Capitalism vs. the bird flu

On today’s episode, we’re talking about bird flu, but in a pretty Decoder way. Lauren Leffer, who recently wrote a piece for The Verge about bird flu and how it’s becoming a forever war, joined me on the show, and we talked about the systems, structure, and culture that might control bird flu — and those that might make it worse.

You’ve most likely heard about bird flu in the context of egg prices. Eggs are expensive and hard to find right now because the bird flu has kicked off an old fashioned supply and demand problem: the virus kills almost every single chicken it infects; fewer chickens means fewer eggs, and fewer eggs means higher prices. You’ll hear Lauren say it’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the basic shape of it.

But the bird flu is actually quite a bit more serious than just the egg supply. The first confirmed human death linked to the virus happened in January. Now, we’re facing some uncomfortable questions with no easy answers. Like how rapidly the new strains of bird flu, known collectively as H5N1, might be spreading from birds to dairy cows and other animals, as well as just how deadly those new strains are among both birds and mammals, including human beings.

If you’re like me, you’re starting to feel some uncomfortably familiar feelings, and you’re not wrong to feel them. There are some real echoes of COVID-19 here — and the Trump administration, with Robert Kennedy Jr. as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, is not at all equipped to handle a fast-moving pathogenic virus. Kennedy himself is an anti-vaccine activist who peddles junk science with abandon.

Just last week, Kennedy went on Fox News and suggested one way to deal with ongoing bird flu outbreaks was to simply let it spread and kill all the birds, which is a purely stupid idea for a variety of reasons Lauren and discussed. Certainly not helping the matter is that on Thursday, just a few days after Lauren and I talked for this episode, Kennedy announced a major workforce reduction of HHS, with layoffs hitting 10,000 employees in a move Kennedy said would a “a painful period” for the department that would involve doing “more with less.”

If all that wasn’t enough, the messy aftermath of the pandemic and the damage done to institutional trust across the board would make the job difficult for even a credible leader of our public health services.

But like I said, I wanted to talk about this in a Decoder framework, and there’s one big difference from COVID-19 that I wanted to push on here: industrial agriculture in the US is a big business, and the bird flu is a threat to that business. Millions of dead birds represent millions in lost revenue, and if the virus becomes more deadly to dairy cows, that’s even more money on the line. So if the government isn’t capable of mounting a response, is the industry capable of seeing and solving this problem before it becomes even worse?

The answer, as you might expect, is a resounding question mark, but as Lauren explained, different parts of the market are reacting differently. And right now, there still appears to be time: scientists are not yet raising the kinds of alarms that we started to see in the months leading up to March 2020, when covid changed all of our lives forever.

But one thing is very clear: the bird flu is not just going to go away, no matter how much Kennedy might wish that was how it worked. We need to learn how to live with it and manage it. And so long as we can get everyone on the same page, we might even be able to fight it.

If you’d like to read more on what we talked about in this episode, check out the links below:

_{Questions or comments about this episode? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!}