Former FDA Chief: We Should Be Worried About Bird Flu

Stories about bird flu continue to percolate in the news, and former FDA chief David Kessler is worried. In a New York Times essay, Kessler warns that the incoming Trump administration should be fully prepared for a serious turn. The US currently has confirmed 55 cases, all of them relatively mild and nearly all of them among dairy and poultry workers. But Kessler warns that the virus might be close to a dangerous shift, one that would make human-to-human transmission easier and would allow the virus to attach to the lining of the lungs, with far more dire outcomes for patients. A key point made by Kessler, who helped lead Operation Warp Speed in Donald Trump's first term to speed up COVID vaccines:

• "No one knows how many mutations will be required to set off human-to-human respiratory spread," he writes. "That could require many mutations and may never happen. But we could also be just two or three mutations away. If the virus begins to transmit efficiently among humans, it will be very difficult to contain, according to (a) Johns Hopkins assessment, and 'the likelihood of a pandemic is very high.'"

Read the full essay, in which Kessler urges mandatory testing of milk in all states and better progress on vaccines. (More bird flu stories.)