The United States has bird flu vaccines. Here’s why you can’t get one

Like bird flu raging through poultry and dairy cattle across the United States, Georgia became the latest state to detect the virus in a flock of commercial poultry, and on Friday, halted all poultry sales to mitigate the further spread of the disease. Nationally, egg prices are on the rise, if you can find them at all in your local grocery store.

The ongoing fire in animals has also brought at least 67 human cases of bird fluwith all but one causing mild illness. Earlier this month, a person in Louisiana died after being hospitalized with severe bird flu in December. It is the country’s first recorded death attributed to H5N1.

The United States has previously licensed three H5N1 vaccines for humans, but they are not commercially available. The government has bought millions of doses for the national reserve in case they are needed. But even as the outbreak spreads, federal health officials under President Joe Biden have been hesitant to implement it. Experts say the decision comes down to risk, and currently, the risk of H5N1 remains low. Pushing a vaccine to farm workers and others at higher risk of infection would be a more targeted tactic, but even that measure may be premature. Now, with a change in federal health care leadership looming as President Donald Trump begins his second term, the decision rests with the new administration.

“Currently, from the point of view of severity and ease of transmission, it does not seem imperative to get a vaccine to protect humans,” says William Schaffner, a doctor and professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. .

So far, no person-to-person spread of H5N1 has been identified, but health officials are monitoring the virus for any genetic changes that would make transmission between people more likely. Most bird flu infections are linked to animal exposure. Of the 67 known human cases in the United States, 40 have been linked to sick dairy cattle and 23 are associated with poultry and culling operations. In the other four cases, the exact source is not known.

In the United States, human cases have been mild, with many of them causing only conjunctivitis. In some cases, people had mild respiratory symptoms. Aside from the Louisiana patient, all individuals who tested positive for H5N1 recovered quickly and never required hospitalization. Historically, however, H5N1 has been fatal in about 50 percent of cases. Since 2003, a total of 954 cases of human H5N1 have been reported to the World Health Organization, and about half of them died. Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and China reported the highest number of human bird flu deaths.

Those numbers come with a few caveats. For one, many of those deaths have occurred in places where people live in close proximity to sick poultry. “Under these circumstances, the thinking is that they probably had a very large dose of virus,” says Schaffner.

In addition, the case fatality rate – the proportion of infected people who die from the disease – only takes into account known cases, and some cases of H5N1 undoubtedly go undetected in part because the symptoms of the Bird flu is similar to other respiratory viruses. In the United States, language barriers among farm workers, lack of testing, and reluctance among workers to report being sick are also factors. “We’re probably missing more cases than we’re detecting, and we’re much more likely to detect a severe case,” says Shira Doron, head of infection control for Tufts Medicine in Boston and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center.