Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: H5N1, published by Zvi on February 13, 2023 on LessWrong.

The big development this week is a sudden rise in concern over bird flu, or H5N1.

I say rise in concern rather than rise in risk.

Risk from H5N1 has been around for a long time. We have known for a while that human-to-human transmission, while it is not happening right now, could evolve at any time from not that many mutations.

What has changed in the past two weeks is that people are waking up to it. What has changed over the past year is that bird flu has spread throughout the wild bird population, has threatened our chicken population, and looks to have mammal-to-mammal transmission in a mink farm.

This is an overview of the situation.

Warnings of Danger

Zeynep Tufecki warns us of the danger (thread). It has already wrecked havoc on farms and caused egg prices to skyrocket. It threatens to become a pandemic in humans.

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.

Obviously, we should not ‘panic’ and also should not consider the only choices to be ‘do nothing’ or ‘panic.’ Taking preventative action is not, and need not induce, panic.

The problem is that calls in such situations to Do Something or Do More usually end up with some combination of being ignored until it is too late, calls for Further Study, or various Sacrifices to the Gods. What can we actually do?

Here are her suggestions.

Surveil pig farms for bird flu, pigs mostly don’t die from it but do spread it.

Shut down mink farms.

Make quick testing easily available, especially for farm workers.

Don’t rely on a vaccine that needs to be incubated in chicken eggs to solve a pandemic that wipes out chickens.

Don’t rely on producing a vaccine after the pandemic starts, which even in the best case scenario would take months. The non-chicken-egg vaccine would be so slow that after six months we would only have 150 million doses worldwide.

To do this, prepare the necessary groundwork for the mRNA vaccines now, so they can be mass produced faster, in as little as three months.

Allow voluntary vaccination now.

Mass vaccinate poultry and pigs.

I would divide this into three categories, and I’d add a fourth she doesn’t mention.

Better surveillance.

Shut down mink farms.

Taking vaccination seriously.

Know what we will do if and when this does happen, and prepare to act.

You can overspend on surveillance in any situation, but here it seems hard. Easy one.

Shutting down mink factory farms seems overdetermined at this point if it can be done. They are an ideal incubation system for potential pandemics so we can mass produce a combination of fur and animal cruelty.

What I don’t want, however, is for the mink farms to be banned in America and Europe and then shift to third world countries. If we can’t effectively stop them, better to keep them...