Big Agriculture Is Leading Us Into the Bird Flu Abyss

We might have just rung in a new year, but it feels like an epidemiological Groundhog Day. Nearly five years since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, public health experts are once again sounding the alarm. This time, it’s the H5N1 virus — also known as avian influenza, or bird flu — that’s causing concern. Even though federal officials have had ample time to stymie the spread, the last 10 months have seen the virus jump virtually unabated from state to state, infecting cattle herds, poultry, pigs and people. There’s still no proof that bird flu can be transmitted between humans, but if the virus continues on its current trajectory, experts warn that we could be facing a devastating pandemic of COVID-19 proportions, at minimum. And, just as in 2020, the U.S. stands to face the next major viral outbreak with none other than President Donald J. Trump at the helm.

It didn’t have to be this way. H5N1, which has been around for decades, was first observed infecting humans in 1997. But last March marked a new turning point: The U.S. reported its first confirmed bird flu outbreak in dairy cattle. Since mammal-to-mammal transmission of the virus is rare, its spread among cows raised immediate red flags for epidemiologists. Still, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched a containment effort that critics called slow and fragmented. Within a month, more than 30 dairy herds across eight states had tested positive for the virus.

In April 2024, Zeynep Tufekci, a Princeton University professor who wrote a series of columns on the government’s poor COVID-19 response in 2020 and 2021, published a new op-ed titled, “This May Be Our Last Chance to Halt Bird Flu in Humans, and We Are Blowing It.”

“There’s a fine line between one person and 10 people with H5N1,” Rick Bright, an immunologist who served on President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board, told Tufekci at the time. “By the time we’ve detected 10, it’s probably too late.”

As of January 3, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has confirmed 66 bird flu cases in humans. One person in the U.S. has died after being infected, according to state officials in Louisiana, where the patient was hospitalized. At least 915 dairy herds across 16 states have now tested positive for the virus. In October, the first known bird flu infection in a pig was reported in Oregon. In late December, an animal sanctuary in Washington went into quarantine after the virus killed 20 big cats.

Recent in-depth reporting from KFF Health News provided a disturbing overview of how the U.S. has stumbled headfirst into another public health emergency, thanks in large part to the federal government’s deference to agriculture industry interests. Fearing financial setbacks from lost milk production, many farmers declined to test their herds when the outbreak began, monitor their employees for illness or allow health officials to inspect their herds. Farmworkers told KFF they’d received scant information on protective gear and testing. When the USDA was permitted on farms, officials dragged their feet when sharing information with scientists from the genome testing, according to The New York Times.

Crucially, the USDA didn’t announce a federal mandate to test milk for bird flu until December — months after the virus had already taken hold of hundreds of dairy farms. “The agriculture community has dictated the rules of engagement from the start,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told KFF. In other words, Big Ag may be leading us into the bird flu abyss.

The agriculture industry, after all, has a substantial voice in the U.S. government. From 2023 to 2024, agribusiness PACs contributed nearly $30 million to political candidates, according to OpenSecrets data, and the industry’s trade groups spent more than $130.5 million lobbying the federal government. More than half of registered agribusiness lobbyists in 2024 were former government employees, a phenomenon known as the revolving door. Biden’s Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who previously served in the position under President Barack Obama, has also received scrutiny as a “revolver.” In between his two stints as USDA head, Vilsack held a dairy industry lobbying position, receiving a salary of nearly $1 million as vice president of Dairy Management, Inc. When asked by reporters at the World Dairy Expo in October, Vilsack did not rule out another potential stint as a dairy lobbyist after he leaves office.

Adding fuel to the bird flu fire is the stand-off between federal agencies and state agriculture officials. Despite the USDA’s lax approach, some states have pushed back against federal intervention. “They need to back off,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told Politico in May, referring to the CDC’s efforts to track and contain the virus on Texas farms. Texas, the first state where bird flu was detected in dairy herds, didn’t invite the CDC to conduct epidemiological field studies, and Miller, a former rodeo cowboy, was considered a frontrunner for Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture. In mid-November, as the bird flu crisis continued to worsen across U.S. dairy farms, Miller published an op-ed on the Texas Department of Agriculture’s website criticizing the government’s regulation of raw milk.

“​​There’s nothing more American than the freedom to choose what kind of food you eat,” Miller wrote. “The government should educate and inform about potential risks but leave it to the people to decide what is best for them and their families.”

The sale of raw milk — milk that hasn’t undergone the pasteurization process, which kills harmful bacteria and viruses such as bird flu — is banned in 20 states. While the dairy product has seen a surge of interest in recent years, particularly among anti-establishment conservatives, health experts overwhelmingly say that the potential harms outweigh the benefits.

California, which allows the retail sale of raw milk, has already announced two recalls after detecting bird flu in commercial samples. The last thing that the U.S. needs amid a burgeoning dairy industry-fueled public health crisis is raw milk deregulation. And so it’s deeply depressing that Trump has picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a raw milk proponent and vaccine skeptic — to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the agency that oversees the various entities key to combatting public health crises, including the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In fact, the head of one of the California raw milk farms at the center of a bird flu recall said that RFK Jr. encouraged him to apply for a position within the FDA. Mark McAfee, the chief executive of Raw Farm, told the Los Angeles Times in December that, at RFK Jr.’s request, he had applied for the position of “FDA advisor on raw milk policy and standards development.”

The bungled bird flu response cuts deep because the COVID-19 pandemic was so recent — and its effects continue to linger. Trump was rightly condemned for his mishandling of that public health emergency. In fact, Bright — the top vaccine scientist who spoke to Tufekci about bird flu last April — was ousted by Trump from his role as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, the agency responsible for fighting emerging pandemics, in April 2020.

The following year, Bright settled a whistleblower complaint he’d filed against Trump’s HHS. Bright alleged he had been demoted as an act of retaliation, after he had declined to promote unproven COVID-19 treatments like hydroxychloroquine, and after his early warnings to the Trump administration about the pandemic were ignored.

The Biden administration has failed to mount what experts would call a formidable or adequate response to the bird flu outbreak. Even more concerning, though, is that Trump’s all-too-recent record shows us he’s unlikely to do any better.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect the first reported U.S. bird flu death.