Leading Public Health Figure Calls on Biden to Authorize Bird Flu Vaccine

There have been 66 confirmed bird flu cases in the U.S., all but one of which caused only mild illness, and there have been no reports of human-to-human transmission of the virus.

by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.

A leading public health figure has called on the Biden administration to authorize a bird flu vaccine and ramp up testing for the virus across the U.S.

During a Dec. 29, 2024, interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Dr. Leana Wen, the former commissioner of the Baltimore City Health Department and a professor of public health at George Washington University, accused the outgoing Biden administration of not doing enough to address the bird flu outbreak.

“I feel like we should have learned our lesson from COVID that just because we aren’t testing, it doesn’t mean that the virus isn’t there. It just means that we aren’t looking for it. We should be having rapid tests, home tests, available to all farm workers, to their families, for the clinicians taking care of them,” Wen said.

There have been 66 confirmed bird flu cases in the U.S., all but one of which caused only mild illness. The first severe human infection in the U.S. was recorded on Dec. 18, in a Louisiana man over the age of 65 who was exposed to a backyard flock, NBC News reported. According to The New York Times, bird flu samples from the patient revealed “concerning” mutations of the virus.

During her appearance on “Face the Nation,” Wen criticized the lack of availability of a bird flu vaccine.

“There actually is a vaccine developed already against H5N1. The Biden administration has contracted with manufacturers to make almost 5 million doses of the vaccine. However, they have not asked the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] to authorize the vaccine,” Wen said.

She suggested the Biden administration take quick action to approve the vaccine before the Trump administration takes office later this month.

“They could get this authorized now, and also get the vaccine out … to farm workers and to vulnerable people. I think that’s the right approach, because we don’t know what the Trump administration is going to be doing around bird flu,” Wen said.

Wen suggested the Trump administration would seek additional evidence of the vaccine’s effectiveness before authorizing it.

“I don’t want to wait for the Trump administration to potentially hold up the vaccines saying that they want more evidence. Look, evidence is always good and facts are always good. New research is always good. But you also have to weigh that against a potential catastrophe, as we could be having for bird flu, the way that we had for COVID,” Wen said.

Wen suggested the potential confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, might pose obstacles to the authorization of a bird flu vaccine. She said:

“Kennedy has espoused many views in the past that are anti-vaccine. In fact, he’s been one of the leading anti-vaccine advocates in the country, if not in the world, over the last couple of decades. He’s also someone who has made his career from being an activist and not a scientist. …

“… it’s very concerning to have someone who doesn’t believe in how science works, in basic scientific principles, to be in charge of our nation’s preeminent scientific and medical agencies.”

Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender that Wen “is following the COVID-19 playbook pushing fear and rushed approval of unsafe vaccines.”

“Our farm, dairy and poultry workers should be outfitted with nasal/throat sprays, gargles and contagion kits if there are baseline risk factors for severe disease,” McCullough said. “Sadly, the poultry-to-human transmission is occurring when the workers are ordered to cull or mass-kill the chickens.”

Wen previously was an outspoken advocate of COVID-19 vaccines and restrictions.

In a July 2021 NPR interview, she expressed her hope that the Biden administration “at this point really gets behind vaccine mandates,” adding that the government “ended masking requirements too abruptly and prematurely.”

In March 2023, Wen told CNN that COVID-19 “misinformation” led to declining public trust in medical science. As recently as September 2024, Wen advised the public to get COVID-19 boosters.

Wen’s remarks mirrored those of other public health experts. Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator under then-President Donald Trump, told CNN last week, “We kind of have our head in the sand about how widespread this is from the zoonotic standpoint, from the animal-to-human standpoint.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said this week that bird flu poses a low risk to the public. But CNN on Tuesday reported that officials from the National Institutes of Health have called for more action to combat bird flu.

Last month, California declared a state of emergency for bird flu, after cases were detected in dairy cows on farms in Southern California.

Epidemiologist Nicholas Hulscher told The Defender the bird flu vaccine that’s been developed poses a greater risk to the public than the virus itself.

“The bird flu vaccine that Dr. Wen wants approved for humans is called AUDENZ, made by CSL Seqirus. Humans injected with AUDENZ died at a rate of 1 in 200 (0.5%) compared to 0.1% in the placebo group, in one of the clinical trials (Study 3),” Hulscher said.

The AUDENZ vaccine doesn’t cover the current circulating strain of bird flu, “meaning it would likely be highly ineffective and promote the emergence of mutant strains,” Hulscher said. “This injection must not be authorized for human use.”

Experts dispute Wen’s claims

“Face the Nation” asked Wen if the current bird flu outbreak is “worrisome,” and she described the latest cases as “one more sign that the drum beat of bird flu coming closer to humans is becoming a major threat.”

“It hasn’t been a major issue in humans, because while it spreads among birds, it hasn’t really spread among mammals. But now there is this mutation, and there’s another concern now … which is that we’re in flu season, and it’s possible that a single person could have bird flu and seasonal flu at the same time,” Wen said.

According to Wen, “The viruses could exchange genes. You could develop a new hybrid virus, and if you now have a virus that’s more contagious and causes more severe disease, that’s when it becomes a major threat to humankind.”

Wen said that, in prior bird flu outbreaks, the mortality was 52%, arguing that while cases during the current outbreak have been “mild,” this could change “when bird flu affects more vulnerable individuals.”

Yet, “there are no reports of person-to-person transmission and no signs that the virus has changed to spread more easily among humans,” the Daily Mail reported.

MedPageToday on Tuesday reported that a 13-year-old Canadian girl — with a history of asthma and a body mass index over 35 — who was hospitalized in critical condition after bird flu infection has recovered.

A Dec. 31 letter in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) raised concerns about a mutated form of the virus found in the girl. But a peer-reviewed article that appeared the same day in the NEJM stated that bird flu cases in the current outbreak were found to generally cause “mild illness, mostly conjunctivitis, of short duration.”

“The best course of action is to drop PCR testing, quarantines, culling and vaccines and allow the herds to fully develop natural immunity which has occurred for decades with this illness,” McCullough said. “Because this is a very mild human infection with no human-to-human transmission, we can take practical steps to prevent and handle the infection as the outbreak naturally burns out.”