As the bird flu outbreak in the United States continues to expand, federal health experts have started to update members of the incoming Trump administration on their response to the crisis thus far.
According to a Biden administration health official who is acquainted with transition briefings at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we sent them all of the information on our study.
This is the first sign that the two administrations are cooperating to make the H5N1 response a top priority.
It was unclear up until now if there had been any transition discussions between the Biden White House and Trump’s new health staff that addressed avian flu. Experts in infectious diseases and public health officials caution that a lack of coordination between the two organizations could have serious repercussions. They fear that another human pandemic could be triggered by the H5N1 virus.
Dr. Cameron Wolfe, a professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, and an expert in infectious diseases, stated that there is something that is obviously changing in the United States.
According to Howard Koh, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Obama administration’s assistant secretary of health and human services for health, sharing surveillance data and resources is essential to comprehending and preventing new viral threats like bird flu.
It is the collective duty of these teams to provide continuity of operations top priority. He stated that this entails being as prepared as possible, particularly in the wake of COVID. Anything else is not acceptable. During his tenure in the Obama administration, Koh did not participate in transition teams.
Neither Trump nor Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice for secretary of health and human services, have made any public statements on how the Trump administration will respond to the outbreak. Furthermore, Kennedy’s staff has indicated that it did not think consulting Biden’s health officials would be beneficial.
Kennedy spokesperson Katie Miller texted a statement saying that the American people don’t need or want the Biden administration to dictate to them what they should do.
Miller continued, “How would career bureaucrats who failed our country during COVID know how to handle anything?” In every national crisis, they have fallen well short of expectations.
Need to expand testing, surveillance efforts
However, Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who was talking generally about bird flu and not about any particular administration, stated that cooperation can help both teams comprehend the scope of the issue.
According to Schaffner, there is a serious risk of a bird flu pandemic. Naturally, it is crucial to coordinate public health concepts and policies as we move from one administration to the next.
The majority of the at least 66 afflicted individuals are dairy workers. The Louisiana Health Department announced last week that a 65-year-old man who had been exposed to a backyard flock had become the nation’s first human victim of bird flu.
Although the CDC claims that the virus hasn’t yet moved from person to person, samples of the virus taken from the Louisiana patients exhibited alarming indications of changes that would increase its transmissibility to people.
The Agriculture Department estimates that the H5N1 virus has infected 925 herds of dairy cattle across 16 states.Millions of chickens have been slaughtered by the virus, which has increased egg prices and caused some shortages.
Senior scholar Dr. Erin Sorrell of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security emphasized the significance of increasing testing and surveillance activities to monitor cases in humans and animals, which necessitates intricate coordination between local, state, and federal authorities. The Biden administration committed $306 million in funds to bolster preparedness measures, including monitoring for avian flu, at the beginning of January.
“We are giving the virus the chance to spread not only to poultry and cattle, which will affect those economies, those animals, and the people who live and work with them, but we are also encouraging the virus to basically infect more people if the policies are not carried forward and are halted or paused,” Sorrell said.
In an effort to combat the outbreak, the Agriculture Department issued a federal order last month requiring testing of the country’s milk supply. In order to assist stop the virus from infecting farmworkers who come into contact with sick animals, the federal government has also published guidelines and provided funding for outreach.
However, David Stiefel, a former national security analyst at the Agriculture Department, stated that in order to stop the spread of bird flu, such measures must be increased in the Trump administration.
They must come up with excellent strategies to encourage farmers and business owners to test. Stiefel stated that although this government has achieved significant progress, there is still more work to be done.
In 2020, the outbreak’s causative strain of bird flu started to spread over the world among poultry and wild birds. According to the Agriculture Department, it arrived in the US in 2022 and has since infected or culled over 130 million birds.
According to experts in infectious diseases, the virus’s ability to move among animals is worrisome because it provides the bird flu with several possibilities to infect humans and maybe change in ways that make it easier for the virus to pass from person to person.
Worries about vaccine hesitancy
The government has two potential vaccines for avian flu in limited supply. Officials from the Biden administration have stated that they do not currently intend to authorize them.
As the Trump administration was successful in doing during the Covid pandemic, Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, a former senior policy adviser on Covid for the Biden White House, stated that it would be crucial for the incoming administration to keep funding the development of new bird flu vaccines and to make sure that manufacturers have the capacity to produce them in large quantities if necessary.
There are questions regarding the future of federal backing for vaccine programs, though, given that Kennedy, Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, has vocally opposed vaccines for decades.Kennedy stated in 2023 that if elected president, he would direct the National Institutes of Health to shift their focus from infectious disease research to chronic illness.
Additionally, since COVID started, vaccination refusal and reluctance have grown nationwide.
Coming out of the Covid-19 vaccination reluctance and politicization, as well as the general anti-vaccine mindset, worries me. “I am extremely concerned about the potential consequences of another pandemic,” Bhadelia stated. I’m awake at night because of it.
HHS and the Agriculture Department have committed $2.5 billion to prepare for and respond to the avian flu outbreak, according to a representative for the agency.
According to the spokesperson, we have performed our duties for the American people on a daily basis, just as we did during the COVID-19 epidemic when we gave 700 million Americans life-saving vaccines. We sincerely hope that the next administration will be as concerned about the avian flu issue as we are.