Bird flu warnings are being ignored. I’ve seen this pattern before

Abstract

There’s an unwritten rule in publishing, or so I’ve been told: don’t write about COVID. Our collective attention span has been saturated by those endless months holed up in attics and cramped corners of apartments, staring out at a world we could no longer take part in. When the worst of it passed, we felt an urge to close that chapter, to padlock it behind a heavy latch.

But in doing so, we also tuck away the hard-won lessons of that time: how quickly systems buckle, how two decades of coronavirus warnings accumulated without adequate preparedness, and how the very mechanisms we rely on for safety can become the scaffolding of a next disaster.

This matters now as another threat is taking shape: highly pathogenic avian influenza, known as bird flu.