Chickens in a factory farm. Credit: Rawpixel
Since 2022, the largest bird flu outbreak in history has raged across the United States. As a result, egg prices have climbed to record highs and shelves are barren at many grocery stores. Recently, a Louisiana patient became the first person in the United States to die of the bird flu. While bird flu, or avian influenza, has been around since 1996, the current epidemic has become increasingly dangerous because of capitalist greed and government mismanagement. And it is only getting worse. There has been little corporate media reporting on the virus, but a closer look reveals a crisis fueled by worker exploitation, public health failures, and neglectful policy choices that set the stage for another pandemic.
Corporate greed at the root of the epidemic
At every step, sluggish responses by the agriculture industry and the federal government have enabled the rapid expansion of the virus. Under the capitalist industrial agriculture system, the majority of animals are raised in “factory farms,” where they live indoors in extremely close quarters, surrounded by their own waste. Not only is this inhumane and terrible for the environment, but it also creates perfect conditions for infectious disease to spread. As a substitute for proper sanitation measures, producers pump their livestock full of antibiotics, which are not effective against viral infections like bird flu and weaken animals’ immune systems. So when bird flu appeared in both commercial and backyard chicken populations in the U.S. in February 2022, it rapidly spread to multiple states. By March 2022, there were 51 outbreaks at poultry farms.
The government has repeatedly deferred to industry instead of experts and has overall prioritized short-term profits over long-term safety. All commercial chicken flocks in the U.S. are now tested, but the virus continues to kill millions of poultry, and bird flu cases among other livestock pose new threats. In 2023, the virus was found in cattle populations in a few states, but it spread to 860 herds by December 2024. Only then, over a year later, did the government start testing milk supplies. An investigation by KFF Health News revealed that underfunded public health departments and lack of regulations on the farm industry drove the expansion. Now, bird flu has been found in pigs. These developments are especially dangerous because cows and pigs are more likely to transmit viruses to humans than chickens due to their more similar cell structures.
While the U.S. Department of Agriculture has offered some reimbursements to farmers who lost inventory to bird flu, many agribusiness producers are still not testing their animals out of fear of losing out on profits and market shares. Experts have urged the federal government to implement further protections from financial loss for farmers who test their livestock, to no avail.
Meanwhile, working-class people feel the burden of food shortages, not the corporations which caused them. Eggs are usually one of the most affordable kitchen staples, but prices have been rising since 2022 and increased by 38% in the past year. In the past month alone, egg prices are up 70% in California. This comes at a time when working-class people are already feeling the strain of inflation and 22 million Americans are struggling with food insecurity on a weekly basis. These rising prices are not an inevitability, but a policy choice to allow agribusinesses to maintain hundreds of billions of dollars in profits while both food insecurity and risk of infection rises for the working class.
Migrant workers on the frontlines
Farmworkers — many of whom are undocumented immigrants — are at the highest risk of bird flu infection, but their safety has been largely ignored. Bird flu was detected in farmworkers as early as April 2024, but the Biden administration only recommended that testing amongst dairy workers be expanded in November 2024 after a study of farmworkers in Colorado and Michigan found that 7% showed signs of recent infection with the virus. Even then, producers are neglecting to test their workers to avoid costs and interruptions in labor. In rural areas especially, public health departments are notoriously underfunded, which makes it difficult to ensure that protocols are being followed.
Last summer, KFF health news found that 650 Colorado migrant workers, some as young as 15, were employed without goggles or masks to cull infected birds inside an unventilated barn in 104 degree weather. This gross safety violation resulted in at least six infections. Researchers have developed bird flu vaccines for humans, yet the Center for Disease Control actually recommended against making them available to U.S. farmworkers.
Outreach to vulnerable populations is a key part of a proactive public health system, but lack of public health education for farmworkers means that many don’t understand the risks. Many farmworkers are also undocumented migrants who may fear seeking treatment due to deportation concerns. Minority populations in the U.S. are also more likely to distrust the government and the medical system due to discrimation, misinformation, and legacies of medical racism.
Failed public health response paves the way for a new pandemic
Overall, testing for both humans and animals has been sporadic and underfunded. For example, UPTE-CWA union workers at the California Animal Health and Food Safety Lab System at UC Davis have raised alarms about unsafe working conditions in bird flu testing labs. The recommended turnaround time time for tests is 24 hours, but due to understaffing, turnaround times at this lab are extended to up to a week and there is an increased risk of mistakes. The workers are threatening to go on strike if UC does not negotiate a fair contract to mitigate the public health risks caused by their negligence.
Despite the fact that there seems to be no end in sight to the virus’s expansion, the USDA and CDC have repeatedly insisted that their response is adequate. After the Louisiana patient’s death, the CDC maintains that bird flu is a low risk to humans. However, many scientists and veterinarians disagree. There have been no cases of human to human transmission so far, but viruses easily mutate within human bodies. Tom Peacock, a bird flu researcher from the UK, warns of a “pandemic that probably looks like 2020 or worse.” Peacock and other researchers explicitly blame the U.S. government’s inadequate mitigation measures for this risk.
Ruling class’s far-right turn poses new threats
Once again, the ruling class is neglecting public safety in service of corporate profits. They refuse to heed the lessons of COVID-19, where the U.S.’s failed public health response led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. This is because mitigation strategies — like expanding testing for people, animals, wastewater, and food supplies; expanding workplaces safety measures; providing vaccines; eliminating infected animal products from the markets; and ensuring adequate staffing — eat into their profits. The government has no plan to bring down prices for working-class people, implement stricter regulations for agribusiness, improve public health and worker safety, or generally quell the expansion of bird flu.
Bird flu was seriously mishandled under Biden, and this is likely to escalate under the Trump administration. Trump has promised massive budget cuts to the CDC and National Institutes of Health, including a $333 million cut to funding for infectious disease elimination. He nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic with zero expertise in healthcare, as director of the Department of Health and Human Services. He also plans to deregulate the agriculture industry, including relaxing food safety measures, and wants to cut federal food assistance programs that millions of working-class people rely on. On top of this, Trump promises mass deportations, which will create an increased crisis for farmworkers.
To avoid more public health disasters, we need to fight for a socialist system that is centered around meeting human needs. The COVID-19 pandemic, and now the bird flu, show us that a system where profits are the top priority will never protect people’s health or basic needs. We should look to countries like Cuba and China, where COVID-19 death tolls were a fraction of those of the U.S. because of their people-first, socialist public health systems. A socialist government would also mitigate bird flu at its source by replacing the industrial agriculture system with a just, sustainable system where animals have room to graze, waste is properly managed and farmworkers democratically make production decisions in their own interests. It would ensure that everyone has access to affordable food and eradicate food insecurity. A system like this is within reach if we build a mass working-class movement to defeat the far-right agenda of the entire ruling class.
