I spent a long time tracking specific airborne/non-airborne statements by various governments during the first month of covid. It quickly became clear that it b

I spent a long time tracking specific airborne/non-airborne statements by various governments during the first month of covid. It quickly became clear that it boiled down to a semantic argument about what droplet size constituted "airborne-ness". This in turn determined the "safe social distance". I remember hearing ridiculous things about how only viruses like measles are really airborne. That entire discussion was an absurd comedy, of a piece with the CDC initially saying masks were useless (in an attempt to save the national supply of masks). In this case, it isn't really questionable that H5N1 is extremely infectious and airborne between and within any species that have epithelial lung cells it has adapted to. So far, that doesn't include humans. The only serious question is how many mutations until it does, and what's the mutation rate in that direction. Additionally, what are the odds that the virus would need to make some trade-off in virulence to mutate to infect human lungs. From that we can extrapolate an approximate date range in which it will go human to human, globally. Cross that with the readiness and effectiveness of existent vaccine stockpiles and extant solutions for traditional vaccine growth, moderated by limitations on adjuvants, plus possible mRNA vaccines. Take into account that in some species of mammals so far it has a neglibile mortality rate, and in other species it approaches 90% in local populations. Do that math and it's obvious that governments need to be accelerating pre-pandemic H5N1 vaccines right now, not waiting for the pandemic strain to authorize them.