How would we handle an avian flu pandemic?

Concerns have been raised in recent months after an outbreak of avian flu caused by the virus H5N1 was detected in cattle in the US. To date, 139 affected herds have been identified, and four dairy workers have contracted the virus. The UK Health Security Agency, which previously believed there to be minimal risk of the virus evolving into a form which could spread among humans, now believes there is up to a one-in-three chance of it doing so. A factory in Liverpool has been busy manufacturing stockpiles of a ‘pre-pandemic’ vaccine which will be given to farm workers and others in occupations that bring them into close contact with bird flu.

We have been here before with bird flu. An outbreak among birds in East Asia in 2005 led to the World Health Organisation predicting that the disease could go on to kill between two million and 7.4 million people. Not to be outdone, Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London declared that ‘around 40 million people died in the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak’, and that given subsequent population growth, ‘you could scale [the potential death toll] up to around 200 million people probably’. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease. Not for the first time, Prof. Ferguson was talking nonsense.

The last Conservative government was in no rush to learn the lessons of Covid-19, perhaps as there were plenty of errors made by Tory ministers who were standing for re-election. The official Covid Inquiry is moving with glacial speed: the first part of its report is published only now, three years after it was first announced. And even that is looking only at ‘preparedness’. In the end, the thing we were truly unprepared for was the political panic – and the devastating effect it had on this country when scientific advisers who should have known better were also swept away in the hysteria.