H5N1 - thread for information sharing, planning, and action
Hi everyone,
I’ve been reading up on H5N1 this weekend, and I’m pretty concerned. Right now my estimate hunch is that there is a 5% non-zero chance that it will cost more than 10,000 people their lives.
To be clear, I think it is unlikely that H5N1 will become a pandemic anywhere close to the size of covid.
Nevertheless, I think our community should be actively following the news and start thinking about ways to be helpful if the probability increases. I am creating this thread as a place where people can discuss and share information about H5N1. We have a lot of pandemic experts in this community, do chime in!
Resources
Articles
https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2023.28.3.2300001 (paper showing H5N1 has spread to minks, which is my primary cause for concern)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/opinion/bird-flu-h5n1-pandemic.html (widely shared, but I’m unsure how much to trust the claims)
Markets
Manifold
Group of H5N1 manifold markets: https://manifold.markets/group/h5n1-bird-flu
Metaculus
Plan for action
Fight status quo bias
In January 2020, many in the effective altruism and rationalist communities had correctly gauged the seriousness of the pandemic threat and were warning people publicly about it. Despite being convinced it was likely to become a pandemic I almost entirely failed to act beyond a few symbolic gestures such as stocking up on food/masks and warning relatives.
I consider this to have been the biggest personal failing of my life. I could have started initiatives to organize and prepare, I could have invested in mRNA producers, I could have researched how it would affect third-world hospitals. Yet all I did was sit idly by and doom scroll the internet for news about covid.
My goal with this thread is to avoid making that mistake ever again, even if it means most likely looking really stupid in a few months time.
How can we lower the chance of a serious pandemic?
I encourage everyone to think about actionable steps and be ambitious in their thinking. As far as I understand mink-to-human transmission is currently the primary reason to be concerned. What ways are there to minimize the chance of this occuring?
The following companies currently own vaccines for H5N1:
| Sanofi SA | Aflunov |
| GSK plc | Q-Pan H5N1 influenza vaccine |
| CSL Limited | Audenz (and 1-3 more I think?) |
| Roche Holding AG Genussscheine | oseltamivir (aka Tamiflu, not a vaccine), this one seems less useful than the others |
Could we pay them to start scaling up production tomorrow? One thing to note is that all these vaccines are egg-based. Are mRNA vaccines possible to create for this? If so, what can we do to speed up the process of making them?
Any other ideas?
For what it’s worth, several of us at Alvea have been keeping a close eye on this for a while. If this escalates, then it is very likely that we would respond appropriately. (Note: My opinions are my own and I do not speak for Alvea in any official capacity.)
Thank you, that’s very reassuring to hear. It can be hard to tell whether an issue is being overlooked or not
Thanks I appreciate the summary—better than anything else I could find on the internet, as is so often the case on this forum.
One small point is that there has been a long history of H5N1 infecting small numbers of humans, with limited human to human spread, without the virus mutating to become highly contageous. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/h5n1-human-infections.htm. This suggests to me that the chances of the virus mutating to become highly contageous might be lower than is intuitive.
Also the fact that there are already 4 vaccines—although high rates of vaccine hesitancy may now unfortunately be established in the population.
I’ve spoken to some virologists who think the probability of it becoming a pandemic is low. However even tho there has been limited human spread for years, I am not aware of outbreaks rather than very limited infections among other mammals in past outbreaks like we are seeing now. I’m getting pretty worried, although I haven’t yet come up with probabilistic predictions.
Also one thing I am not clear on is the efficacy of tamiflu or whether focusing on increasing tamiflu supplies might help.
Tamiflu is oseltamivir. CDC has info on antivirals and vaccines for H5N1 and H7N9.
Tl;dr: we have 3 antivirals, but some evidence of resistance, and a small stockpile of candidate vaccines, though the virus mutates fast.
Thanks Monica! I suppose the big question is, do outbreaks among mammals make future outbreaks among humans more likely. Intuitively it might seem so, but I can’t think of other examples off the top of my head where there was a known and tracked outbreak of a non-human affecting disease among mammals, which then mutated to become a very contageous outbreak among humans. There may well be cases though I’m unaware of.
This is very different from diseases like the plague, or sleeping sickness where the host animals such as rats or cows spread the disease directly to humans.
Very keen to hear examples if anyone knows of them.
The main concern now is that we’re seeing unprecedented likely mammal-to-mammal spread. I don’t know what seems intuitive to most people, but this is the reason for heightened concern around the issue. Whatever your priors were before, this should probably update you towards a bigger risk of human-to-human spread.
Yes they do update me to a higher risk of human to human spread. Human to human spread however has happened a number of times before, yet has never got out of hand. This pattern over the last 10 years. could perhaps update us towards a smaller risk of highly contageous spread between humans.
Of course we should take this seriously, and we may well not be taking it seriously enough right now. Knowing the history of a disease is important though, as this is not a new disease and is more likely to follow past trends than new noes.
Full agree! A track record of human-to-human spread with limited transmissibility is an update against a change in that area, and a new event of rapid mink-to-mink spread is an update for. Not sure how to balance them out mathematically, but it’s important to keep both in mind.
Also, with regard to human vaccines, my understanding is they’re in low stock and only tested for seroconversion, since we don’t use them widely enough to get direct data on efficacy. We also have poultry vaccines but don’t use them widely, and it seems their effectiveness is inconsistent. So much to be improved on in the realm of H5N1 vaccine tech.
*H5N1
Changed thanks nice one!
Thanks for the good post, and raising a critically important issue. I absolutely recognise the individual disconnect between awareness and action at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, and think posts like this one are a good way to avoid this. Some things to think about:
I think Zeynep should be held in good regard as a source. I found her reporting throughout the COVID pandemic to be consistently excellent, readable, and epistemically robust.
The spread in the mink farm is another case where humanity’s collective disregard for animals turns out to be collectively harmful, just like the wet markets in Wuhan. This seems to be a case where different EA branches are converging on a single clear policy direction. Seems like this could be a case where EA might be able to make policy progress in the wake of a near-miss event?
Even if the likelihood of this becoming a pandemic remains low, are governments reacting proportionally to the risk? Maybe they can’t/don’t want to say so publicly, but given the slow response to COVID my prior is that they’re much more likely to be reactive rather than proactive.
There are now also two superforecaster forecasts about this:
Will the World Health Organization (WHO) declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) regarding H5N1 avian influenza before 1 January 2025? (currently 3%)
How many deaths attributed to H5N1 avian influenza will the World Health Organization (WHO) report between 7 February 2023 and 31 December 2024? (currently 97% on ≤1000 deaths)
I’ve gathered more information on the current status at my H5N1 pandemic prediction checklist.
Another article here: https://progress.institute/what-are-the-chances-an-h5n1-pandemic-is-worse-than-covid/
FYI Audenz is not egg-based—it’s made in cells: https://www.precisionvaccinations.com/vaccines/audenz-avian-influenza-vaccine
I think claiming 10,000 lives but being nowhere next COVID scale is pretty unlikely. What mechanism do you suggest would control it at this point?
I don’t think I suggested that? Forgive me if the original post was phrased poorly, I wrote it in some fourty minutes.
My point with mentioning 10,000 lives lost was to operationalize the question of whether it becomes a serious pandemic.
Apologies, I think the juxtaposition of “non-zero chance of >10,000 deaths” and “unlikely to be COVID scale” led me to think you were claiming something different
Agreed. Here’s the account I would give, using my pandemic prediction checklist framework.
Currently, H5N1 scores a 5⁄14. COVID scored a 13⁄14.
+1 point: You’d have a death toll of > 2,000, 5x beyond when we saw the stock market crash during COVID
+1 point: Almost certainly, the disease would have altered to be transmitted efficiently from human to human via respiration. Human-to-human H5N1 will lead to a very serious response to contain it, and if we can’t contain it at a few poultry/mink farmworkers, that’s a sign it spreads very efficiently.
+1 point: That transmission mechanism would likely mean it has led to community spread
+1 point: Almost certainly this would be front page news because bird flu is scary even when it’s mostly just in birds and animals and sporadically in farmworkers.
Possible +1 point: Once we get to 10,000 deaths, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where that’s true but it’s contained to a single country. Could happen (a Chinese mink farm leads to efficient human transmission; a Wuhan-on-steroids lockdown isolates it perfectly from the rest of the world), but doesn’t seem likely.
Possible +1 point: If it’s limited to one country, they might choose to quarantine the region to contain it. Global spread may see a return to things like travel bans to island nations or other serious containment measures. Pretty easy to imagine a situation with at least one going on.
Possible +1 point: A 50% CFR from a respiratory infection could easily overwhelm hospitals
Possible +1 point: If we started to see all these problems, that would almost certainly motivate pharma to rush for mRNA vaccines and other tools
That puts it at anywhere from a 9⁄14 for the “almost certain to occur by 10,000 deaths” checklist items to a 13⁄14 (a score that’s far more plausible to me).
I’m working with the assumption that we can either test for it sufficiently well, or that given how deadly it is, we just enforce zero tolerance for social contact for any symptoms of illness. If we had testing difficulties, failed to enforce strict social distancing, or had to deal with asymptomatic spread, then I think by the time we’re at 10,000 deaths, we’re probably already at a full-blown 14⁄14 situation that, if not already categorized as a pandemic, is well on its way.
I’m curating this — thanks a bunch for making it. I’d be very glad to see more comments and resource-sharing here, and more posts like this in the future in similar situations.
Note also two recent posts from DirectedEvolution:
Pandemic Prediction Checklist: H5N1
Stop an H5N1 pandemic: barn nets and respirators
One thing I’m curious about, given the predictions on whether the WHO will declare a PHEIC for H5N1: how come there wasn’t a spike (or even growth) in markets like this one? The mink-to-mink transmission seems to be concerning, and that happened and was known in October.
It could just be that reason the market isn´t moving is NOT because traders didn´t find it concerning but instead because the market is too low liquidity to be efficient. That´s very much my impression of low liquidity markets at least (I.e. there´s only 20 traders total in this case)
I’m not sure exactly when it became clear that we’re having a bad bird flu year, but it’s possible the mink farm outbreak wasn’t that big an update for the forecasters who were already seeing lots of transmission to mammals, just not among them.
Another market: https://manifold.markets/Radicalia/what-percent-of-100m-people-will-di?r=UmFkaWNhbGlh
(as of Feb 24) So far there’s a Cambodian girl that has already contracted H5N1 and died, others possibly detected. How does this update everyone? https://fortune.com/well/2023/02/23/h5n1-bird-flu-death-cambodian-girl-multiple-contacts-sick/
Other related questions on Metaculus:
Launches tomorrow:
Again this question can be misleading, as in the case of human to human transmission of this H1N1 (which may well happen, 25% chance seems about right to me based on past outbreaks), by far the most likely scenario is one or a few cases of transmission as we have seen in the past—not the kind of human to human transmission which could lead to disaster
I think it wouldn’t be a problem if either the question had been phrased in terms of the expected number of human-to-human cases, or if there were other questions for specific orders of magnitude. I think the latter could still be done, and it would contextualize the first question.
Good points. As is often the case with forecasting questions, the details of the resolution criteria matter quite a bit. For this question to resolve as “yes”, the UK Health Security Agency must classify H5N1 as a “level 5 risk.” Currently it is classified as a level 3 risk.
So, forecasters on Metaculus are predicting whether the UK Health Security Agency will raise the H5N1 risk level to level 5, which signifies human-to-human transmission.
Zvi recently shared a post on H5N1 on LessWrong.