By Ada "Peer-Review" Sparks
The penguins did not volunteer for this. More than 1,000 little penguins on Victoria's Phillip Island have received their first dose of a bird flu vaccine, in what organizers describe as the world's largest vaccination program ever attempted on a wild bird population.
Catherine Basterfield, chief executive of Phillip Island Nature Parks, said the campaign began in earnest last week and is now ramping up across the colony, home to the roughly 33-centimeter-tall seabirds that draw tourists to the island's nightly "penguin parade." The effort is a preemptive strike: highly pathogenic avian influenza, the H5N1 strain that has torn through wild bird and mammal populations on other continents, has not yet reached Australia's little penguin colonies, but wildlife authorities are racing to build immunity before it does.
Catching and injecting a wild colony is, in Basterfield's word, "tricky." Little penguins nest in burrows, forage at sea for days at a stretch, and are notoriously difficult to handle without stressing the animals. The scale of the undertaking — a four-figure number of individually caught, injected, and released birds — appears to be unprecedented for a wild-bird vaccination effort anywhere.
What's missing from the reporting so far, and worth flagging for readers: no data on vaccine efficacy in this species, no named vaccine manufacturer, and no independent immunologist quoted assessing whether antibody response in little penguins has been verified. Vaccinating captive or zoo birds against avian flu is established practice; scaling that to a free-ranging wild colony of this size is a genuine experiment, not a routine intervention. Whether it protects the birds — and whether protection holds up once flu variants shift — will only be known once results are published and reviewed. Until then, this is a bold effort worth watching, not yet a proven success.
Extraordinary claims. Ordinary evidence? Then no.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."