Apathy and ignorance towards bird flu and mpox prove we learnt nothing from Covid, say virologists

Political apathy and selfishness in the face of outbreaks of bird flu and mpox show that the world has not learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, leading virologists have warned.

While scientific measures for diagnosing or treating viral outbreaks might have come on since the coronavirus emerged, politicians are often still blinkered by short termism.

The US government’s failure to give flu jabs to farm workers in areas where H5N1 flu is spreading through cattle, and nations hoarding mpox vaccines even as the virus ravages parts of Africa are both examples of failing to learn lessons, they said.

Dozens of leading virologists gathered in Durban, South Africa, this week at the annual meeting of the Global Virus Network (GVN).

Behind closed doors, scientists from 80 laboratories in 40 countries discussed topics including pandemic preparedness and countering scientific misinformation.

Prof Salim Abdool Karim, director of Centre for the Aids Programme of Research in South Africa, acted as his government’s top adviser during the pandemic and said science had progressed, but the political action needed to be prepared had not.

He said: “At a scientific level, at a technological level, the ability to make biological counter measures, we are really far advanced.

“So if you want to know how we are doing in pandemic preparedness, science gets a big tick. If you want to know how we are doing in political preparedness, put a big cross. You should put that cross, because we haven’t learnt some important lessons.”

Despite the United Nations declaring a public health emergency over mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), he said there was still a chronic shortage of diagnostics and vaccines.

The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week said a worsening outbreak of the infection had killed more than 100 people in Africa in a single week. A concerning new strain of the virus first found in the DRC has now spread to at least 14 countries.

Prof Karim said richer nations were again hoarding supplies that could be used to stop the spread.

He said: “We are struggling to get diagnostics, we are struggling to get vaccines. This is Covid all over again, we just simply haven’t learned that lesson.”

“Many countries are sitting on huge stockpiles. Their approach is: ‘Actually we will sit on our stockpile because we will wait for the virus to get to us and then we will use our vaccine’, instead of saying: ‘This is a global problem, lets stop it at source, lets use the vaccines we have so that it never arrives on our shores’.

Yale School of Public Health’s Prof Sten Vermund, GVN president, said countries had made improvements since Covid-19 on readying supplies of protective equipment, or making sure they had more intensive care beds.

But he said primary prevention, to stop outbreaks, or nip them in the bud, was being neglected, as shown by the response to the H5N1 outbreak this year in US cattle.

Avian influenza began spreading in US dairy cattle last December. Since then, over 200 herds across 14 states have become infected.

There have been 14 human cases, all but one, in Missouri have been in farm workers who had been in direct contact with infected birds or cows.

Virologists worry that as the flu season approaches, there is a risk human flu and H5N1 viruses could end up swapping genes if they both happen to infect someone at the same time, in a phenomenon called reassortment.

Reassortment is thought to have produced new flu strains, sometimes with more virulence, in the past.

Prof Vermund said he was surprised there was not more political pressure to vaccinate farm workers against H5N1 and common flu, so reassortment did not happen.

He said: “In my country, even obvious opportunities for pandemic prevention are being missed and I do think that there is a pathological short memory on the part of many of our policy makers.

“They have the evidence of the recent pandemic, they have threats of subsequent pandemics and yet the response continues to be indolent.”

He went on: “I would like to have seen all of the farmworkers who are at risk offered the two vaccines: the routine yearly human flu vaccine and the H5N1 which is stockpiled by the hundreds of thousands in the US.

“Vaccinating them against these two flu strains, one is an occupational hazard for them, doesn’t cause much disease, but could be the source of a new pandemic strain, to me that would be very rational.”

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