Capitalism vs. the hen flu

On right this moment’s episode, we’re speaking about hen flu, however in a reasonably Decoder approach. Lauren Leffer, who not too long ago wrote a bit for The Verge about hen flu and the way it’s changing into a perpetually warfare, joined me on the present, and we talked in regards to the programs, construction, and tradition which may management hen flu — and people who may make it worse.

You’ve most probably heard about hen flu within the context of egg costs. Eggs are costly and onerous to seek out proper now as a result of the hen flu has kicked off an quaint provide and demand downside: the virus kills nearly each single rooster it infects; fewer chickens means fewer eggs, and fewer eggs means increased costs. You’ll hear Lauren say it’s a bit of extra difficult than that, however that’s the essential form of it.

However the hen flu is definitely fairly a bit extra severe than simply the egg provide. The primary confirmed human demise linked to the virus occurred in January. Now, we’re dealing with some uncomfortable questions with no straightforward solutions. Like how quickly the brand new strains of hen flu, identified collectively as H5N1, could be spreading from birds to dairy cows and different animals, in addition to simply how lethal these new strains are amongst each birds and mammals, together with human beings.

In the event you’re like me, you’re beginning to really feel some uncomfortably acquainted emotions, and also you’re not incorrect to really feel them. There are some actual echoes of COVID-19 right here — and the Trump administration, with Robert Kennedy Jr. as the pinnacle of the Division of Well being and Human Companies, is in no way outfitted to deal with a fast-moving pathogenic virus. Kennedy himself is an anti-vaccine activist who peddles junk science with abandon.

Simply final week, Kennedy went on Fox Information and instructed one approach to cope with ongoing hen flu outbreaks was to easily let it unfold and kill all of the birds, which is a purely silly concept for a wide range of causes Lauren and mentioned. Definitely not serving to the matter is that on Thursday, just some days after Lauren and I talked for this episode, Kennedy introduced a significant workforce discount of HHS, with layoffs hitting 10,000 workers in a transfer Kennedy mentioned would a “a painful interval” for the division that might contain doing “extra with much less.”

If all that wasn’t sufficient, the messy aftermath of the pandemic and the harm performed to institutional belief throughout the board would make the job troublesome for even a reputable chief of our public well being providers.

However like I mentioned, I wished to speak about this in a Decoder framework, and there’s one large distinction from COVID-19 that I wished to push on right here: industrial agriculture within the US is an enormous enterprise, and the hen flu is a risk to that enterprise. Hundreds of thousands of useless birds symbolize hundreds of thousands in misplaced income, and if the virus turns into extra lethal to dairy cows, that’s much more cash on the road. So if the federal government isn’t able to mounting a response, is the business able to seeing and fixing this downside earlier than it turns into even worse?

The reply, as you may anticipate, is a convincing query mark, however as Lauren defined, completely different elements of the market are reacting in a different way. And proper now, there nonetheless seems to be time: scientists will not be but elevating the sorts of alarms that we began to see within the months main as much as March 2020, when covid modified all of our lives perpetually.

However one factor could be very clear: the hen flu isn’t just going to go away, regardless of how a lot Kennedy may want that was the way it labored. We have to learn to reside with it and handle it. And as long as we will get everybody on the identical web page, we’d even be capable of struggle it.

In the event you’d wish to learn extra on what we talked about on this episode, take a look at the hyperlinks beneath:

Questions or feedback about this episode? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We actually do learn each e-mail!