Trump and Biden teams begin discussions on bird flu crisis

Amid an escalating bird flu outbreak spreading in the United States, federal health officials have begun briefing members of the incoming Trump administration on how they have responded to the crisis so far.

“We have sent them all the information about our work,” said a Biden Administration health official familiar with transition briefings within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

It is the first indication that the two administrations appear to be working together to prioritize the response to H5N1.

Until now, it was unclear whether the Biden White House and Trump’s incoming health team had discussed bird flu in any transition meetings. A lack of coordination between the two groups would have enormous consequences, public health officials and infectious disease experts have warned. They are concerned that the H5N1 virus has the potential to trigger another human pandemic.

“This is something that is clearly evolving here in the United States”said Dr. Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease expert and professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.

Sharing information and resources for surveillance is crucial to understanding and getting ahead of emerging viral threats like bird flu, said Howard Koh, a professor at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health who served as undersecretary for Health and Human Services in the Administration of former President Barack Obama.

“These teams have a shared responsibility to prioritize business continuity. That means maximizing preparedness as much as possible, especially in the wake of COVID-19,” he said. “Anything else is unacceptable”. Koh did not participate in the transition teams during his time in the Obama Administration.

Neither Trump nor his pick for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, have publicly suggested how the Trump Administration would handle the outbreak. What’s more, Kennedy’s team has noted that he did not see the value in seeking input from Biden’s health officials.

In a statement, Kennedy spokeswoman Katie Miller said via text that the American people “do not want or need the Biden Administration to tell us how to do anything.”

“What are the career bureaucrats who failed our nation during COVID-19 going to know how to handle?” Miller added. “They have failed beyond measure in all national crises.”

Expand testing and surveillance

Working together, however, can help both teams understand the magnitude of the problem, said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who was referring generally to bird flu and not to any specific Administration.

“A pandemic due to bird flu is an imminent threat,” Schaffner said. “In the transition from one Administration to another, coordinating public health concepts and policies is, of course, very important.”

At least 66 people, mostly dairy workers, have been infected. Last week, the Louisiana Department of Health reported the first human death from bird flu in the country: that of a 65-year-old man who was exposed to birds in a backyard.

Samples of the virus collected from the Louisiana patient showed worrying signs of mutations that could make it more transmissible to humans, although the virus has not yet spread from person to person, according to the CDC.

It is estimated that 925 herds of dairy cows from 16 states have been infected with the H5N1 virus, according to the Department of Agriculture. The virus has killed millions of poultry, driving up the price of eggs and causing some shortages.

Dr. Erin Sorrell, a senior researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, stressed the importance of expanding testing and surveillance efforts to track cases in both animals and humans, which requires complex coordination between federal officials, state and local. In early January, the Biden Administration announced $306 million in funding to support bird flu surveillance and other preparedness efforts.

“If the policies implemented and if they are stopped or paused, we are giving the virus the opportunity not only to spread to poultry and livestock – with the subsequent impact on those economies, on those animals and on the people who live and work with them – but also to encourage the virus to essentially infect more people,” Sorrell said.

Last month, the Department of Agriculture stepped up its response to the outbreak, issuing a federal order requiring testing the national milk supply. The federal government has also issued guidelines and funded outreach activities to help prevent the virus from spreading to farmworkers who come into contact with sick animals.

But these efforts must be stepped up under the Trump Administration to prevent bird flu from spreading, said David Stiefel, a former national security analyst at the Department of Agriculture.

“They need to find really good ways to incentivize farmers and industry owners to test. This Administration has made giant strides, but it’s not done,” Stiefel said.

The strain of bird flu causing the outbreak began spreading around the world among wild and poultry birds in 2020. It arrived in the United States in 2022 and has caused the infection or slaughter of more than 130 million birds, according to the Department of Agriculture.

The spread of the virus in mammals is worrying because it gives bird flu plenty of opportunities to jump to people and potentially mutate in a way that spreads effectively from person to person, infectious disease experts have said.

Concern about vaccine hesitancy

The Government has two bird flu vaccine candidates in limited quantities in its stockpile. Biden Administration officials have said they have no current plans to authorize them.

Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, former senior COVID-19 policy advisor in the Biden White House, stated that it would be critical for the next Administration to continue investing in the development of new bird flu vaccines and ensure that manufacturers had ability to cope with a sudden increase in demand in case they had to mass produce them, as the Trump Administration managed to do during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, Kennedy, Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, has spent decades publicly opposing vaccinesraising concerns about the future of federal support for vaccine programs. In 2023, Kennedy said that if elected president, he would tell the National Institutes of Health (HHS) to take “a break” from studying infectious diseases to focus on chronic diseases instead.

And vaccine hesitancy and refusal have also increased across the country since COVID-19 began.

“I am concerned about vaccine hesitancy and politicization after COVID-19, as well as anti-vaccine sentiment in general – I am very concerned about what could happen if we experience another pandemic,” Bhadelia said. “It keeps me awake.”

An HHS spokesperson said the agency and the Department of Agriculture have “collectively committed $2.5 billion to prepare for and respond to the avian flu outbreak.”

“We’ve done our job day in and day out for the American people — just like we did when we delivered 700 million vaccines to save American lives during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the spokesperson said. “We certainly hope that the incoming Administration take the threat of bird flu as seriously as we have“.