Well, this is frightening. https://t.co/biArZYwXOc

— Ady Barkan (@AdyBarkan) February 4, 2023

As the world is just beginning to recover from the devastation of Covid-19, it is facing the possibility of a pandemic of a far more deadly pathogen.

Bird flu — known more formally as avian influenza — has long hovered on the horizons of scientists’ fears. This pathogen, especially the H5N1 strain, hasn’t often infected humans, but when it has, 56 percent of those known to have contracted it have died. Its inability to spread easily, if at all, from one person to another has kept it from causing a pandemic.

But things are changing. The virus, which has long caused outbreaks among poultry, is infecting more and more migratory birds, allowing it to spread more widely, even to various mammals, raising the risk that a new variant could spread to and among people.

Alarmingly, it was recently reported that a mutant H5N1 strain was not only infecting minks at a fur farm in Spain but also most likely spreading among them, unprecedented among mammals. Even worse, the mink’s upper respiratory tract is exceptionally well suited to act as a conduit to humans, Thomas Peacock, a virologist who has studied avian influenza, told me.

The world needs to act now, before H5N1 has any chance of becoming a devastating pandemic.

We have many of the tools that are needed, including vaccines. What’s missing is a sense of urgency and immediate action.

The best defense against a new deadly pathogen is aggressively suppressing early outbreaks, which first requires detecting them quickly. The United States, the World Health Organization and global health officials already have influenza surveillance networks, but many avian influenza experts told me they don’t think the networks are functioning well enough given the threat level. Such surveillance would need to prioritize people in the poultry industry but also expand beyond that.

Thijs Kuiken, an expert in avian influenza at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, says farms for pigs — another species susceptible to influenza — should also be surveilled for bird flu. People interacting with wild birds and animals, as well as susceptible species of pets like ferrets, are also at higher risk. It’s not enough to detect, though: Suppression would require a major effort and global coordination.

Unfortunately, mink farms must be shut down — even if it means killing the minks. They are typically killed anyway for their fur at about 6 months of age. It’s hard to imagine a better way to incubate and spread a deadly virus than letting it evolve among tens of thousands of animals with an upper respiratory tract similar to ours crowded together. When the coronavirus infected Danish mink farms in 2020 and the minks generated new variants that then infected humans, the efforts to save the industry were futile because the outbreaks were uncontrollable.

If different strains of flu have infected the same person simultaneously, the strains can swap gene segments and give rise to new, more transmissible ones. If a mink farmworker with the flu also gets infected by H5N1, that may be all it takes to ignite a pandemic.

To avoid this, quick testing should be widely available and easy to obtain globally, especially for poultry workers and people handling wild birds or other wildlife. And current testing capabilities should be quickly expanded. There are 91 public health labs in the United States that can test for H5 influenza. Positive results are sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where further analyses can detect H5N1 within about 48 hours. But plans should be in place to increase the amount of tests and testing facilities in case demand ramps up.

Perhaps the best news is that we have several H5N1 vaccines already approved by the Food and Drug Administration whose safety and immune response have been studied.

The U.S. government has a small H5N1 vaccine stockpile, but it would be nowhere near enough if a serious outbreak occurred. The current plan is to mass-produce them if and when such an outbreak occurs, based on the particular variant involved.

There are several problems, though, with this approach even under the best-case scenarios. Producing hundreds of millions of doses of a new vaccine could take six months or more.

Worryingly, all but one of the approved vaccines are produced by incubating each dose in an egg. The U.S. government keeps hundreds of thousands of chickens in secret farms with bodyguards. (It’s true!) But the bodyguards are presumably there to fend off terror attacks, not a virus. Relying on chickens to produce vaccines against a virus that has a 90 percent to 100 percent fatality rate among poultry has the makings of the most unfunny which-came-first, the-chicken-or-the-egg riddle.

The only company with an F.D.A.-approved non-egg-based H5N1 vaccine expects to be able to produce 150 million doses within six months of the declaration of a pandemic. But there are seven billion people in the world.

The mRNA-based platforms used to make two of the Covid vaccines also don’t depend on eggs. Scott Hensley, an influenza expert at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that those vaccines can be mass-produced faster, in as little as three months. There are currently no approved mRNA vaccines for influenza, but efforts to make one should be expedited.

If the W.H.O. is to take the lead in expanding global vaccine manufacturing, it needs the support of wealthy countries and the cooperation of large pharmaceutical companies that have the patents and know-how.

A big challenge to stockpiling flu vaccines is that they can lose potency over time and need updating as new variants arise. The U.S. government is skeptical about creating a large stockpile, fearing that stored vaccines may not be effective against whatever strain became pandemic, and worries that stockpiles will expire anyway. Officials also have faith that they can get new flu vaccines mass-produced rapidly.

Many influenza experts told me that older vaccines could still provide some protection against severe outcomes or death. Peter Palese, a professor of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who established the first genetic maps for influenza A, B and C viruses, told me that such stockpiles would be especially useful for essential workers.

