For a moment, the threat of guac-ocalypse loomed over America. Had President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada gone into effect, the prices of avocados and tomatoes would have skyrocketed in the approach to Super Bowl Sunday. Trump may be bluffing about his willingness to start a trade war, but the grace period he negotiated with those nations lasts just 30 days. Yesterday he said that he would announce tariffs on even more countries—he didn’t specify which—in the coming week. Soon, Americans could again be clutching our guacamole.

If the tariffs Trump has threatened do go into effect, they would quickly raise the prices not just of avocados but of strawberries, cucumbers, bell peppers, oranges, countless processed foods, and other grocery staples that are already becoming less affordable for many people. Any pain that tariffs cause American consumers would—in Trump’s view, which he boomed on Truth Social—be only a temporary bump on the road to “THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA.” Implicit in that idea—and the reality of an actual trade war—is the assumption that the U.S. can make up for any lost imports on its own. Trump’s stance on agriculture is the same as his stance on everything else: “America First.”

The notion that the country could produce all of its food domestically is nice—even admirable. An America First food system would promote eating seasonally and locally, supporting more small farmers in the process. But that is not how most people eat now. Eating America First would restrict the variety that shoppers have come to expect; eating fresh blueberries year-round would be impossible. Barring the overhaul of all U.S. agriculture, it would mean a less healthy diet, too. The guac-ocalypse near miss was a reminder of the precarious state of our food system: Much of the food we want is not produced at home.

Trump’s tariffs may amount to nothing but political posturing. During his first term, he threatened Mexico with a 5 percent tariff, then backed off two weeks later. The current grace period could extend indefinitely. But an actual trade war would have a dramatic impact on the food supply. Avocados are a perfect case study. The national obsession is staggering: In 2023, the average person ate more than nine pounds of them—roughly equivalent to 27 average-size fruit. More than 90 percent of the avocados Americans buy come from Mexico; they are the nation’s top import in terms of value, Luis Ribera, an agricultural-economics professor at Texas A&M University, told me. Because they are much more expensive than, say, bananas, the effect of a 25 percent tariff (plus its associated costs) would be more significant: A small Hass avocado worth 50 cents might go to $1.50, Ribera said. Avocado-dependent businesses would feel it, too. A Chipotle representative told me that tariffs would certainly raise prices.

The America First perspective frames tariffs as an opportunity to boost domestic production. Roughly 10 percent of avocados available in America are grown here; the majority come from California, and Florida and Hawaii make up the remainder. Zach Conrad, a food-systems expert at the College of William & Mary, ticked off a multitude of reasons domestic production could not re-create our current avocado bounty. Avocados grow in too few areas of the U.S., and on top of that, they largely produce fruit only from spring to early fall. Trump’s immigration policies threaten the already dwindling farm-labor workforce.

Avocados aside, the U.S. does already produce enough food to feed itself, and then some. About 4,000 calories’ worth of food a day were available for each person in 2010, according to the USDA’s most recent estimate; that year, the average person consumed 2,500 calories a day. But food is more than just calories. The U.S. produces plenty of grains, oils, sweeteners, and meat, but far less fresh produce and legumes; in recent years, the country has become a net importer of food. “The food group that we produce the least of to meet our dietary needs is fruits and vegetables,” Conrad said. In 2022, 69 percent of the fresh vegetables and 51 percent of the fresh fruits imported by the U.S. came from Mexico. Meat, canola oil, and, uh, biscuits and wafers account for most of the U.S. imports from Canada, but 20 percent of this country’s fresh-vegetable imports come from there, too.

Theoretically, America could grow all of its own produce. But that would require a complete remaking of the food system. More land would have to be dedicated to growing fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and less of it to grains and sweeteners. It would also mean addressing labor shortages, increasing the number of farmers, finding suitable land, and building new infrastructure to process and ship each new crop.

Every one of these issues is incredibly complex. Many fruits and vegetables are so delicate that they must be harvested by hand, so machines can’t supplement human labor. A wheat farmer can’t just switch to growing tomatoes; specialty crops—a category that includes any fruit, vegetable, or tree nut—require specialty knowledge as well as specialty equipment, which can cost millions. Solving all of these problems—which would likely be impossible—would take many years, Conrad said.

Cutting off Canada would have subtler but no less extensive effects than abstaining from Mexican produce. Grains, beef, and pork are produced domestically, but sourcing them abroad can be less expensive, Chris Barrett, a professor who specializes in agricultural economics at Cornell University, told me. Demand for beef on the West Coast of the U.S., for instance, can be cheaper to fulfill from the Canadian prairies than from an East Coast packinghouse. Canada’s other big contribution to the American diet is canola oil, which is produced stateside in relatively small amounts. The ongoing campaign against seed oils, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., may claim that Americans would be better off without canola oil, but for now, America runs on processed food. Without cheap canola oil from Canada, many frozen foods and packaged goods will cost more. “That excellent ratatouille you get in a can, even if you think it’s healthy, probably contains a bit of imported oil. It’s going to get priced up, ” Barrett said.

The problems with an America First food system wouldn’t just be about cost. It would lack diversity: There would be no tropical fruits such as mangoes and coconuts, and far fewer specialty varieties, such as Sumo Citrus and Meyer lemons, because domestic growers would have to focus on the basics. Given the current emphasis on meat, grains, and sweeteners,  it would encourage a less healthy diet, too. Striving toward the “Make America healthy again” ideal pushed by RFK Jr. would be made more difficult with fewer choices and higher prices. As my colleague Nicholas Florko wrote recently, people buy food on the basis of taste, convenience, and cost. America could supply its entire population with a healthy diet, as Conrad’s research has shown, but not without totally blowing up its agricultural priorities.

The notion of an America First food supply—harvesting homegrown produce, eating seasonally, supporting farmers—does align with the idea of returning to a pastoral era, which has been embraced by RFK Jr.’s supporters, raw-milk drinkers, and farmers’-market devotees across the political spectrum. “It’s a nice way of thinking about food,” Conrad said. But it just doesn’t align with the reality of how Americans currently eat. Every time we go to the grocery store, we choose from a marvelous variety of foods from around the world. A McDonald’s hamburger with fries, that most American of meals, is made with sesame seeds from Mexico and canola oil from Canada. That eating vatfuls of guacamole every year in the middle of February is a pillar of American culture is a testament to our interdependence with our neighbors.

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One sign that the egg-cost crisis has gotten dire came in the form of a bright-yellow sticker on a laminated breakfast menu: On Monday, Waffle House announced that it would be adding a temporary 50-cent surcharge to each egg ordered.

Egg prices have risen dramatically as of late. First, inflation pushed up their cost. Then the ongoing bird-flu outbreak led to shortages. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump assured Americans that he would get food costs under control: He vowed last summer that he would bring food prices down “on day one”—a promise he did not fulfill. As egg prices have kept ticking up in recent weeks, Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, has blamed the Biden administration for high egg costs, citing the standard, USDA-authorized measure of killing millions of egg-laying chickens that were infected with bird flu (something the previous Trump administration also did). The average price of a dozen eggs in U.S. cities remained below $2 until 2022. Eggs now cost an average of more than $4 a dozen—it’s a lot higher at some grocery stores—and the USDA has forecasted a 20 percent further price jump for eggs in 2025. As a spokesperson for Waffle House said in a statement, high egg prices are now forcing customers and restaurants to make “difficult decisions.”

As egg prices shift, so does the pricing logic that grocery stores and restaurants have long used. For decades now, grocers have helped maintain eggs’ affordable image, even when the amount they themselves spent on eggs was fluctuating. Many stores consider eggs “loss leaders”; they effectively subsidize the cost of eggs in order to draw in shoppers (who, they expect, might then splurge on higher-margin items). This was possible for stores to do because eggs were cheap to produce and readily in supply. Innovations in industrial farming, incubation, artificial lighting (to trick hens into thinking it was morning and time to lay), and carton technology meant that, by the early 20th century, cheap eggs were bountiful in American markets.

But when wholesale costs soar, as they are now, the loss-leader rationale starts to strain. (The cost of a dozen eggs for restaurants and stores is about $7, compared with $2.25 last fall, according to one recent estimate.) A few grocers are keeping egg prices consistent despite rising costs, but many more have started passing high prices over to shoppers. Eggs are also ingredients in lots of grocery items, such as baked goods and salad dressing—so those may see price increases too.

As for restaurants, when the cost of a single item goes up, they are generally willing to absorb it, with the hope that the price will soon go down and perhaps another item will be cheaper the next month, Alex Susskind, a Cornell professor who teaches courses in food and beverage management, told me. But when a cost goes up as continuously as egg prices have, restaurants start to run out of options. Susskind noted that the Waffle House spike was not a permanent price increase but a surcharge, which leaves open the option for the chain to simply remove it in the future. The Waffle House spokesperson said in the restaurant’s statement that “we are continuously monitoring egg prices and will adjust or remove the surcharge as market conditions allow.”

All of this has hit Americans hard, because we eat quite a lot of eggs. Egg consumption peaked around the end of World War II, when Americans ate an average of more than one egg a day per person. After waning a bit in the 1990s, eggs bounced back in the 2010s: By 2019, Americans were eating an average of about 279 eggs a year—that’s five to six a week. The resurgence was due in part to the fact that, after decades of warning about the risks of high-cholesterol foods, the federal government updated its guidance. Now some Americans are cutting back temporarily, but others are attempting to stock up on several dozens of eggs at a time. In spite of all the drama of the past few years, Americans aren’t likely to go eggless anytime soon. Eggs are “so embedded in American culture,” my colleague Yasmin Tayag, who covers science and health, told me, predicting that “it will take a lot more than a few years of price shifts to change that.”

The price of eggs has become a symbol of where America is going: first as a sign of inflation, now of the ongoing bird-flu outbreak. Even if you had tuned out current events for the past couple of years—if you’d deleted social media, turned off news notifications, read only Victorian novels—a version of this news was still going to reach you, in the egg aisle of the grocery store. Stocking up on eggs or cutting back is a temporary solution to a bird-flu problem that is likely to persist. The virus, Yasmin said, will keep coming back, at least until more effective mitigation measures, such as vaccines, become widespread. And week after week at the grocery store, many Americans will feel the effects.

Related:

Get used to expensive egg prices. (From 2023) Bird flu is a national embarrassment.

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From inside the room, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings felt at times more like an awards show than a job interview. While the health-secretary nominee testified, his fans in the audience hooted and hollered in support. Even a five-minute bathroom break was punctuated by a standing ovation from spectators and cheers of “We love you, Bobby!” There were some detractors as well—one protester was ushered out after screaming “He lies!” and interrupting the proceedings—but they were dramatically outnumbered by people wearing Make America Healthy Again T-shirts and Confirm RFK Jr. hats.

The MAHA faithful have plenty of reason to be excited. If confirmed, RFK Jr. would oversee an agency that manages nearly $2 trillion, with the authority to remake public health in his image. “He just represents the exact opposite of all these establishment agencies,” Brandon Matlack, a 34-year-old who worked on Kennedy’s presidential campaign, told me on Wednesday. We chatted as he waited in a line of more than 150 people that snaked down a flight of stairs—all of whom were hoping to get a seat for the hearing. Many of them were relegated to an overflow room.

Of course, Matlack and other RFK Jr. fans could be in for a letdown. Whether Kennedy will actually be confirmed as health secretary is still up in the air. There was less raucous cheering during the hearing on Thursday, as Kennedy faced tough questions from Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, whose vote could be decisive in determining whether Kennedy gets confirmed. But the realization of RFK Jr.’s vision for health care in America may not hinge on his confirmation. The MAHA movement has turned the issue of chronic disease into such a potent political talking point that people like Matlack are willing to trek from Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C., just to support Kennedy. Politicians across the country are hearing from self-proclaimed “MAHA moms” (and likely some dads too) urging them to enact reforms. They’re starting to listen.

Kennedy is best known as an anti-vaccine activist who spreads conspiracy theories. His more outlandish ideas are shared by some MAHA supporters, but the movement itself is primarily oriented around improving America’s diet and the health problems it causes us. Some of the ways MAHA wants to go about that, such as pressuring food companies to not use seed oils, are not exactly scientific; others do have some research behind them. Consider artificial food dyes, a major MAHA rallying cry. Multiple food dyes have been shown in animal studies to be carcinogenic. And although a candy-corn aficionado likely isn’t going to die from the product’s red dye, the additive is effectively banned in the European Union. (Kennedy claims that food dyes are driving down America’s life expectancy. There’s no evidence directly linking food dyes to declining human life expectancy, though one study did show that they cut short the life of fruit flies.)

Until recently, concerns over food additives, such as artificial dyes, were the domain of Democrats. In 2023, California became the first state in the nation to ban certain food additives: red dye 3, potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil, and propylparaben. But now food-additive bans are being proposed in Donald Trump country, including West Virginia, Arkansas, and Kentucky. Some of the efforts, such as the Make Arkansas Healthy Again Act, are an explicit attempt to enact Kennedy’s agenda.

In other states, something a bit more Schoolhouse Rock is happening: The purported dangers of food ingredients are riling up Americans, who are then going to their lawmakers seeking change. Eric Brooks, a Republican state legislator in West Virginia, told me that he decided to copy California’s food-additive bill after being prodded by a constituent. “I said, Well, I don’t normally look out West, especially out to California, for policy ideas, to be honest with you,” he told me. “But once I had done the research and I saw the validity of the issue, I said, Okay.” Although his bill, which was first introduced in January 2024, did not move forward in the previous legislative session because, in his words, “there were bigger fish to fry,” Brooks hopes the national interest coming from the MAHA movement will motivate West Virginia legislators to take another look at the proposal.

Other red-state efforts to follow California’s lead have similarly not yet been passed into law, but the fact that the bills have been introduced at all signifies how motivated Republicans are on the topic. The MAHA moms may be enough to propel Kennedy to the job of health secretary. One Republican, Senator Jim Banks of Indiana, told Kennedy on Thursday that he plans to vote to confirm him because doing anything else “would be thumbing my nose at that movement.” Republicans are not only introducing bills to ban food additives; they’re also taking up Kennedy’s other MAHA priorities. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently asked the federal government for permission to forbid food-stamp recipients in her state from using their benefits to buy junk food—a policy Kennedy has repeatedly called for.

Over the past two days, senators seemed shocked at just how loyal a following Kennedy has amassed. One pejoratively called him a prophet. MAHA believers I spoke with made clear that they want RFK Jr.—and only RFK Jr.—to lead this movement. Vani Hari, a MAHA influencer who goes by “Food Babe” on Instagram, told me that, if Kennedy fails to be confirmed, there “will be an uprising like you have never seen.”

But at this point, it seems that the movement could live on even without Kennedy. On Wednesday, the Heritage Foundation hosted a press gaggle with MAHA surrogates. Heritage, an intellectual home of the modern conservative movement, is now praising the banning of food dyes. This is the same pro-business think tank that a decade ago warned that should the FDA ban partially hydrogenated oils, trans fats that were contributing to heart attacks, the agency “would be taking away choices,” “disrespecting” Americans’ autonomy, and mounting “an attack on dietary decisions.”

Republicans have generally been a bulwark for the food industry against policies that could hurt its bottom line. Democrats and Republicans in Washington today seem more aligned on food issues than ever before. “When you have members on both sides of the aisle whose constituencies are now extremely interested in understanding fully what’s in their food products, it does shift the game a bit,” Brandon Lipps, a food lobbyist and a former USDA official under Trump, told me. After all, even Bernie Sanders, despite chastising Kennedy multiple times during this week’s confirmation hearings, professed his support for aspects of the MAHA movement. “I agree with you,” Sanders told Kennedy on Thursday, that America needs “a revolution in the nature of food.” During the same hearing, Cassidy said that he is struggling with Kennedy’s candidacy because, despite their deep disagreements on vaccine policy, on “ultra-processed foods, obesity, we are simpatico. We are completely aligned.”

Although MAHA has shown itself to be a unifying message, the real test will come down to the brass tacks of any political movement: passing actual legislation. How willing lawmakers—especially those with pro-business proclivities—will be to buck the status quo remains to be seen. Politicians have proved eager to speak out against ultra-processed foods; in that sense, MAHA is winning. But policy victories may still be a ways off.

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Over the past several months, bird-flu numbers have been steadily ticking up, especially among farmworkers who interact closely with cows. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who reports on science, about her level of concern right now, and the government’s response to the spread of the virus so far.

Lora Kelley: We last spoke in April, after a dairy worker became infected with bird flu. At the time, you described your level of concern about bird flu as “medium.” How would you describe your level of worry now?

Katherine J. Wu: At this point, I would upgrade it to “medium-plus.” I don’t think I will upgrade to “high” unless we start to see strong evidence of human-to-human transmission. I am not ruling out that possibility, but we aren’t there yet.

The situation has gotten quite a bit worse since last spring. We are seeing consistent infection of dairy workers, meaning an especially vulnerable population is exposed in their work environment. Each time the virus infects a new person, it’s an opportunity for it to evolve into something that could eventually become a pathogen that moves easily from person to person.

Lora: What could public-health officials have done differently in recent months to contain the outbreak?

Katherine: Part of the reason I feel concerned is the government’s lackluster response. The movement of the virus into cows was a huge red flag. Cows have never been a known source of this flu, so that was a complete surprise. That should have been a moment when officials said: We really need to contain this before it gets out of control. If some of the first afflicted herds had been kept from moving around, or even culled, it’s possible that the virus might have been contained before dairy workers got sick.

The USDA has ramped up its testing of milk, and the CDC is still working hard to do outreach to farmworkers, who are the population most at risk here. But there could still be more testing at the individual level—individual animals, individual people. There could be more frequent, aggressive sampling of where the virus is in the environment, as well as on farms.

Representatives at USDA and CDC have denied that their response has been inadequate—though independent experts I have spoken with dispute that. To be clear, officials can’t fully predict the future and stop an outbreak the second it starts to get bad, and critics aren’t demanding that. But right now, it’s still a very reactive approach: We see that the virus has been here; I guess we can keep checking if it’s there. But a more proactive approach with testing and better communication with the public would really help.

Lora: How has the government’s response to bird flu compared with its response to COVID?

Katherine: There’s no doubt that having COVID in the rearview affected the government’s response. I think they didn’t want to overreact and cause widespread panic when there wasn’t a need. That’s fair, but there’s a middle ground that I think they missed.

The response to COVID was by definition going to be haphazard, because we didn’t have a preexisting arsenal of tests, vaccines, and antivirals. We hadn’t dealt with a coronavirus like that in recent memory. Here, though, there is a slate of tools available. We’ve dealt with big flu outbreaks. We know what flu can do. We know that flu, in general, can move from animals into humans. We’ve seen this particular virus actually move into people in different contexts across the world.

Lora: Have we missed the opportunity to mitigate the spread of bird flu?

Katherine: Because there has not yet been evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission, there is still time to intervene. Did officials miss some opportunities to intervene more and earlier? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that from here the attitude should be I guess we should just let this roll.

Lora: We may have RFK Jr., a vaccine skeptic, leading the Department of Health and Human Services soon. How might his leadership affect the bird-flu response?

Katherine: I don’t think there is a need to roll out bird-flu vaccines to the general public yet. But I think there are likely to be major changes to public-health policy in this country. RFK Jr. has specifically said that the National Institutes of Health will be taking a break from focusing on infectious disease for the next few years, and that doesn’t bode terribly well. Infectious diseases are not going to take a break from us.

Lora: Are there lessons from the COVID era that the public should better absorb in order to deal with illness more broadly?

Katherine: To be fair, it’s hard to avoid getting sick in general, especially at this time of year. During the worst of the pandemic, when people were still masking more consistently and not going into public places, we did get sick a lot less often because we were avoiding each other.

That said, I think people did forget very, very quickly that the things that worked against COVID work well against a lot of other diseases, especially other respiratory viruses. I am not saying that we all need to go back to masking 24/7 and never going to school or work in person. But maybe don’t go to work when you’re sick—a practice that all employers should enable. Maybe don't send your child to day care sick. Maybe don’t sneeze into your hand and then rub your hand all over the subway railing. Wash your hands a lot.

Unfortunately, there is this tendency for a really binary response of doing everything or nothing. Right now, people seem to be leaning toward doing nothing, because they are fatigued from what they felt like was an era of doing everything. But there’s a middle ground here too.

Related:

Bird flu is a national embarrassment. America’s infectious-disease barometer is off. (From April)

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In the spring of 2009, Vice published a blog post, notorious even by its own standards, titled “Department of Oopsies!—We Hired a Grifter.” An employee had started chatting with the magazine’s new executive assistant, Kari Ferrell; after she reportedly began coming on to him over instant messages, he Googled her, only to find out that she was on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s most-wanted list. Instead of simply firing Ferrell, Vice outed her online.

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Aldi shoppers should check their freezers. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a recall on Saturday for around 24,870 pounds of frozen chicken and cheese taquito products that “may be contaminated with foreign material.” The products are in Aldi grocery stores nationwide.

Read more...

Three years ago, when it was trickling into the United States, the bird-flu virus that recently killed a man in Louisiana was, to most Americans, an obscure and distant threat. Now it has spread through all 50 states, affecting more than 100 million birds, most of them domestic poultry; nearly 1,000 herds of dairy cattle have been confirmed to be harboring the virus too. At least 66 Americans, most of them working in close contact with cows, have fallen sick. A full-blown H5N1 pandemic is not guaranteed—the CDC judges the risk of one developing to be “moderate.” But this virus is fundamentally more difficult to manage than even a few months ago and is now poised to become a persistent danger to people.

That didn’t have to be the reality for the United States. “The experiment of whether H5 can ever be successful in human populations is happening before our eyes,” Seema Lakdawala, a flu virologist at Emory University, told me. “And we are doing nothing to stop it.” The story of bird flu in this country could have been shorter. It could have involved far fewer cows. The U.S. has just chosen not to write it that way.

[Read: America’s infectious-disease barometer is off]

The USDA and the CDC have doggedly defended their response to H5N1, arguing that their interventions have been appropriately aggressive and timely. And governments, of course, don’t have complete control over outbreaks. But compared at least with the infectious threat most prominent in very recent memory, H5N1 should have been a manageable foe, experts outside of federal agencies told me. When SARS-CoV-2, the virus that sparked the coronavirus pandemic, first spilled into humans, almost nothing stood in its way. It was a brand-new pathogen, entering a population with no preexisting immunity, public awareness, tests, antivirals, or vaccines to fight it.

H5N1, meanwhile, is a flu virus that scientists have been studying since the 1990s, when it was first detected in Chinese fowl. It has spent decades triggering sporadic outbreaks in people. Researchers have tracked its movements in the wild and studied it in the lab; governments have stockpiled vaccines against it and have effective antivirals ready. And although this virus has proved itself capable of infiltrating us, and has continued to evolve, “this virus is still very much a bird virus,” Richard Webby, the director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds, told me. It does not yet seem capable of moving efficiently between people, and may never develop the ability to. Most human cases in the United States have been linked to a clear animal source, and have not turned severe.

The U.S., in other words, might have routed the virus early on. Instead, agencies tasked with responding to outbreaks and upholding animal and human health held back on mitigation tactics—testing, surveillance, protective equipment, quarantines of potentially infected animals—from the very start. “We are underutilizing the tools available to us,” Carol Cardona, an avian-influenza expert at the University of Minnesota, told me. As the virus ripped through wild-animal populations, devastated the nation’s poultry, spilled into livestock, started infecting farmworkers, and accumulated mutations that signaled better adaptation to mammals, the country largely sat back and watched.

When I asked experts if the outbreak had a clear inflection point—a moment at which it was crucial for U.S. leaders to more concertedly intervene—nearly all of them pointed to the late winter or early spring of last year, when farmers and researchers first confirmed that H5N1 had breached the country’s cattle, in the Texas panhandle. This marked a tipping point. The jump into cattle, most likely from wild birds, is thought to have happened only once. It may have been impossible to prevent. But once a pathogen is in domestic animals, Lakdawala told me, “we as humans have a lot of control.” Officials could have immediately halted cow transport, and organized a careful and concerted cull of infected herds. Perhaps the virus “would never have spread past Texas” and neighboring regions, Lakdawala told me. Dozens of humans might not have been infected.

[Read: America’s bird-flu luck has officially run out]

Those sorts of interventions would have at least bought more of the nation time to provision farmworkers with information and protection, and perhaps develop a plan to strategically deploy vaccines. Government officials could also have purchased animals from the private sector to study how the virus was spreading, Cardona told me. “We could have figured it out,” she said. “By April, by May, we would have known how to control it.” This sliver of opportunity was narrow but clear, Sam Scarpino, an infectious-disease modeler and flu researcher at Northeastern University, whose team has been closely tracking a timeline of the American outbreak, told me. In hindsight, “realistically, that was probably our window,” he said. “We were just too slow.”

The virus, by contrast, picked up speed. By April, a human case had been identified in Texas; by the end of June, H5N1 had infected herds in at least a dozen states and more than 100 dairy farms. Now, less than 10 months after the USDA first announced the dairy outbreak, the number of herds affected is verging on 1,000—and those are just the ones that officials know about.

The USDA has repeatedly disputed that its response has been inadequate, pointing out to The Atlantic and other publications that it quickly initiated studies this past spring to monitor the virus’s movements through dairy herds. “It is patently false, and a significant discredit to the many scientists involved in this work, to say that USDA was slow to respond,” Eric Deeble, the USDA’s deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, wrote in an email.

And the agency’s task was not an easy one: Cows had never been a known source of H5N1, and dairy farmers had never had to manage a disease like this. The best mitigation tactics were also commercially formidable. The most efficient ways to milk cows invariably send a plume of milk droplets into the air—and sanitizing equipment is cumbersome. Plus, “the dairy industry has been built around movement” of herds, a surefire way to move infections around too, Cardona told me. The dairy-worker population also includes many undocumented workers who have little incentive to disclose their infections, especially to government officials, or heed their advice. At the start of the outbreak, especially, “there was a dearth of trust,” Nirav Shah, the principal deputy director of the CDC, told me. “You don’t cure that overnight.” Even as, from the CDC’s perspective, that situation has improved, such attitudes have continued to impede efforts to deploy protective equipment on farms and catch infections, Shah acknowledged.

Last month, the USDA did announce a new plan to combat H5N1, which requires farms nationwide to comply with requests for milk testing. But Lakdawala and others still criticized the strategy as too little, too late. Although the USDA has called for farms with infected herds to enhance biosecurity, implementation is left up to the states. And even now, testing of individual cows is largely left up to the discretion of farmers. That leaves too few animals tested, Lakdawala said, and cloaks the virus’s true reach.

The USDA’s plan also aims to eliminate the virus from the nation’s dairy herds—a tall order, when no one knows exactly how many cattle have been affected or even how, exactly, the virus is moving among its hosts. “How do you get rid of something like this that’s now so widespread?” Webby told me. Eliminating the virus from cattle may no longer actually be an option. The virus also shows no signs of exiting bird populations—which have historically been responsible for the more severe cases of avian flu that have been detected among humans, including the lethal Louisiana case. With birds and cows both harboring the pathogen, “we’re really fighting a two-fronted battle,” Cardona told me.

Most of the experts I spoke with also expressed frustration that the CDC is still not offering farmworkers bird-flu-specific vaccines. When I asked Shah about this policy, he defended his agency’s focus on protective gear and antivirals, noting that worker safety remains “top of mind.” In the absence of consistently severe disease and evidence of person-to-person transmission, he told me, “it’s far from clear that vaccines are the right tool for the job.”

[Read: How much worse would a bird-flu pandemic be?]

With flu season well under way, getting farmworkers any flu vaccine is one of the most essential measures the country has to limit H5N1’s threat. The spread of seasonal flu will only complicate health officials’ ability to detect new H5N1 infections. And each time bird flu infects a person who’s already harboring a seasonal flu, the viruses will have the opportunity to swap genetic material, potentially speeding H5N1’s adaptation to us. Aubree Gordon, a flu epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me that’s her biggest worry now. Already, Lakdawala worries that some human-to-human transmission may be happening; the United States just hasn’t implemented the infrastructure to know. If and when testing finally confirms it, she told me, “I’m not going to be surprised.”