Bird Flu Mutations Raise Fears Of A Broader Outbreak

Scientists with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have identified mutations in H5N1 bird flu infections — in hospitalized patients in Louisiana and British Columbia — that may enhance the virus’ ability to infect humans, the agency said.

CDC officials found several mutations in samples collected from people suffering severe respiratory illness that “may result in increased virus binding to α2-6 cell receptors found in the upper respiratory tract of humans,” they said Thursday. The agency also reported that the mutations likely happened in the patients’ bodies post-infection rather than in the jump from bird to human.

The troubling development is raising fears among public health experts that far more people are infected with the virus than the few dozen currently known — laying the ground for the incoming Trump administration to face potential health and agricultural crises soon after taking office.

Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator during the first Trump administration, excoriated the CDC in a CNN interview Friday morning for failing to learn the right lessons from Covid-19.

“Our No. 1 principle in preventing pandemics is detect, and if you go to the CDC website, you can see that they are monitoring more than 10,000 exposures, but they've only tested 530,” she said. “That means we're not testing enough. And we know from other viruses that a lot of the spread can be asymptomatic. So we kind of have our head in the sand about how widespread this is from the zoonotic standpoint, from the animal to human standpoint.”

Birx added that her greatest fear is someone getting infected with bird flu during the regular seasonal flu, potentially triggering mutations that make the former far more infectious to humans.

“We should be providing tests free of charge to dairy farm workers so they can test anonymously and weekly, because they'll want to know if they have both cases of potential flu co-circulating in their own body to protect their families,” she said.

Scott Gottlieb, another health policy veteran from Trump’s first administration, echoed Birx’s warning of inadequate testing in posts on X this week, writing that if H5N1 ultimately develops into a pandemic, “The U.S. will have only itself to blame.”

“Agricultural officials did just about everything wrong over last year, hoping the virus would burn out, and it didn’t,” said Gottlieb, who formerly headed the FDA.

Though one state, California, has declared a state of emergency, the CDC reiterated this week that it believes the risk to humans “remains low” as outbreaks continue to threaten cows, pigs and other livestock, eggs and dairy products, wildlife and the humans who may interact with them.