United States: In the United States, the world has acknowledged bird flu, quoting cow farmers as evidence but not seeing bird flu as a big risk to human health.
Scientists highlight that unless the virus develops profound changes in its structure, it will never become airborne from person to person.
What are health officials saying?
Federal health officials report that they have been working on a vaccine to protect against a potential pandemic.
Dawn O’Connell, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Health and Human Services Department, said, “We’ve got some preparedness pieces in place that will give us a head start should we need a large-scale vaccination campaign in a pandemic situation,” as NPR News reported.
Moreover, according to O’Connell, the proposed vaccine would be made from older strains that carry similar strains of the virus. However, scientists also indicate that early testing would avoid spreading to a limited scale.
She also mentioned that the government has kept stocks adjuvant, which is a substance used to raise a vaccine’s effectiveness.
“We actually have manufactured small lots of both of the candidates. So we have some to the tune of hundreds of thousands in prefilled syringes and in vials that could be deployed fairly quickly,” she added.
Moreover, “You could imagine getting that first 100 million doses is going to be really important and is going to give us a good head start and then we would lean into the manufacturing from there to continue to ramp up,” as she continued.
Experts Say Human-to-Human Transmission is Unlikely
According to the experts, the fact the availability of a vaccine is a much-needed concern has not yet been confirmed by any health experts. Also, the potential risk that bird flu might pose to humans is not very concerning to cause a case of an emergency for a vaccine.
Michael Osterholm, who runs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said, “The first thing we have to do is eliminate the happy talk,” and, “I think estimates of stockpiles that currently exist and the potential to use them should this emerge into a human pathogen where it’s transmitted by humans to humans, have unfortunately been overstated,” as NPR News reported.
“I don’t have a lot of faith that those vaccines will offer a great deal of protection,” he added.