(The Epoch Times)—Officials in the United States, Canada, and Europe are considering the vaccination of workers and others against the highly pathogenic avian influenza.
The U.S. government is “looking closely” at the possibility of vaccinating farm workers and others in close contact with the virus, according to Dawn O’Connell, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the U.S. Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, said she has been in discussions with U.S. and Canadian officials about using vaccines to protect workers after the influenza, or bird flu, jumped from birds to cattle.
The first cases of H5N1, a strain of the flu, in cattle were detected earlier this year, although some scientists say available evidence points to the cases cropping up in late 2023.
Discussions about using vaccines to try to prevent a pandemic are ongoing at the government level and among scientists in several places, including the UK, said Wendy Barclay, chair in influenza virology at University College London, who also researches avian flu for the UK Health Security Agency.
The UK government did not comment but said it is monitoring the situation in the United States.
In the European Union, the European Commission’s Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority is working on a joint procurement of CSL Seqirus’s vaccine to “potentially prevent a pandemic” sparked by individuals exposed to infected birds and animals, spokesman Stefan De Keersmaecker said.
A spokeswoman for CSL, which has contracts for pandemic influenza vaccines with 30 governments, said the company has been in talks with several governments about procuring vaccines since 2022.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a CSL influenza A vaccine in 2020, based largely on immunogenicity and safety results from a small clinical trial of 319 people.
Dr. Peter McCullough, an epidemiologist based in Texas, said on the social media platform X that without larger trials, it’s not possible to know whether the vaccine is safe or effective in humans.
The formulation for the CSL shot has been updated to more closely match the bird flu, which is an influenza A virus.
U.S. officials said recently that they’re planning to produce 4.8 million doses of the updated CSL vaccine. European health officials also said they were in talks to acquire CSL’s shot.
Canadian health officials said they have met with GSK, maker of Canada’s seasonal flu shots, to discuss acquiring and manufacturing a prepandemic bird flu vaccine.
The United States is in talks with Pfizer and Moderna, which make messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) COVID-19 vaccines, about potential pandemic vaccines.
University of Pennsylvania researchers said in a May 23 paper that their experimental mRNA bird flu vaccine performed well in preclinical testing in ferrets.
Since the bird flu cases in cattle were first detected, cases have been confirmed in 63 herds across nine states, including Colorado, Michigan, and South Dakota, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Human Cases
Two cases in humans—one in Michigan and one in Texas—have also been confirmed. Both have since recovered. Analysis of virus samples from the patients showed high similarities to the virus spreading in cows.
Richard Webby, a St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital virologist who studies flu in animals and birds for the World Health Organization, said the situation in dairy cattle merits vaccine use.
“If we look at the exposure levels that some of these farmers are getting, it’s high,” Mr. Webby said.
The decision on how and when to use the vaccine will hinge on evidence of increased transmission, severity of disease, cases in people with no link to a dairy farm, and mutations in the virus, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Principal Deputy Director Nirav Shah said.
The agency says on its website that the government is developing bird flu vaccines “in case they are needed.”
Human exposure to the virus in poultry and dairy operations could increase the risk that the virus will mutate and gain the ability to spread easily in people. Vaccines that perform poorly can also increase that risk.
So far, only one change has been detected in the human cases, the CDC said on May 24.
“These data indicate viruses detected in both cows and the two human cases maintain primarily avian genetic characteristics and lack changes that would make them better adapted to infect or transmit between humans,” the agency stated.
For now, CDC officials say the best way to avoid bird flu is to stay away from infected animals, fluids, and feces.
Workers who must come into contact with animals are advised to wear protective equipment and monitor themselves for symptoms, which include fatigue.
People who do become sick can take influenza antivirals, which are more effective when received shortly after symptoms develop.
Health officials also recommend cooking eggs and poultry to at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit, cooking beef to appropriate temperatures, and only consuming pasteurized milk.
Testing of beef found a surrogate virus was still present in burgers cooked rare, according to the Department of Agriculture. High levels of bird flu virus have been detected in raw milk. Some pasteurized samples tested positive, but further testing showed no viable virus, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
Reuters contributed to this report.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
