Every time a farm worker is infected with H5N1, it’s like a game of Russian Roulette for the rest of us. The virus is making trillions of copies of itself, and many of them carry random mutations. If any of those copies carry mutations that allow it to achieve human-to-human transmission, it will likely be passed on to a contact- or contacts- of that worker. You’ve just witnessed the potential birth of a new pandemic.
So basically, you really, really don’t want this thing- this Spillover Event- to happen even a single time. Every time you do, you’re potentially gambling with 8 billion people’s futures. The Biden Administration has allowed it to happen 61 times in less than a year. And instead of treating it like an emergency, which they almost certainly would’ve before COVID, the USDA, FDA, CDC and White House keep treating their Russian Roulette “wins” like permission to play another round.
Like most of the conclusions the White House appears to have drawn about public health, this betrays a poor understanding of statistics. When you win a round of Russian Roulette, it doesn’t mean you’re “good” at Russian Roulette, or that the game is easy, or that you’re on a hot streak, although gamblers believe these sorts of things about gambling all the time. It just means you got lucky. It shouldn’t be taken as an invitation to go around again.
Where Hong Kong, Finland, Spain and many other governments took immediate and drastic action to avoid spillovers, the US has watched the virus spread and worsen, looking the other way as infections among farmers crop up. Through negligence and incompetence, the US government is creating the conditions for another global pandemic, despite having had months to avert it entirely.