A medical expert who helped lead America’s COVID-19 response has warned that the ongoing bird flu (H5N1) epidemic can evolve into a pandemic if greater measures are not taken to stop the spread. Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under Donald Trump’s administration, spoke with CNN about the illness that has been traced to dairy and chicken farms.
Journalist Pamela Brown asked, “Do you think it’s just a matter of time until there’s just a full-fledged pandemic here?” to which Birx responded, “Well, certainly we’re setting ourselves up here for that potential.” The veteran health official further explained that early reactions to the more than 60 human cases detected this year gave her flashbacks to the initial approach used to address the then-novel COVID-19 virus.
“I’m hearing the same words come out of the CDC [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] … Low risk of human-to-human transmission. Didn’t we hear that from the WHO [the World Health Organization] and the CDC about COVID? So, I think our way through this is to use 21st century technology. And remember, it was the private sector that gave us tests,” she recollected.
“Within weeks we went from 20,000 tests to two million tests. So if we got the private sector engaged in our response, they would help us get tests out to all of the dairy farms [and] all the poultry farms, where they could test both the chickens and the people exposed to the chickens, and then we would know how far spread this virus was.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency to strengthen the response to the virus on Dec. 18. Between mid-November and late December, more than 300 cow herds tested positive for H5N1, also known as avian influenza. “This proclamation is a targeted action to ensure government agencies have the resources and flexibility they need to respond quickly to this outbreak,” said the Democratic elected official.
The first severe case of the illness was identified in a human patient in Louisiana. The individual was reportedly exposed “to sick and dead birds in a backyard flock,” reported the CDC. Birx warned, “Right now we’re just looking for symptoms again. We should never be tracking viruses through symptoms. You don’t see a virus through a symptom, you see the virus through the test, and we know from COVID most of the spread was asymptomatic. If we had been testing in January, as many other countries were, we wouldn’t have had the spread that we had. … Our agencies are making the same mistakes they made with COVID.”
WHO declared the end of the pandemic in May 2023 and subsequently rolled back vaccine mandates.