The Biden administration, in a final push to shore up the nation’s pandemic preparedness infrastructure before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, announced on Thursday that it is committing an additional $306 million toward efforts to ward off a potential outbreak of bird flu in humans.
Federal health officials have been keeping a close eye on H5N1, a strain of avian influenza that is highly contagious and lethal to chickens, and has spread to cattle. The virus has not yet demonstrated that it can spread efficiently among people.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that the current risk to humans remains low, and that pasteurized milk products remain safe to consume. But should human-to-human transmission become commonplace, experts fear a pandemic that could be far more deadly than Covid-19.
The Biden administration has already spent about $1.8 billion battling bird flu since the spring of last year; $1.5 billion of that was spent by the federal Agriculture Department on fighting the virus among animals. The remainder has been spent by the Health and Human Services Department on efforts to protect people, according to federal officials.
The additional $306 million will go toward improving hospital preparedness, early stage research on therapeutics, diagnostics and vaccines. About $103 million will help maintain state and local efforts to track and test people exposed to infected animals, and for outreach to livestock workers and others at high risk.
The funds will be distributed in the next two weeks, Dr. Paul Friedrichs, the director of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, said in an interview Thursday.
“While C.D.C. reports that the risk to the general public is low, keeping communities healthy, safe and informed remains a top and urgent priority,” Dr. Friedrichs said.
He added that the money would go toward “existing programs that can work to improve preparedness, not just for bird flu, but for other pathogens as well.”
Thursday’s announcement comes amid a growing sense of urgency around H5N1. In mid-December, the C.D.C. confirmed the nation’s first “severe case” of H5N1 in a southwest Louisiana patient who was exposed to sick and dead birds in a backyard flock. Last month, California declared a state of emergency over bird flu in dairy cows.
With less than three weeks before President Biden leaves office, the timing of the announcement also reflects deepening concern among senior federal health officials that the Trump administration will slash the budgets of agencies including the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health.
Mr. Trump has said he would disband the White House preparedness office, although whether he could do so is unclear because the office was created by an act of Congress. His nominee for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said while he was running for president that he would “give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”
One senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter candidly, noted that because the $306 million comes from funds that have been appropriated but not spent by the Health and Human Services Department, the money cannot be rescinded regardless of any actions the next administration takes to restrict the mission of health agencies.
Some experts have accused the Biden administration of a lackluster bird flu response. In a report issued last month, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research institution, said the administration “continues to fall short in its management of the threat” and needed to “get serious about H5N1” by engaging governors, state and local leaders, and U.S. industry in the response.
“This is long overdue,” J. Stephen Morrison, director of the center’s Global Health Policy Center, said of Thursday’s announcement, adding that it was “going to be very welcome news to a health security community in America and outside of America, that are increasingly alarmed at how sluggish the response to H5N1 has been in America.”
He said the money is “a signal that they’re that they realize that they need to bolster the efforts on H5N1, because we’ve now entered a much different phase with the Louisiana case.”
Since the first case of H5N1 was confirmed in cattle last spring, the White House has met regularly with officials from the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as with industry.
Dr. Friedrichs said those meetings now take place twice a week. In addition to funding the development of mRNA vaccines, he said, the administration has established a national milk testing strategy and mandated testing of dairy cows moving across state lines.
The C.D.C. has also ramped up testing and surveillance of the pathogen, and has contracted with commercial manufacturers to make diagnostic tests.
Dr. Nirav D. Shah, principal deputy director of the C.D.C., in an interview Thursday, said about 200 C.D.C. scientists were currently working on bird flu.
Scores of people in the United States have contracted bird flu over the past year, most of them from infected cows or poultry. The overwhelming majority of the cases have been mild, which has reassured health officials, Dr. Shah said.
The case involving the Louisiana patient, however, was followed by an unsettling finding. Some of the genetic samples from the patient contained gene mutations that might help H5N1 infect people more easily. Dr. Shah said the patient remained in critical condition.
Experts know that each time the virus infects another person, it has another opportunity to mutate in a way that might increase its capability of spreading among people. In another troubling finding, one of the mutations identified in the Louisiana patient also turned up in a viral sample taken from a teenager with a severe case of bird flu in British Columbia, Canada.
“That’s our concern — the more shots on goal that we give the virus, the greater chance of there being a mutation of some sort that precipitates a much larger situation,” Dr. Shah said. “But we’re also equally interested in the scientific finding that thus far, in the current outbreak, cases have been milder than what we’ve seen historically.”
He said there are a few hypotheses about why that is, including that when dairy workers are infected by a splash of milk in the eye, they get a lower dose of virus that does not lead to the severe respiratory symptoms that doctors have seen in the past.
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