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Commentary By James B. Meigs

The Next Pandemic?

Health Healthcare

During the peak Covid years, our public-health establishment vastly expanded its scope. Officials took it upon themselves to micromanage which aisles could stay open in stores and which playgrounds and skateboard parks must close; they ordered landlords not to evict tenants who stopped paying rent; and they leaned on social-media companies to censor whatever they defined as disinformation about the disease. But one thing the authorities didn’t focus on very much was preparing for the next pandemic.

That pandemic may already be here. An avian flu virus is currently raging through America’s poultry and dairy farms and sporadically infecting people. The virus could be evolving into a strain that more easily transmits to and between humans, causing a mass outbreak. Or the whole thing could blow over. We just don’t know. But we do know that our country’s efforts to stave off a potential epidemic have been a sad joke from the start. “The Biden administration has failed, utterly, to react and respond to the avian flu outbreak,” Richard H. Ebright told me via email. Ebright leads a microbiology lab at Rutgers University and is a leading critic of the U.S. response to Covid (and of the gain-of-function research that likely led to the outbreak in the first place). “The same errors that were made early in the Covid-19 pandemic are being made again,” he said.

Continue reading the entire piece here at Commentary

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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor.

Photo by Abraham Gonzalez Fernandez/Getty Images