In 2017, the C.D.C. found that the H5N1 vaccine made in 2004 and 2005 helped protect ferrets against an H5N2 virus in 2014. Investigations in 2006 showed that 80 percent of the U.S. stockpile of earlier H5N1 vaccines were still potent a full year after their expected one-year shelf life had passed. In 2019, another study found that H5N1 vaccines produced as early as 2004 were still potent a full 12 years later.

We could also allow voluntary vaccination, especially for high-risk groups like poultry workers and health care workers, who would be treating patients should outbreaks occur. Voluntary vaccination could also produce larger-scale data on the safety and dosing specifics of vaccines. Vaccinating poultry workers has the additional big benefit of helping suppress outbreaks in the first place.

Several influenza experts I spoke to bemoaned the lack of more widespread vaccination for chickens and turkeys. Had all poultry been vaccinated earlier, perhaps H5N1 would have never spread so widely to wild birds. It’s late, but mass vaccination of poultry and pigs should begin quickly.

Even getting more people vaccinated — especially poultry and pig farmworkers — against the regular influenza can help. With less regular flu in the world, there would be fewer hosts for an H5N1 virus to co-infect, a process that can lead to strains of H5N1 that can spread more easily.
We already have antivirals for influenza, which work regardless of strain, but they need to be administered early, which requires widespread early testing, easy access, and sufficient and equitable stockpiles globally.

Scientists are working toward a universal flu vaccine, potentially covering all variants as well as future pandemic ones — a moonshot, perhaps, but worth the investment.

The pace of developments has been disquieting. Until 2020, when the new H5N1 strain began to spread extensively among wild birds, most big outbreaks occurred among poultry. But now, with wild birds acting as conduits, it’s not just the biggest outbreak ever among poultry, causing the death of at least 150 million animals so far, but it is also steadily expanding its reach, including to mammal species like dolphins and bears.

In 2006, when scientists discovered that H5N1 had not spread easily among humans because it settles deep in their lungs, Kuiken of Erasmus University Medical Center warned that if the virus evolved to bind to receptors in the upper respiratory tract — from which it could become more easily airborne — the risk of a pandemic among humans would rise substantially. The mink outbreak in Spain is a signal that we might be moving along exactly that path.

It’s hard to imagine clearer and more alarming warning signs of a potentially horrific pandemic.

The public, of course, doesn’t want to hear about another virus, and Congress isn’t even willing to keep funding efforts against the current one.

We could get lucky — we’ve had bird flu outbreaks before without human spread. But it seems foolish to count on that. A pandemic strain may have a much lower fatality rate than the 56 percent of known human cases so far, but it still could be much more deadly than the coronavirus, which is estimated to have killed 1 percent to 2 percent of those infected before vaccines or treatments were available. Deadly influenza pandemics occur regularly in human history, and they don’t wait until people recover from an earlier outbreak, no matter how weary we may all feel.

This time, we have not just the warning, but also many of the tools we need to fend a pandemic off. We should not wait until it’s too late.

Meanwhile some Antartica glaciers are breaking up likely indicating dramatic sea rises.

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/03/chile-wildfires-state-of-emergency

Chile’s government has declared a widened state of emergency amid wildfires that have killed at least 13 people and consumed about 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres), as the South American country endures a summer heatwave across southern and central swaths of the country.

The interior minister, Carolina Toha, said on Friday morning the government had declared a catastrophe in the region of Biobío, joining its neighbouring region Ñuble, which President Gabriel Boric announced on Thursday evening, allowing the deployment of soldiers and additional resources.

Eleven people, including a firefighter, had died in the Biobío town of Santa Juana, local authorities said.

The agriculture minister, Esteban Valenzuela, also reported an emergency-support helicopter in the southern region of La Araucanía had crashed, killing the pilot and a mechanic.

Hundreds of homes had been damaged while 39 fires raged across the country, Toha said.

“The conditions in the coming days are going to be risky.”
Earlier, four people were reported to have died and hundreds were evacuated on Friday when the flames reached the town of Santa Ana.

Toha said two of the dead were killed when the fires engulfed the road they were travelling on, while the other two died in a car accident, presumably while trying to escape the inferno.

Boric is due to travel to Biobió and Ñuble, which are known for agriculture and forestry, after cutting short his summer vacation.

The fires are raging between the central capital city, Santiago, and the country’s southwith the worst seen in Ñuble and Biobío as well as the Araucanía region.

Shelters have opened for families affected by the fires, according to Chile’s disaster agency, Senapred, which reported one person had suffered burns and eight firefighters had minor injuries.

Fires have disrupted traffic on highways in the burning areas, and numerous municipalities have been evacuated.

Authorities have controlled 146 fires.

Weather forecasts on Friday predicted temperatures over 100F (38C) in Ñuble’s capital, Chillán. Strong winds were also expected in the area, which risk worsening fire conditions, the National Forestry Corporation warned.

