of worldwide spread, here is what I wrote in April 2020 as the full extent of the COVID pandemic was emerging. Note the text I’ve put in boldface at the end here which now seems all too relevant:
I’ve been telling friends that our entire global society looks as if it were designed by a virus. We have dense urban habitats linked by plane flights that put no part of the world more than one day away from any other by air.
We have sea transport that constantly lands cargo and sailors from across the world on every shore. We have land transport—passenger rail, buses, cabs, subways and private automobiles—that can easily move infected persons out in all directions from major ports and inland cities.
We have food systems that move food across countries, continents and oceans. What role this has played in the current outbreak is unknown but thought to be insignificant. That may not be true for future outbreaks of novel viruses.
What exactly then can an individual do in the face of such developments? It is never too late to adopt good health practices, particularly when it comes to diet, which, as I’ve discussed previously, is the major cause of illness in the United States and likely many developed countries. Changing to a diet of real food—as opposed to the processed stuff parading as food—could make a huge difference in your health and your resilience in the face of any infectious disease.
There is also the question of airborne transmission. I would count on a human bird flu pandemic being transmissible via air. That means you should consider right now improving ventilation at home to the extent you can and at work if you have the power. Improved ventilation can go a long way in reducing airborne transmission. Also, I plan on wearing a well-fitted mask in public places in part because I think I owe it to my fellow citizens not to breathe virus particles on them if I’m infected but don’t know it because I am not yet symptomatic. If I test positive, I would stay home until I recover.
As for public health officials, they will have a hard time convincing the public to adopt the measures those officials recommend. The political polarization in the United States and elsewhere has spread to public health, and many people do not trust their public health officials.
I can point to two missteps (there were certainly more) that undermined that trust. First, public health officials strongly opposed any attempts to treat COVID patients through means other than vaccines even BEFORE vaccines were available. It is understandable that these officials would try to dissuade the public from false cures which always appear in health emergencies from hucksters taking advantage of a frightened public.
But the attempts to sanction licensed practicing physicians who were trying out possible ways to address the suffering of and save the lives of those afflicted BEFORE a vaccine was available—and also after when patients were brought into the hospital already sick with COVID and a vaccine would not have helped them—created vast ill will and mistrust. In the United States, physicians are regulated by state law which gives them wide discretion in treating their patients. Collecting information about which clinical interventions were working to mitigate symptoms and reduce mortality should have been a priority among public health officials. That’s just common sense. Instead, no information was collected and doctors were threatened with loss of their hospital privileges and their licenses for even trying various nonstandard interventions.
Second, health officials told the public that vaccines would keep them from getting COVID if exposed and also prevent them from spreading COVID. Neither turned out to be the case. Let me be absolutely clear on this next point: Because of widely available medical research, these health officials had to have known at the time that they made these claims that 1) coronaviruses mutate rapidly and that is why there had previously never been a successful publicly available vaccine against a coronavirus and 2) they could therefore NOT guarantee that any COVID vaccine would definitely prevent illness or prevent the spread of COVID from one person to another.
(Coronaviruses are a family of RNA viruses. RNA viruses have notoriously high mutation rates. Note that the article about mutation rates is from 2018. And there this from a 2016 paper: “The high mutation rate of RNA viruses has often been an impediment to drug and vaccine development as viruses can rapidly gain resistance to antiviral drugs and to the immune response elicited by vaccines.” Here is another piece from 2005 discussing high RNA mutation rates. I could provide many more examples prior to the outbreak of the COVID pandemic to demonstrate that the scientific facts about high RNA mutation rates were widely understood by the scientific community.)
If those officials had leveled with the public that—based on what we already knew about coronaviruses—they could not be certain about the extent of the effectiveness of the vaccine but were recommending them as the best hope for mitigating the severity of the disease and preventing infection, their credibility would not be in such tatters. The loss of that credibility is now a huge liability as we face a possible bird flu pandemic. (How many times have you heard people who received a COVID vaccine and many subsequent boosters say, “And, I still got COVID”? I’ve heard it many times. And for many of these people, it was personal confirmation that public health officials could not be trusted.)
I hope that bird flu remains relegated to animals and is soon eradicated. I hope that it does NOT become the biggest story of 2025. So, my new year’s wish is that I am wrong for all of our sakes, and that we as a global society safely navigate the many other dangers that arise in the coming year.
