Experts' bird flu warning

Politico

9 hours ago

With David Lim, Erin Schumaker and Simon Levien
Driving the Day
BIRD FLU LATEST — Bird flu, for the moment, appears to be under control. But experts have a warning for federal and state health officials: Fall is coming — so don't get too comfortable, Sophie and David report.
Over the past few months, avian flu cases among humans, cattle and poultry have slowed — easing fears that the U.S. could be hurdling toward another major pandemic and prompting the CDC to end its emergency response.
When viruses collide: Eight public health experts and two state health officials from Washington and California — two states hit especially hard by the outbreak — told POLITICO that the decision makes sense if the federal government's case count is accurate. But they warned that things could shift quickly as the weather cools off. The seasonal migration of birds and the human flu season will increase the chance of a fall influenza-bird flu mash-up, which could make it more likely that bird flu will spread among humans, the experts warned.
'The most likely scenario is that someone will get infected with both H5N1 and a seasonal flu virus, and they will swap genes, and that reassortment could kick off the next pandemic,' said Jennifer Nuzzo, a professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health.
And the emergency's end comes after the Trump administration canceled hundreds of millions of dollars it had awarded to Moderna to help the company develop an mRNA vaccine for flu strains with pandemic potential — including avian flu — leading some experts worried the U.S. isn't doing enough to prepare for the possibility of an avian flu outbreak.
'We are going to see another influenza pandemic, and it could be much worse than we saw with Covid, and we're not preparing for that at all,' said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. 'We have an opportunity with mRNA technology to make a vaccine much faster … and yet, if you look right now, we've cut all funding within the U.S. government for that type of work.'
An accurate case count? The World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Organisation for Animal Health recently issued a joint assessment that the global public health risk of avian flu is low. The groups said their confidence in the assessment is medium, partly because there 'may be biases in surveillance, testing and reporting.'
Nuzzo cautioned that hesitation among farmworkers — many of whom are undocumented — to be tested for the virus, as well as local politics, might make it more difficult to test people who've been potentially exposed to the virus in the fall.
'A matter of time': Bird flu this summer has been comparatively quieter compared with this time last year, and Nuzzo doesn't think the virus is spreading under the radar at similar levels seen last summer. But she cautioned that while it's not clear when another flu pandemic will emerge, it's only a matter of time. Three major flu pandemics struck during the 1900s, part of a pattern of recurring outbreaks throughout history.
Former CDC principal deputy director Nirav Shah said increased global connectivity, the convergence of the boundaries between animals and humans, climate change and the rise of dense cities mean the number of pandemic flus in the past century should be viewed as a baseline, even though society has new treatments and other methods to intervene faster than in the past.
WELCOME TO MONDAY PULSE. The Senate adjourned Saturday evening, meaning we're officially in August recess season. Send your tips, scoops and feedback to [e-mail] and [e-mail], and follow along @kelhoops and @sophie_gardnerj.
AROUND THE AGENCIES
BLUE STATE REBUTTAL — Blue states filed a brief Friday opposing the Trump administration's request to the Supreme Court for relief from a lower court's order, Erin reports.
That order had blocked the administration from cutting grants related to diversity, equity and inclusion from the National Institutes of Health.
'The only unlawful decisions here are the federal government's,' the brief says. 'The only urgency is that manufactured by NIH in its haste to implement its unprecedented and unreasoned policies. The government has not shown any need for a stay.'
In addition to being unnecessary, plaintiffs argued a stay would harm universities and institutions in their states and could hurt the public if, for example, clinical trials are canceled. Plaintiff states included Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin.
The administration requested relief last week on the grounds that the federal government shouldn't be required to pay for research not aligned with President Donald Trump's executive orders and his administration's priorities.
Key context: U.S. District Judge William Young ordered the administration in June to restore hundreds of scientific grants the NIH terminated this year.
During a hearing on two lawsuits about grant terminations, the Massachusetts judge, a former President Ronald Reagan appointee, rebuked the administration for what he called 'appalling' and 'palpably clear' discrimination against racial minorities and LGBTQ+ Americans.
Industry Intel
COMMON GROUND WITH AMA — Dr. Bobby Mukkamala, the American Medical Association's new president, is seeking common ground with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., even as the AMA has skirmished with Kennedy over his changes at HHS, Simon reports.
Mukkamala told POLITICO on Friday he supports Kennedy's push to swap out unhealthy food additives, like Coca-Cola's decision to replace high-fructose corn syrup with cane sugar in its soda recipe. He added that he wants to prevent food producers from 'dictating' Americans' diets. Mukkamala, an otolaryngologist, has a background in lifestyle medicine, which lines up with Kennedy's interest in preventive care.
But Mukkamala, who has been gearing up for his role for several months, said he hasn't met or spoken with the secretary. He earlier sent two letters to Kennedy on his personal letterhead that he described as entreaties to find common ground upon his appointment as secretary.
His letters went unanswered, Mukkamala said at the Asian American Journalists Association conference in Seattle on Friday.
Kennedy has been critical of the AMA, arguing it doesn't have patients' best interests in mind, as the group has pushed back and argued that the secretary has devalued expertise in HHS ranks. The doctors' group criticized the purge of experts from a vaccine safety panel and warned gravely about a similar dismissal Kennedy might take against an HHS preventative care task force.
Mukkamala, in his AAJA session, was also skeptical of Susan Monarez, the first nonphysician to lead the CDC in decades after her confirmation Tuesday.
'To have someone that is a medical doctor is critically important,' he said. 'And you put them in a position like that, you have to wonder, how good are they going to be at that, right?'
Monarez earned a doctorate in microbiology and immunology and was deputy director of ARPA-H, the agency former President Joe Biden created several years ago to invest in high-risk, high-reward research.
Public Health
NEW KENNEDY OP-ED — On Friday afternoon, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took to a publication called Trial Site News — a website that often publishes anti-vaccine activists — to criticize a recent study by Danish researchers that found no harms associated with exposure to low amounts of aluminum through early childhood vaccinations.
Before Kennedy became health secretary, he spread misinformation about vaccines and co-founded the Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group.
The study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in July, used nationwide registry data of more than 1,000,000 children to look for links between aluminum exposure and 50 chronic disorders, including autism.
Kennedy argues that the study's design makes its results unreliable, including the decision to exclude children diagnosed with certain congenital or preexisting conditions from the study.
'The architects of this study meticulously designed it not to find harm,' Kennedy writes. 'From the outset, Andersson et al. excluded the very children most likely to reveal injuries associated with high exposures to aluminum adjuvants in childhood vaccines.'
The study's first author did not respond to a request for comment. The findings largely align with other studies that have found no evidence linking vaccines to autism or other neurological conditions.
WHAT WE'RE READING
POLITICO's Samuel Benson reports that West Virginia schools have banned certain artificial food dyes.
CBS News' Kaia Hubbard reports on CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz announcing applications for the rural hospital fund will go out in early September.