The US Has Bird Flu Vaccines. Here’s Why You Can’t Get One

As avian influenza With birds and dairy cattle out of whack across the U.S., Georgia became the latest state to detect the virus in a commercial poultry flock, and on Friday, it halted all poultry sales. Reduce further spread of disease. Nationally, egg prices are on the rise—if you can find them at your local grocery store.

Ongoing outbreaks in animals have also occurred At least 67 human cases of bird fluAll but one cause mild illness At the beginning of this month, a person from Louisiana Dr Died after being hospitalized with severe bird flu It was the country’s first recorded death attributed to H5N1 in December.

The United States has previously licensed three H5N1 vaccines for humans, but they are not commercially available. The government has bought millions of doses for the national stockpile if needed. But even after the outbreak spread, federal health officials under President Joe Biden were hesitant to deploy them. Experts say the decision comes down to risk and currently, the risk of H5N1 is low. A more targeted strategy would be to roll out a vaccine to farm workers and others at high risk of infection, but even that measure may be premature. Now, with a change in federal health leadership imminent as President Donald Trump begins his second term, the decision rests with the new administration.

“Right now, from the perspective of the severity and the ease of infection, it doesn’t seem necessary to come out with a vaccine to protect people,” said William Schaffner, a physician and professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. .

So far, no person-to-person spread of H5N1 has been detected, but health officials are monitoring the virus for any genetic changes that make it more likely to infect humans. Most bird flu infections are related to animal exposure. Of the 67 known human cases in the United States, 40 are associated with sick dairy cattle and 23 are associated with poultry farms and slaughtering operations. In four other cases, the exact source is not known.

In the United States, human cases have been mild, many of them causing only conjunctivitis. In some cases, people have experienced mild respiratory symptoms. Besides the Louisiana patient, all those who tested positive for H5N1 recovered quickly and did not require hospitalization. Historically, however, H5N1 has been fatal in about 50 percent of cases. Since 2003, there have been a total of 954 cases of H5N1 in humans The World Health Organization has been informed, And about half of them died. Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and China have the highest number of bird flu deaths.

Those numbers come with a few caveats. For one, many of these deaths occurred in places where people lived in close proximity to sick poultry. “In this situation, the thinking is that they probably got a very large dose of the virus,” Schaffner said.

Also, the disease fatality rate—the proportion of infected people who die of the disease—considers only known cases, and some cases of H5N1 are doubtless because the symptoms of bird flu are similar to those of other respiratory viruses. In the United States, language barriers among farm workers, lack of testing, and workers’ reluctance to report illnesses are also factors. “We probably miss more cases than we detect, and we’re much more likely to detect a case that’s serious,” said Shira Doron, chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Boston and a hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center.