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Imagine a country facing a burgeoning health threat — perhaps even a crisis — and telling its top federal medical specialists they’re not allowed to talk about it unless the information had been reviewed and approved by a top political appointee.
And to make matters worse, the political appointee in question isn’t scheduled to be confirmed in their position for weeks.
No conferences to share findings and discuss strategies. No public release of empirical data. No advice for lower offices of government — no public release of information of any kind, not to email groups or on social media sites.
CDC / File
An electron microscopic image of two Influenza A (H5N1) virions.
That’s the situation that researchers and scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. federal Department of Health and Human Services find themselves in.
It’s a roll of the health-care dice.
It’s not completely unprecedented — new administrations often haul back on the reins of public comment when they’re first in office, concerned about being publicly undercut by civil servants and their connections to past administrations.
But it is unusual for such strictures to apply to scientific publications — this week, the communications ban even stopped the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which addresses the current state of pressing public health issues, which other levels of government regularly use to set their standards for things like testing and treatment.
The MMWR ranges across public health issues: recent information includes suggested immunization schedules for children, adolescents and adults, mercury exposure at an Ohio recycling facility, and even “Waterborne disease outbreaks associated with splash pads.”
It is pretty dry, non-political reading: the results of scientific analysis and research, in all of its ponderous and particularly tortured prose.
But the report this week was to have had several pieces addressing a growing H5N1 bird flu outbreak across the United States.
The CDC also regularly updates information on the avian flu on its Avian Influenza website, including updating case totals on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The most recent update was on Jan. 17.
The CDC has been testing cows’ milk across the U.S. to establish how the bird flu is now moving through dairy herds — 929 dairy herds across the U.S. are confirmed to have been infected, with 712 of those in California, where the state government has declared a state of emergency over the spread of the flu. Across 50 U.S. states (and Puerto Rico) the outbreak has resulted in the loss (or cull) of 139 million birds, mostly in commercial farms.
Last Thursday, the virus was found in Georgia, a major poultry and egg production state.
Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter
“This is a serious threat to Georgia’s No. 1 industry and the livelihoods of thousands of Georgians who make their living in our state’s poultry industry,” Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper said in a news release. “We are working around the clock to mitigate any further spread of the disease and ensure that normal poultry activities in Georgia can resume as quickly as possible.”
While the CDC still classes the risks to humans as low, the flu has crossed into humans, and has resulted in deaths as well as hospitalizations.
Concerns are growing that H5N1 might mutate enough for easy human-to-human transmission — and you only have to go back to 2019 to recognize that early intervention, in the most effective way possible, is better than dealing with a new virus that’s escaped into the general population.
As always, the time to share empirical information is now, not to slow or stop it for political reasons.
Science isn’t meant to be bent into political pretzels, it’s meant to be used for the common good.
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