What if a mammal-adapted H5N1 strain hits US dairy herds?
A mammal-adapted, more-transmissible H5N1 is the genuine pandemic tail — IF it gains human spread, the crude-down/gold-up/Fed-easing risk-off cascade is directionally right; on dairy alone it's mainly a milk-price and import-ban story. Rhymes with the Feb-2020 COVID demand-shock template the analogues cite (circuit breakers, gold bid). Transmission: a true human-transmission event hits global mobility, EM FX, and risk broadly. Forward: this is the one agri scenario where the macro-risk-off mapping is justified — but only conditional on human spread, which is not yet evidenced.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A more transmissible, mammal-adapted H5N1 variant tears through US dairy herds, collapsing milk output and triggering fresh foreign import bans. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Pandemic shock ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.