Canceled bird flu research is a recipe for disaster
The Trump administration is woefully unprepared to deal with a pandemic.
By Jeff Nesbit
Last week’s news that President Donald Trump’s administration has canceled Moderna’s $600 million bird flu vaccine mRNA platform development that the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human services fast-tracked last year proves, yet again, that the Trump White House is woefully unprepared to deal with a potential bird flu pandemic.
It is a recipe for disaster.
Should the H5N1 avian flu virus mutate and become capable of human-to-human transmission, the repercussions of the decision to cancel the accelerated development of an mRNA bird flu vaccine would be enormous.
Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. allowed Elon Musk and his DOGE team to run off the senior career public and animal health officials who had decades of experience in dealing with life-and-death issues, such as pandemics.
As a result, not only are there fewer veteran, seasoned career public health officials in critical roles at federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health, but it also appears that the Trump administration is badly underestimating the real threat from a potential avian flu pandemic.
That was not the case in the Biden administration, which had a coordinated, all-of-government plan for bird flu and executed on it. Biden officials at HHS and the U.S. Department of Agriculture took their jobs seriously when it came to the potential for avian flu to turn into a pandemic.
In 2024, after H5N1 had been detected in dairy cows in Texas and began to spread to other states, the Biden administration’s relevant government agencies and departments – CDC, USDA, FDA, NIH, and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response – collaborated closely to make sure the threat of bird flu to the general public remained low. All told, the Biden administration spent $2.5 billion ($1.5 billion at USDA and $1 billion through the various agencies at HHS) to mitigate the risks from bird flu.
During the Biden administration, HHS jump-started an accelerated bird flu vaccination program (which Kennedy’s team derailed). Biden’s U.S. Department of Agriculture likewise started a dairy cow vaccine program in the event such a vaccine was necessary.
HHS’s Agency for Strategic and Preparedness Response created 10 million doses of the existing vaccines for H5N1, enough to vaccinate every farm worker if needed. CDC confirmed every single test from farm workers infected with bird flu.
Throughout 2024, all the relevant government agencies coordinated in monitoring, testing, viral surveillance and characterization, worker protection, and animal-health collaboration.
Some aspects of the all-of-government response took longer than the Biden administration hoped. A national milk survey program to detect avian flu on farms was met with resistance from some farmers. But, eventually, Biden officials were able to overcome that, and the milk testing program went live late last year.
Biden’s HHS also kept the media and the public health community apprised of everything it was doing. During the second half of 2024, the Biden administration held 32 on-the-record briefings for reporters and infectious disease experts. Kennedy’s HHS has yet to conduct a single briefing on bird flu and has killed major research reports on the topic.
We’ve known about the potential for avian flu to turn into a deadly pandemic for some time. It’s why federal public health officials took it so seriously; spent considerable resources across multiple programs to track, contain, and prepare for a pandemic; and moved as quickly as they could to put programs in place in case vaccinations were necessary.
For now, the risk to the general public from bird flu remains low. But bird flu is a dangerous threat. If human-to-human transmission becomes possible, it could quickly become a deadly pandemic much worse than the Covid-19 pandemic.
If the Trump administration continues to undermine federal science and public health agencies, ignore scientific and medical best practices on how to prepare for and deal with infectious disease outbreaks, and derail vaccine research and development for bird flu and other potential pandemics, the consequences will almost certainly be deadly for millions of Americans.
Jeff Nesbit was the assistant secretary of health for public affairs at HHS during the Biden administration.
Not only are we not prepared for a pandemic but we aren’t prepared for a potential bioterrorism attack either.
Immunosuppressed or immunocompromised people are at high risk especially but for that matter we all are. The best scientists and doctors at the HHS departments have been fired and without these people overseeing the day to day operations and activities of the laboratories they are responsible for is immensely crippling. With no security clearance to be able to access medically and scientifically classified data and documents they are essentially dead in the water.
The actions of Donald Trump and his HHS secretary are criminal. These actions should be investigated by both houses of Congress. We should Demand this from our legislative branch.
Good article. This is a disaster in the making. Not to mention that the original intent of mRNA research was the development of cancer vaccines and mRNA research has been curtailed. There are so many holes in surveillance and coping with pathogens that a disaster inevitable.