Deborah Birx, a physician who served as former President Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, warned that the United States is making the “same mistakes” with the bird flu as it did with COVID-19.
“This is why I’m really concerned because we’re making the same mistakes today 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 got asymptomatically infected,” Birx told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on Tuesday.
Birx served as the coronavirus response coordinator in Trump’s administration and has since sounded the alarm bells on how the U.S. 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 had exposure to infected cows.
The CDC has maintained that the current public health risk in connection to the bird flu is low, but that it will continue to monitor the situation.
Birx said that every cow should be getting tested weekly for the bird flu, adding that there are likely some undetected cases in humans.
“We have the technology. The great thing about America is we’re incredibly innovative and we have the ability to have these breakthroughs,” she said.
“We could be pool testing every dairy worker. I do believe that there’s undetected cases in humans, because we’re once again 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 get to the vulnerable individuals,” she added.
