“Easter isn’t until April, but the hunt is on for eggs,” said Caroline Petrow-Cohen in the Los Angeles Times. “The breakfast staple has become pricier and harder to find” as the bird flu outbreak has worsened; in December alone, some 13 million chickens died of the disease or were culled to contain it. The average price of a dozen eggs nearly doubled over the past year to a record $4.95, and some grocery stores are now limiting how many boxes customers can buy. But “there’s a lot more at stake than the price of eggs,” said F.D. Flam in Bloomberg. At least 69 people in the U.S. have contracted avian flu, and one person—a Louisiana resident with a backyard flock of chickens—has died of the H5N1 virus. So far, the spread has only been from animal to person, with most human cases occurring in farm workers who had close contact with infected birds or dairy cows. But each new infection increases the odds that the virus will mutate to allow human-to-human transmission and “spark the next pandemic.”
Despite that threat, the White House is “hobbling public health officials’ response” to the outbreak, said Shannon Pettypiece in NBC News. The Trump administration has fired about a quarter of the personnel at an Agriculture Department program that tracks the spread of bird flu, and has laid off some 1,200 employees at the National Institutes of Health—including many promising young disease detectives. President Trump even briefly froze almost all external communication from the Centers for Disease Control; the agency is still not issuing regular bird flu updates. “We just don’t know what’s happening,” said Michael Kilkenny, head of the Huntington Health Department in West Virginia. “We don’t know if [bird flu] is expanding into our area if we aren’t getting that communication from the CDC.”
Bird flu will be the “first real test” for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said Carolyn C. Cannuscio and Rachel Feuerstein-Simon in The Philadelphia Inquirer. If the outbreak becomes a pandemic, “our best defense would be a new vaccine”—and as the newly confirmed health and human services secretary, Kennedy will have to support its development, testing, and approval; oversee its distribution; and build public trust in the lifesaving shot. “This is a tall order for a person who has built a reputation, career, and wealth” on anti-vaccine activism, and who recently said he wanted to pause infectious disease research for eight years. But Kennedy “is the secretary of HHS we have,” so “let’s hope he meets the moment.” His performance could be “a matter of life and death.”