Deborah Birx, a doctor who served as former President Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, warned that the United States is making the “same mistakes” with bird flu as it did with COVID-19.
“That’s why I’m really worried because today we are making the same mistakes that we made with COVID. And what do I mean by that? “We’re not testing to really see how many people have been exposed and been infected asymptomatically,” Birx told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on Tuesday.
Birx served as coronavirus response coordinator in the Trump administration and has since sounded alarms about how the United States is not doing enough to prevent another pandemic.
A third human case of bird flu was identified in the state of Michigan last week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Like other previous cases identified since March, the person is a dairy farm worker who was exposed to infected cows.
The CDC has maintained that the current public health risk from bird flu is low, but that it will continue to monitor the situation.
Birx said all cows should be tested weekly for bird flu, adding that there are likely to be some undetected cases in humans.
“We have the technology. The good thing about the United States is that we are incredibly innovative and we have the ability to make these advances,” he said.
“We could jointly test all dairy workers. I think there are undetected cases in humans, because again we are only tracking people with symptoms. When we did that with COVID, the virus spread throughout the Northeast undetected, because it took a long time to reach vulnerable people,” he added.
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