Reporting Highlights
- Deadly Outbreak: A bird flu outbreak has been raging uncontrolled on a Utah mink farm for two months. Flu experts fear it could spark a devastating human pandemic.
- Government Failures: State officials didn’t order the mink to be killed, which other countries with outbreaks have done. They are prioritizing the financial interests of the fur trade.
- Silent Risks: Despite CDC guidance urging officials to monitor workers, they actively chose not to and declined to test workers — including one with a symptom experts said would warrant testing.
Literally nobody needs a mink farm.
Price said the state’s policy not to monitor workers is meant to allow farmers to decide whether to contact the health department, rather than “forcing it on them.” “If we started seeing people actively dying from this, obviously that would change how we respond to this,” she said.
We feel that the most reasonable course of action is to wait for the horse to escape before we have a fact finding meeting, probably followed by a public comment period, before we decide whether or not to close the barn door. After all, we don’t want to annoy the farmers.
We are so fucked.
I hope all the mink farmers, manufacturers who use the mink fur and those who buy mink clothing all contract bird flu and die.
Simple as that.
Yeah. Isn’t mink fur specifically a luxury item? I see no reason for mink farms to exist.
The world is so chaotically fucked up right now that officials are saying “Let’s wait and see what happens”.
In Spain and Finland they also had to kill whole farms full of Mink. in 2022 and 2023 for avian influenza.
It’s insanely sad and pointless that they are raised to be killed for fur in the first place, but at least that was the correct reaction to the infection.
In this case in Utah they just let underpaid workers die?
Fur? Really? Still?
They’re farming mink? For the fur?? Who is even buying it???
China buys all the mink fur in the world for clothes production. I’m not sure where the end consumers of the products are.
Yeah… that pissed me off more than authorities refusing to order them to cull the infected animals (which they should have done on their own anyway, imho)
Very rich MAGAs.
Utah… yep. That tracks.
I live in Utah why the fuck is this two day old article how I’m hearing about this? FUCK
Maybe…. We shouldn’t be farming animals….
It might be an idea to argue for veganism AFTER fascism collapses.
Why can’t we stop pointless consumption that probably benefits said fascists today?
If you want to do that as an individual, that’s a choice. But I’m saying we are in an existential crisis right now, that’s going to decide what kind of society we will be: democracy or monarchy. Until the cruel government we now have is dealt with, the niceties will be ignored by the average American, or dismissed as fringe.
Okay, what actionable steps will you take in order towards that?
I think one would be to stop consuming pointless products, like meat or leather or whatever, that fuel the lobbyists working together with your government.
It’s as individuals that we together create a group strong enough to pose a resistance.
They are prioritizing the financial interests
Sums of why a lot of things are bad
Between this and the Russian incident that everyone has stopped talking about…
Supposedly Russia updated the World Health Organisation last week to say the young lab worker who died did not die of parapneumonic plague and that no pathogens have been identified so far. They’ve also quarantined 200 of her contacts.
It suggests both that they are taking this very seriously and that something probably DID happen. That one is looking like a near miss, but with the big caveat that who knows how much Russia is actually revealing.
Shit man, I need to keep more aware of actual stories and not the swamp. I forgot about that and was trying to think of if there was a mink farm outbreak in Russia, thanks for the update
Don’t forget, the Regime has flat-out refused to allow the development of a vaccine in the states. This will kill millions.
This is untrue. The US already has bird flu vaccines.
Are There Existing H5N1 Vaccines? The U.S. licensed 3 H5N1-focused vaccines in 2007, 2013 and 2020; additional vaccines have been authorized by the European Medical Association (EMA) for protection against various H5 influenza viruses. The target population for these vaccines—and H5N1 vaccines overall—is not the general public, but rather those with the highest risk of exposure to the virus (e.g., people who work with poultry or cattle). Finland is currently the only country offering a vaccine to high risk individuals. Other countries, including Canada and the U.S., have stockpiled vaccines that could be distributed if or when needed, or have historically offered H5N1 vaccination to those at high risk of infection (e.g., Taiwan in 2013).
The U.S. also harbors stockpiles of influenza A vaccine “building blocks”—i.e., antigens and adjuvants, which trigger and enhance an immune response, respectively. Managed by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the National Pre-pandemic Influenza Vaccine Stockpile (NPIVS) contains the materials (e.g., influenza A H5 antigen) to quickly advance production of H5N1 vaccines that closely match circulating viruses.
The World Health Organization (WHO) maintains a list of all candidate vaccines for H5N1 and other zoonotic influenza viruses, which it updates as part of its twice-yearly consultations on influenza vaccine composition (the same meetings in which the seasonal vaccine composition recommendations are debated).
https://asm.org/articles/2025/march/avian-influenza-h5n1-vaccines-what-status
I believe they’ve licensed at least one for H7 as well.
