Bird flu has swept across the United States in the last few months, killing millions of chickens and driving egg prices to all-time highs. But the real danger isn’t to our breakfast budgets; it’s to our health.

Since its outbreak last year, the virus has sickened dozens of Americans and killed one. And if it mutates into a strain that can jump from person to person – without requiring an animal host – inflated omelette prices will be the least of our worries.

Fortunately, American scientists are working hard to develop vaccines and treatments before disaster strikes. But senior officials within the new U.S. administration, as well as those for international bodies like the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization, are making scientists’ jobs far more difficult.

Trump administration officials earlier this year fired thousands of federal employees across health agencies including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Agriculture. Those layoffs included dozens of scientists who were specifically working to monitor and mitigate the bird flu outbreak. On top of that, the Trump administration is slashing funding for scientific research at America’s top universities.

Meanwhile, international bodies seem determined to ignore crucial lessons from the last pandemic. When COVID-19 struck, decades of patent-protected research into mRNA technology allowed scientists to develop a new type of vaccine based on that technology at unprecedented speed.

That quick innovation was the direct result of America’s robust system of intellectual property protection, which gave companies the confidence to invest huge sums of money in risky, long-term research because they would be protected from others stealing their work and selling copycat versions if they succeeded