“Today, unfortunately, we have twice as many hectares burned than in previous years,” the government’s spokesman in Ñuble, Gabriel Pradenas, told local media.

“We are in a very critical state.”

Some Saturday evening concert footage

Watching a Robert Mitchum movie from 1958 that I dvred from TCM, Thunder Road, about moonshiners, revenuers, and the Mob. I didn’t know that Bruce Springsteen named one of his best songs after the movie. (He didn’t see it but liked the poster).

Here’s a live version of the song from 1978 when Bruce was riding high on the heels of his incredible Born to Run album. I saw him twice during this period (actually the only times I saw him—great concerts!)

It’s a town full of losers. I’m pulling out of here to win!

Pritzker seems to be making some good moves before a possible presidential run down the road.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/03/ron-desantis-ap-black-studies-j-b-pritzker-culture-war/

Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, is fond of describing his state as the place “where woke goes to die.”

If so, perhaps Democratic governors can do more to advertise their states as places where Florida-style school crackdowns go to die.

Some Democratic governors — not just in coastal states but also in Midwestern ones — are beginning to test this idea. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has seized on DeSantis’s latest culture-warring — Florida’s decision to ban an Advanced Placement course in African American studies — to articulate a contrasting vision for what topics should be permitted in classrooms.

This week, Pritzker singled out DeSantis as an “extremist,” after the College Board introduced a revised AP course in Black studies in response to DeSantis’s attacks. Florida nixed the old version for including topics such as “intersectionality” and “queer studies,” and the new version removes explicit mentions of those or downgrades them to optional topics.

In response, Pritzker faulted the board from the other direction, slamming its move as “a weak attempt to please extremists.” Pritzker hammered DeSantis for fearing classroom discussion of “intersectionality, feminism and queer Black life,” explicitly defining them as “components of Black History.”

This comes after Pritzker told the College Board that Illinois might not use its new AP course in African American studies if it is modified to “appease extremists” and “fit Florida’s racist and homophobic laws.”

What happened with the AP class is complex. The College Board denies that the new version is a response to DeSantis’s criticism, insisting these changes were underway earlier. And the new version does require teaching some topics that would advance students’ understanding of structural racism — a concept targeted by the right — such as redlining and housing discrimination.

Still, the new version removes scholars that Florida criticized, such as civil rights scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, a DeSantis bogeywoman. As Crenshaw noted, at a minimum this creates the “appearance of bowing to political pressure in the context of new knowledge and ideas.”

In response, Democrats could explicitly declare that topics discouraged or banned in Florida classrooms will not be discouraged or banned in their states’ classrooms. They could model a liberal cultural agenda as an alternative to the reactionary culture-warring now underway in Florida and other red states.

In coming months, Pritzker will grow more vocal on this front, a source familiar with his thinking tells me. He will amplify the case that restricting classroom topics works against kids’ interests and risks stunting intellectual growth, and that a more open approach sharpens their arguments and thinking, making them more competitive in the quest for higher education.

Pritzker will also argue that Illinois prides itself on refraining from the kind of directives that seem designed to encourage school libraries to remove books to avoid running afoul of the law.

As the source told me, the message will be: “Illinois doesn’t ban books.”

Something similar is underway in Michigan, where Democrats just captured full control of state government. After getting reelected against a frothing culture warrior, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer immediately vowed a new push to protect LGBTQ rights, explicitly contrasting this with regressive measures in nearby Ohio and Indiana.

And Michigan state Sen. Dayna Polehanki, the new chairwoman of the chamber’s Education Committee, recently vowed that the panel will “listen to educators first” and “will not participate in the demonization of teachers.” Under GOP control, that committee wasted time chasing phantom pedagogical enemies, she says, but now it will pursue legislation making it more attractive for young people to enter the profession.

The misnamed “parents rights” movement in Florida and elsewhere often deliberately caricatures “woke” educators as the enemies of parents and vulnerable children. In places such as Michigan and Illinois, legislators will instead treat the professionalism of educators as a valuable asset.

DeSantis’s “anti-woke” crusade is really about using the bureaucracy to suppress certain structural understandings of racism that would actually challenge students to broaden their thinking. His “anti-woke” classroom police are restricting curriculums and collecting budgeting information on college courses that violate orthodoxy. To avoid running afoul of vaguely defined decrees, teachers and librarians are aggressively self-censoring.

“DeSantis is reaching down into the minute-by-minute personal lives of families and kids and schools,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told me. “The sum total of it all is really creepy.”

The “Orwellian nature” of this use of “government to manipulate and micromanage our lives,” Murphy continued, provides “an opportunity for Democrats.”

These red-state innovations in fighting the culture wars are incentivizing Democratic state actors to innovate themselves, as political scientist Jacob Grumbach notes. Blue-state politicians with higher ambitions have a big opening to dramatize an alternative cultural vision for the future of the country.