Bird flu: U.S. officials prepare for additional cases, testing components for potential vaccine

Two candidate vaccine viruses — essentially the building blocks manufacturers use to produce a vaccine — appear well matched to protect against the H5N1 strain circulating among dairy cattle and birds, according to federal health officials. It’d probably be weeks to months before those shots could first be made available if needed, according to a Health and Human Services official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation.

Top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency is well poised to detect if a person has H5N1 through the agency’s regular surveillance for seasonal flu at more than 100 public health labs in all states as well as enhanced monitoring put in place in 2022 for anyone who has been exposed to birds infected with that strain.

“CDC and the whole U.S. government is taking this situation very seriously,” CDC Director Mandy Cohen said in an interview. “We had not seen avian flu in cattle prior to last week. That is new. It’s a reservoir for virus to circulate and potentially, change.”

The development underscores critical questions about whether the country is equipped to handle an influenza outbreak after the coronavirus pandemic, the worst global health crisis in a century, exposed the weaknesses in the nation’s public health infrastructure and decimated the public’s trust in key federal agencies.

More than half a dozen federal officials say their job is to prepare for the worst but said risk to the general public remains low. H5N1 was first identified in geese in China in 1996, but outbreaks in the past haven’t led to an explosion of cases in humans.

The heightened attention on bird flu comes after the virulent H5N1 strain was recently identified in U.S. dairy cattle for the first time. Federal and state officials announced Monday that a dairy worker in Texas is being treated for bird flu, marking the second-ever human case of this bird flu strain in the United States. The patient — who experienced eye inflammation as the only symptom — was exposed to cattle presumed to be infected with the virus.

Disease trackers are monitoring for additional cases, particularly whether the virus can jump from human to human, which has happened infrequently and would be cause for more alarm.

“Why I feel we can say the risk of avian flu remains low to the public is because the virus we are seeing in the cattle and in this one human case is the same genetic virus that we were seeing in poultry,” Cohen said, meaning the virus has not yet evolved to spread easily in humans.

Since bird flu isn’t a novel virus, some experts believe the country is better prepared to tackle such an outbreak than covid, but cautioned against overconfidence.

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