President Donald Trump might have campaigned on lowering the prices of groceries, but even as egg prices have become a minor national crisis, he has stayed quiet about the driving cause of America’s egg shortage: bird flu. Trump hasn’t outlined a plan for containing the virus, nor has he spoken about bird flu publicly since the CDC announced last April that the virus had infected a dairy worker. Last week, the CDC, which has ceased most communication with the public since Trump took office, posted data online that suggested humans may be able to spread the virus to cats. The agency quickly deleted the information.
Bird flu has now spread to cow herds across the country, led to the euthanization of tens of millions of domesticated poultry, sickened dozens of people in the United States, and killed one. The virus is not known to spread between humans, which has prevented the outbreak from exploding into the next pandemic. But the silence raises the question: How prepared is Trump’s administration if a widespread bird-flu outbreak does unfold? The administration reportedly plans to name Gerald Parker as the head of the White House’s Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, which was created in 2022 by Congress and is charged with organizing the responses of the various agencies that deal with infectious diseases. (I reached out to both Parker and the White House; neither replied.)
If the president names him to the post, the appointment might be the least controversial of any of Trump’s health-related picks: Parker is an expert on the interplay between human and animal health who served in the federal government for roughly a decade. But confronting bird flu—or any other pandemic threat—in this administration would require coordinating among a group of people uninterested in using most tools that can limit the spread of infectious disease.
Trump’s pick to lead the CDC, David Weldon, has questioned the safety of vaccines, and Jay Bhattacharya, the administration’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, vehemently opposed COVID shutdowns. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who likely will be installed as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services in the coming days, has implied that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have funded attempts to create a bird-flu virus capable of infecting humans, and that past threats of flu pandemics were concocted by federal health officials both to inflate their own importance and to pad the pockets of pharmaceutical companies that produce flu vaccines.
Many of Trump’s health appointees are united in their view that the U.S. overreacted to COVID. They—and plenty of Americans—argue that measures such as masking, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates were unnecessary to respond to COVID, or were kept in place for far too long. Faced with another major outbreak, the Trump administration will almost certainly start from that stance.
One way or another, Trump is likely to face some sort of public-health crisis this term. Most presidents do. Barack Obama, for instance, dealt with multiple major public-health crises, each brutal in its own way. Zika didn’t turn into a pandemic, but it still resulted in more than 300 American children being born with lifelong birth defects. Ebola, in 2014, killed only two people in the U.S., but allowing the virus, the death rate of which can be as high as 90 percent, to freely spread across America would have been catastrophic. In 2009 and 2010, swine flu led to more than 12,000 deaths in the U.S.; roughly 10 percent of the victims were under 18. Even if bird flu does no more than it already has, it’ll still cause a headache for the White House. Bird flu continues to wreak financial havoc for farmers, which is then trickling down to consumers in the form of higher prices, particularly on eggs.
Step by step, the U.S. keeps moving closer to a reality where the bird-flu virus does spread among people. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that cows have now contracted the variant of the virus that was responsible for the recent fatal case in the United States. That means the chances of humans catching that strain are now higher than they were: Many recent human cases have been in dairy farmworkers. As cases of seasonal flu increase too, so does the chance of the bird-flu virus gaining mutations that allow it to spread freely between humans. If both viruses infect the same cell simultaneously, they could swap genetic material, potentially giving the bird-flu virus new abilities for transmission.
Parker clearly understands this danger. Last year, he spoke to USA Today about the potential for the virus to mutate and change the outlook of the current epidemic. He also wrote on X that “federal, state, and private sector leaders need to plan for challenges we may face if H5N1 were to make the fateful leap and become a human pathogen.” How much leeway the Trump administration will give Parker—or whoever does run the pandemic-preparedness office—to keep the U.S. out of calamity is another matter.
Plenty of public-health experts have come to look back at the coronavirus pandemic and regret certain actions. Should bird flu worsen, however, many of the same tools could become the best available options to limit its toll. Parker, for his part, expressed support during the worst parts of the pandemic for masking, social distancing, and vaccinations, and although he said in 2020 that he doesn’t like lockdowns, his social-media posts at the time suggested he understood that some amount of community-level social distancing and isolation might be necessary to stop the disease’s spread. How eager the Trump administration will be to use such tools at all could depend on Parker’s ability to convince his colleagues to deploy them.
The White House pandemic-response office was set up to play air-traffic control for the CDC, the NIH, and other agencies that have a role amid any outbreak. But having a job in the White House and a title like director of pandemic preparedness does not guarantee that Parker will be able to win over the crew of pandemic-response skeptics he will be tasked with coordinating. And his job will be only more difficult after Trump sniped at the purpose of the office, telling Time in April that it “sounds good politically, but I think it’s a very expensive solution to something that won’t work.”
Although Trump appears to have thought better of dissolving the entire office, its director can’t really succeed at fulfilling its purpose without the president’s support. The only thing that could make persuading a group of pandemic skeptics to care about an infectious-disease outbreak more difficult is your boss—the president of the United States—undercutting your raison d’être. Parker has some sense of the enormity of the job he’d take on. In 2023, he tweeted, “Pandemic Preparedness, and global health security have to be a priority of the President and Congress to make a difference.” In 2025, or the years that follow, he may see firsthand what happens when the country’s leaders can’t be bothered.
The post Is Trump Ready for Bird Flu? appeared first on The Atlantic.
