It’s Not The Egg Shortage We Should Be Worrying About
By The egg shortage is being treated as a politico-economic problem. It’s far more than that.
It’s a symptom of the widespread infection of commercial flocks of chickens by the H5N1 virus. They have to be killed, hence fewer chickens to produce eggs. Commercial milk cows have also been infected, as have wild birds.
The virus is deadly to cats and marine mammals.
Few humans have been infected, mostly workers at commercial farms. There is no sign of human-to-human transmission.
The more the virus spreads, the more it will mutate, possibly to a form that can be transmitted from one human to another. If that happens, we will have another pandemic.
Robert F. Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services has taken action.
Donald Trump’s response to the COVID pandemic was to deny it was happening. It’s unlikely he would change that. He burbled something about biosecurity at chicken farms last week, but it was his usual incoherence.
Vaccines are available for chickens, and other countries are using them. The government should be making them available and encouraging their use.
Vaccines can be developed against H5N1 in whatever variant might become dangerous to humans. We should be setting up structures to prepare for rapid production and widespread deployment of those vaccines.
The featured image is from Unsplash.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner