Note: We will be off on Friday for the holiday and back next Tuesday, July 9th. As always, we’ll send out alerts if anything urgent happens in the meantime!
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There are actually three different human H5N1 vaccines available, each from a different manufacturer. They use traditional flu-shot technology, which often uses chicken eggs to grow the virus before it’s modified and put into the vaccine. These have been manufactured for the government stockpile in case of a human outbreak, but they’re not commercially available. And while the U.S. does have hundreds of thousands of doses in the national stockpile that could be deployed within a few weeks, it could take months before these manufacturers could fully ramp up production to get shots for the entire U.S. population that would need them (possibly pausing seasonal flu vaccine production in the process). And, as Dr. Mike Osterholm pointed out in a recent episode of his podcast, the virus would need to mutate to spread easily between humans, meaning that there’s no guarantee that the vaccine we do have will actually work against the future strain that might circulate in people. This was the case with the H1N1 swine flu back in 2009; we did have a vaccine, but it didn’t work against the new strain that spread in humans. We’re in a better position than we were with COVID, though, since we know a lot more about flu and this H5N1 strain than we did about the novel coronavirus.
Sources: Time, Osterholm Update
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled on a case that overturned what’s called the “Chevron deference,” a longstanding rule that allows government agencies to reasonably interpret any ambiguous laws in their specific area of expertise. It may be a long time until it’s clear exactly how this major decision will impact public health, but most legal and health policy experts expect a lot of litigation in the coming months and years. The FDA is one agency at particular risk, they say, since there are so many broad categories under their jurisdiction but not a lot of specific legislation. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan gave examples of specific and complicated health questions that she feels agency experts are better suited to answering than congress or courts, like “What qualifies as a protein regulated by the FDA?” Some public health experts worry that this decision dramatically undermines the ability of government agencies to prepare for and respond flexibly to health emergencies, including pandemics or natural disasters.
Sources: Washington Post, KFF.org
We appreciated this expert’s opinion that the bird flu outbreak in the U.S. is being treated too much as an economic problem affecting the agricultural sector, and not enough like an animal and public health problem: