SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
public health
With Bird Flu, Our Factory Farmed Chickens Have Come Home to Roost
It was only a matter of time before the horrific and unjust conditions in the animal agriculture system became the proving ground for a pathogen capable of igniting a dangerous pandemic. Now our luck may have run out.
Mar 15, 2025
In Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague, set in the French Algerian town of Oran, rats one day begin showing up dead on residents’ doorsteps, dying with violent spasms and blood pouring from their mouths.
At first, the rats’ death agonies are only a curiosity to the townspeople. But then the rats begin dying in greater numbers, their corpses piling up in the streets. “The staircase from the cellar to the attics was strewn with dead rats, 10 or a dozen of them. The garbage bins of all the houses in the street were full of rats.”
When Dr. Rieux, a physician, remarks upon the strange phenomenon to his mother, she replies vaguely, “It’s like that sometimes.”
The avian flu threat, however, has now given us an opportunity to rethink our existential and ethical relations with the other animals of our planet, and to recognize how closely our fates are bound together.
By the time Rieux realizes what is happening, it is too late. Bubonic plague has come to Oran. Soon it is the townspeople themselves who are dying in agony, their bodies heaping up in mounds—like the rats whose suffering, and fates, they had only days before viewed with indifference...
Lately, I have been thinking of Camus’ novel, as we ourselves teeter on the brink of a new deadly plague—avian flu. Like the people in the story, we too have remained indifferent to the suffering, and shared collective fate, of our fellow creatures. And we continue to do so at our own peril.
For more than a year, I have followed news reports of the H5N1 virus that causes bird flu, or highly pathogenic avian influenza, as it has torn across the world, infecting hundreds of species and killing millions of animals, from storks and snowy owls to cranes and harbor seals, from foxes and herons to finches and lions. Geese have fallen from the skies dead over Kansas City. House cats have died from violent seizures in Iceland and Texas. The virus has decimated colonies of Adélie penguins in Antarctica, wiped out albatross fledglings on the remote South African island of Marion, killed dolphins and manatees off the Florida coast.
Never have scientists seen a virus infect so many species all at once, nor spread so quickly or with such devastating effect. It is the first observed panzootic—a pandemic of “all” animals. Researchers are now calling avian flu an “existential threat” to planetary biodiversity.
While droves of our fellow beings were dying in agony in far-away places, however, few people seemed to notice or care. Even today, we resist acknowledging our own role in the catastrophe—the fact that it is we ourselves, by imprisoning billions of animals in the food system, then allowing the virus to run rampant inside it, who have turned H5N1 into a trans-species bioweapon. And now that bioweapon is turning toward us.
While the H5N1 virus is naturally occurring, it emerged as a global problem only when it became concentrated in the Asian poultry industry in the late 1990s. Farmers at the time killed hundreds of millions of chickens and other birds to try to contain the virus—in many cases, by burying them alive or setting them on fire. Since then, H5N1 has resurfaced again and again on animal farms, leading to the deaths of poultry and humans alike.
For years, epidemiologists have warned that the animal agriculture system was a time bomb waiting to go off. Most of the deadly diseases ever to have afflicted our own species, including cholera, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, AIDS, and influenza, have been caused by our exploitation of animals for food. Today, three-quarters of all emerging infectious diseases are in fact zoonotic in origin—a consequence chiefly of the modern animal food system.
That system has increased our vulnerability to animal-borne diseases in two ways. First, raising cattle and other ruminants for slaughter requires staggering anounts of land, which destroys animal habitat and crowds species together, thus enabling viruses to find new hosts who lack natural immunity to them. (More than half the surface of the Earth has been turned into farmland, and 80% of that is devoted to raising animals for slaughter.) Second, we have created a permanent source of new plagues by concentrating sick and traumatized animals together in industrialized conditions.
Even with a vaccine, Americans can expect little help from their government should a bird flu pandemic materialize, since President Donald Trump is eviscerating the federal agencies responsible for public health and disease prevention.
Few people are aware of the sheer scale of the global animal food system. But each year, 80,000,000,000 land animals and up to 2,700,000,000,000 marine animals die violently to satisfy growing human demand for animal products. This system is now the most ecologically destructive force on our planet—the leading cause of the mass extinction crisis and the second-leading source of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the main cause of freshwater system loss, algal blooms, and land degradation.
The animal food system is also a moral and epidemiological calamity. Billions of sensitive chickens, pigs, cows, and others are forced into miserable, fetid conditions of intensive confinement, where they are beaten, tormented with electric prods, and then brutally killed at a fraction of their lifespans. Our prisoners suffer such psychological and physiological stress and trauma that millions die even before they can reach a slaughterhouse. So to keep them alive, farmers pump them full of antibiotics. Seventy percent of antibiotics worldwide are fed to farmed animals, a practice which, in turn, is fueling deadly new strains of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.”
Natural ecosystems constrain the virulence of pathogens like H5N1, by selecting out the most lethal traits that would otherwise keep a virus from spreading by killing its host prematurely. As science writer Brandon Keim observes, however, the “constraints on virulence” ordinarily found in nature are absent on industrialized poultry farms, where birds are killed at a tiny fraction of their normal lifespans. In fact, virulence is selected for.
It was only a matter of time, thus, before the horrific and unjust conditions in the animal agriculture system became the proving ground for a pathogen capable of igniting a dangerous pandemic. Now our luck may have run out.
Last year, the H5N1 virus crossed a crucial threshold, when wild birds exposed to concentrations of the virus on animal farms contracted the disease and spread it to other species along their migration routes. Meanwhile, the Biden administration, deferring to powerful agricultural interests—and seeking to avoid antagonizing rural voters in an election year—squandered every opportunity to track and contain the deadly disease. For months, the U.S. government effectively stood by and did nothing. As a result, H5N1 has now become endemic throughout the U.S. animal agriculture system. And the longer it remains there, the more likely is it to mutate into a form transmissable between humans.
How bad would that be? In 2005, David Nabarro, then the United Nations system coordinator for avian and human influenza, warned that a bird flu pandemic could kill up to 150 million people. That may be a conservative estimate, however, since the known past mortality rate from avian flu in humans has been over 50%, making H5N1 up to 100 times deadlier than Covid-19. Unlike Covid-19 furthermore, a bird flu pandemic would not primarily target older adults or people with underlying conditions, but would kill indiscriminately.
The H5N1 virus is neuropathic, meaning that it attacks the brain, causing conditions ranging from mild encaphalitis to seizures, coma, and death. Children and pregnant women would be especially vulnerable to the virus. When a Canadian teen contracted the H5N1 virus last year, she suffered multiple organ failure and had to be placed on a respirator for months before she recovered. Avian flu has meanwhile killed 90% of the pregnant women who, in past decades, contracted it. “We are in a terrible situation and going into a worse situation,” Angela Rasmussen, a Canadian virologist, recently warned. “I don’t know if the bird flu will become a pandemic, but if it does, we are screwed.”
So far, we have been extremely lucky. The dozens of farm workers who have fallen ill from avian flu this last year, most from exposure to infected dairy cows, appear to have contracted a mild version of the virus. Most have now recovered. Last month, however, the far deadlier D1.1 variant of the virus was discovered in a herd of cattle in Nevada. Should such a lethal variant mutate into a transmissable form, and become capable of binding to receptors in our lungs, the resulting pandemic could lead to societal chaos and mass mortality.
For too long, we have behaved as if our species were “an island entire of itself,” and we were the only beings whose lives mattered or had value.
Just before leaving office, then-President Joe Biden transferred $590 million to Moderna to accelerate development of a bird flu vaccine. Other companies are also working on vaccines. But it’s anyone’s guess if they will be ready in time. Even with a vaccine, Americans can expect little help from their government should a bird flu pandemic materialize, since President Donald Trump is eviscerating the federal agencies responsible for public health and disease prevention. The new administration has slashed the budgets and staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FEMA, suppressed CDC updates on bird flu, and taken the U.S. out of the World Health Organization—the international agency responsible for monitoring and providing guidance on global public health threats, including pandemics.
Worsening matters, any federal response to an avian flu pandemic would be in the hands of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new secretary of Health and Human Services—a notorious vaccine skeptic. President Trump himself would likely respond to a new pandemic not by protecting the most vulnerable Americans, but by using the crisis to expand his own powers, if not to impose martial law.
Perhaps our luck will hold, and we will somehow all avoid getting avian flu. But we can’t count on it. Nor can we afford to go on ignoring the inextricable links between our oppression of nonhuman animals and growing pandemic risk.
The best way to prevent zoonotic pathogens from making us sick in future is to begin transitioning to an all plant-based diet. In doing so, we would not only spare billions of animals further suffering, but also mitigate a great deal of environmental damage to our planet. And we ourselves would be healthier for it. Scientists have shown that vegans have lower rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and type 2 diabetes than meat-eaters. One study in JAMA found that vegans may even live longer than “omnivores” who consume animal products.
Tragically, however, rather than rethink our dietary choices, we continue to cling to the animal system, and to its vast cruelties, against the better claims of reason and conscience. Few people indeed seem aware of the violence and suffering that attend even “ordinary” animal production. To produce eggs, for example, tens of millions of chickens are jammed into cages so small that they cannot extend even a single wing. The birds’ beaks are painfully cut off to keep them from pecking at their cell mates in distress. Then the chickens are repeatedly starved to shock their systems into producing more eggs. Finally, they are violently grabbed and thrown into a truck, and brought to the slaughterhouse. There, they are shackled upside down by their legs and have their throats cut, often while still conscious. Many are boiled alive in feather removal tanks. Billions of male baby chicks—of no use to industry—are meanwhile ground up alive or are simply tossed away in dumpsters, to suffocate or die from dehydration.
These and other barbaric practices have no place in society today. Even now, however, Americans are concerned only about soaring egg prices, not about the suffering of the tens of millions of animals being killed in ventilator shutdowns across the country. The idea that we should simply stop eating eggs—for the birds’ well-being as much as for our own safety—appears not to have occurred to anyone.
As an ethicist who has spent decades lecturing and publishing on animal rights, hoping to convince people that there is a better way to live a human life than by imprisoning and killing our fellow beings, I find it beyond discouraging how little progress has been made toward ending our violence against animals in the food economy. The avian flu threat, however, has now given us an opportunity to rethink our existential and ethical relations with the other animals of our planet, and to recognize how closely our fates are bound together.
“Ask not for whom the bell tolls—it tolls for thee.” When the poet John Donne wrote these words, centuries ago, it was customary for churches in England to toll their bells to announce the death of someone in the community. We are deeply connected to one another, Donne was saying, and what happens to one, happens to all.
“No man is an island entire of itself,” Donne wrote. Each of us “is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Every death therefore “diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”
Donne’s poem has taken on new significance, as avian influenza now closes in around us. Our species is not alone on the Earth, but part of the biotic main, a “piece of a continent” teeming with myriad other suffering, mortal beings. And what we do to the other animals, we do also to ourselves.
For too long, we have behaved as if our species were “an island entire of itself,” and we were the only beings whose lives mattered or had value. Now, after long treating our fellow creatures with violence and contempt, as mere “things” to be exploited and killed for our purposes, our karmic debt is coming due, in a ruined Earth and escalating pandemic risks. The tolling of the bell today is avian flu, and it tolls for us.
Keep ReadingShow Less
5 Years After Covid, New York Has Forgotten Its Essential Workers
In a world where the avian flu hovers near us, measles is reemerging, and viruses are mutating daily, we need the example of essential workers’ courage and solidarity to strengthen us for the next public health emergency.
Mar 15, 2025
Just five years after Covid-19 struck New York City, we’ve almost forgotten the early days of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, when refrigerator trucks were filled with dead bodies and 800 people a day were dying from Covid-19. We may remember the lockdowns and disputes over masking and vaccines that persist to this day, but we fail to remember what actually kept the city running and helped it survive: the labor of essential workers in our hospitals, grocery stores, transit system, police precincts, and firehouses.
The desire to forget the traumas of the pandemic is perfectly human, but forgetting the labor that saved the city would be a dangerous mistake. In a world where the avian flu hovers near us, measles is reemerging, and viruses are mutating daily, we need the example of essential workers’ courage and solidarity to strengthen us for the next public health emergency.
When then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ”New York On Pause” plan took effect on March 22 of 2020, it divided the state’s workforce into essential workers (who were expected to go out to do their jobs) and the rest of us who could labor from home.
Maintaining public health requires setting aside private interest to serve the public good. When a communicable disease attacks, it becomes clear that the health of each of us is bound up with the health of all of us.
Essential workers drew strength from many sources—from socially conscious professionalism to ideals of courage to the support of workmates to the knowledge that their families needed their paycheck to survive.
For some essential workers—above all police and firefighters—facing danger is part of the job. And transit workers toil in a system of buses, subways, and repair shops where hazards are common.
Others faced danger on their jobs for the first time. Healthcare professionals expect to confront dangerous illnesses, but the communicability of Covid-19 was unusual. Cashiers in supermarkets and drug stores were surprised to find themselves facing a deadly disease transmitted by customers and coworkers.
It was a scary time. Police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians went into the homes of the sick to provide support, care, and—when all else failed—transportation to a hospital. Nurses learned new skills overnight to meet the demands of Covid-19, then held cellphones next to their dying patients so they could hear the voices of their loved ones. Doctors improvised new forms of communication and treatment. Cashiers and food service workers provided meals and emotional support for customers.
For all their bravery, many essential workers faced terrible working conditions. Bicycle couriers who delivered meals for restaurants confronted poor pay, bad weather, and the galling fact that the restaurants they served would not let them use their toilets. Health care professionals grappled with shortages of protective gear and medical supplies.
Transit workers had to deal with passengers who ignored rules on social distancing. One bus driver was knocked unconscious by a passenger after he asked him to put on a mask to cover his chronic cough.
Still, for a brief time, the city seemed united. Every night at 7:00 pm, New Yorkers learned from their windows or stood on the sidewalk to cheer their essential workers. For precious minutes we broke out of our isolation, saluted the best in us, and strengthened each other. Working together, putting the common good first, the city managed to “bend the curve.” Stay-at-home orders, social distancing, and masking brought the number of infections down.
By June, the Covid-19 surge of spring 2020 was over and deaths were down to a much-reduced level of less than 50 a day.
But the spirit of solidarity proved to be short-lived. Ironically, after vaccines against Covid-19 were introduced in December 2020 and danger eased, the city was gripped by a sour mood, starting with negative reactions to a computerized system of registration for vaccines that was glitchy and inefficient. Restaurant operators had to contend with both changing municipal guidelines and customers who flouted masking requirements. Old currents of hatred, especially antisemitism and racism against Asians, gained new strength. Over time, the value of the vaccines themselves became a subject of debate and disinformation.
One of the great lessons of the pandemic is that solidarity is hard to maintain. When the interest of public health and personal interest aligned, as they did in the spring of 2020, people were willing to wear masks and engage in social distancing to save themselves. Once the vaccines made them feel safe, they were reluctant to accept limitations on their individual lives.
Maintaining public health requires setting aside private interest to serve the public good. When a communicable disease attacks, it becomes clear that the health of each of us is bound up with the health of all of us.
In the grim days of the pandemic, essential workers were their brothers and sisters’ keepers. For all the divisions in our city and country over the pandemic and so much else, the courage of essential workers is something we all can admire. We need to learn from it if we are to build a better future.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Medicine Demands Trust—Dr. Oz Has Spent His Career Undermining It
If given the reins of CMS, Dr. Mehmet Oz will not only fail to improve healthcare for our seniors but also use privately managed care to actively harm Americans. The Senate must reject his nomination.
Mar 13, 2025
Medicine is about trust. As a medical student, I’ve been taught that trust in medicine is built on honesty, evidence, and a commitment to patient well-being—principles that should guide physicians and leaders in healthcare. But how can we trust a man who built a career on misleading patients to oversee healthcare for 160 million Americans?
Dr. Mehmet Oz, a former TV doctor notorious for promoting unproven “miracle cures,” has been nominated by U.S. President Donald Trump to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)—an agency that millions of seniors, children, and low-income families depend on for care. Yet, he promotes predatory Medicare Advantage programs and unscientific remedies that harm citizens. His nomination cannot stand.
As I take care of my own patients, I am consistently trained to practice evidence-based medicine and uphold ethical standards that prioritize patient well-being. Dr. Oz, in contrast, has used his platform to spread misinformation, undermining the very trust that medicine depends on. Formerly a well-regarded cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Oz began his journey toward harm over healing on the “Dr. Oz Show,” a nationally televised program on which he promoted unproven treatments that interfered with patients' appropriate medical care.
As the head of CMS, he would have direct influence over policies that could drive billions in profits for private insurers, companies that he has already aligned himself with.
Pennsylvania doctors even launched “Real Doctors Against Oz” to protest his 2022 U.S. Senate run, arguing that he was a “major threat to public health.” He skirted ethical responsibilities when he supported evidence-lacking recommendations to use hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 while owning stock in the pharmaceutical companies that supply the drug and has been criticized by Congress for inappropriate claims he made about green-coffee extract as a weight-loss medication.
Dr. Oz will have an even more deleterious impact on seniors’ health, having expressed a clear intent to expand Medicare Advantage, privately managed Medicare. Medicare Advantage (MA) is rapidly reshaping senior healthcare at the expense of patient well-being. In Maryland, the proportion of MA enrollees to total Medicare beneficiaries has more than quintupled (5% to 27%) in the last decade. Seniors in these plans, especially those with significant medical conditions, are more likely to drop these plans and return to traditional Medicare because of increased denials of medically necessary care and delays accessing care due to narrow networks and increased bureaucracy. Becoming locked into a system where administrative bloat and corporate profits result in up to $140 billion in overpayments annually to Medicare Advantage companies would not only drain the Medicare trust fund but also harm seniors as cancer patients in Medicare Advantage face worse outcomes.
Even more concerning, Dr. Oz currently has a personal financial stake in the expansion of Medicare Advantage. His disclosure forms reveal he owns between 280,000 and 600,000 shares in UnitedHealth Group, the largest Medicare Advantage insurer. He has committed to divesting from these holdings if confirmed. Even still, as the head of CMS, he would have direct influence over policies that could drive billions in profits for private insurers, companies that he has already aligned himself with. Dr. Oz’s profiteering from these investments represents his prioritization of financial self-interest over patient well-being—and makes him uniquely unqualified to oversee public health programs.
Right now, we are pivoting sharply toward doing more harm at a time when we desperately need to pivot toward providing better healthcare for everyone. Medicare for All is supported by 69% of registered voters and provides truly universal coverage while cutting administrative overhead, reining in healthcare costs, and saving Americans thousands by removing the private insurance middleman. More importantly, it would make America healthy again; with prevention and primary care finally prioritized, Americans can enjoy better healthcare outcomes and quality of life.
As a Philadelphia anesthesiologist said in The New York Times, “I can’t believe he took the same oath that I did when we graduated… that oath is about first doing no harm.” As I prepare to take this same oath, I am appalled that someone who has so blatantly violated its principles could be entrusted with the health of millions. If given the reins of CMS, Dr. Mehmet Oz will not only fail to improve healthcare for our seniors but also use privately managed care to actively harm Americans. The Senate must reject Dr. Oz’s nomination. His long track record of misleading the public, pushing corporate interests, and prioritizing profit over patient health makes him wholly unfit to lead CMS.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular