Since the Covid-19 emergency was officially declared over last year, the US has been gripped by one of the biggest bird flu outbreaks among farm animals in its history. The World Health Organization, meanwhile, just last month declared the mpox virus a new global health emergency, due to its rapid spread in central Africa.

For public health experts, outbreaks like these are a worrying sign of how little has been learnt from the Covid pandemic. “We should have realised we need to take outside chances more seriously and act more aggressively early to forestall these epidemics — and twice we haven’t done that,” says Scott Gottlieb, former US Food and Drug Administration commissioner.

In response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak, which has spread to cattle herds in more than a dozen US states, in some cases affecting dairy workers, Gottlieb notes that US human and animal health authorities have struggled to co-ordinate their response, thus holding up testing efforts. The WHO, he adds, has been too slow to approve vaccines for mpox.