A rooster roams on a farm on January 23, 2023 in Austin, Texas.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
As avian flu drives egg prices to record levels and increasingly poses a risk to humans, moves by the White House to cut spending and restrict communications have hobbled public health officials’ response, with the new administration yet to outline a clear strategy on how it plans to stem the spread of the virus.
State and local public health officials have gone weeks without regular updates on avian flu from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after President Donald Trump froze nearly all external communications from the agency, said a person familiar with the situation. It wasn’t until this week that some of those communications began to resume, the person said.
Widespread funding cuts across the government and new restrictions on funding for National Institutes of Health grants have also created uncertainty among infectious disease researchers and local health officials, who are unsure about what resources they will have to work with going forward. Meanwhile, cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development have limited monitoring of the virus overseas.
“When you add that uncertainty, it plays into what health departments can do when their entire funding situation is at risk,” said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “It makes it even harder to do more when you don’t think you’ll have the resources or they might get pulled out from under you.”
At the same time, key positions in the Trump administration central to responding to the threat of a pandemic have remained unfilled. And the secretaries running the Health and Human Services and Agriculture departments weren’t confirmed until this week, though bird flu was one of the first items on Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ agenda after her confirmation.
The disruptions come at a potentially perilous time. The virus has been decimating poultry flocks, causing egg prices to more than double. It has been showing signs it can evolve to more easily thrive in a variety of species, including a new strain detected among dairy cattle this month. While there are no indications the virus can be transmitted among humans, at least 68 people in the U.S. have contracted avian flu and one person has died, according to the CDC. Researchers worry that the more the virus replicates, the more opportunities it will have to develop a mutation that would enable it to spread easily from human to human.
“This is getting more and more dangerous and urgent, and the scientific community is setting off alarm flares,” said Stephen Morrison, who directs the global health policy center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But are they translating into the government moving at a faster pace or with a different resolve? No. Instead, we’re in a period of confused transition that’s been made worse by the disruptions in government function and the normal slowness of getting the new team in.”
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment on its strategy for addressing avian flu and what additional steps it planned to take to address the spread of the virus.
Rollins, who was confirmed by the Senate Thursday, told reporters that she had a briefing in the Oval Office Thursday night and would be announcing more on the department’s plan to address egg prices “in the coming days.”
“We are looking at every possible scenario to ensure that we are doing everything we can in a safe, secure manner, but also to ensure that Americans have the food that they need,” Rollins said when asked about the price of eggs. “And as a mom of four teenagers, actually, I fully understand and feel the pain of the cost of these eggs.”
White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said in an interview on MSNBC Thursday that the Trump administration would soon have a strategy now that Rollins has been confirmed.
“It turns out, President Biden’s team didn’t have an avian flu strategy, and now we’re about to have one, as soon as Brooke Rollins is at the Department of Agriculture,” said Hassett.
In a statement on egg prices earlier this week, the White House said Rollins would take “bold, decisive action to address the crisis” by refocusing the agency tasked with stopping the spread of the virus among animals “on its core mission: protecting the health of the United States’ plants, animals, and natural resources while simultaneously lowering costs.”
So far, though, public health officials say the White House has created more confusion than clarity.
In West Virginia, Michael Kilkenny, head of the Huntington Health Department, said he hasn’t been getting regular updates from the CDC for the past several weeks.
“We just don’t know what’s happening right now. We don’t know if this is expanding into our area if we aren’t getting that communication from the CDC,” said Kilkenny. “In more rural areas, there are small health departments that, without the information they need coming from the CDC, they’re not going to be able to inform their small-flock farmers, poultry farmers or higher-risk agricultural workers that depend on the local health department for information or services.”
The prospect of potential federal funding cuts have also caused his and other health departments he works with to begin contingency planning and put hiring and new projects on hold.
“We are holding on hiring and we are holding on planning while we are waiting to see that there is clear evidence that things are going to be funded before we can spend our work time planning or even submitting for a project,” said Kilkenny. “That is how this disrupts us.”
Along with limiting CDC communications with local health officials, the World Health Organization has also been receiving limited information on the spread of avian flu in the U.S. since Trump signed an executive order to withdraw from the global health organization, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a Feb. 12 press conference.
The “near-total communication freeze” at public health agencies “is deeply unprecedented, and that alone scares me more than anything else,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the pandemic center at the Brown University School of Public Health.
Nearly a month in, Trump has yet to name an official to head the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, which was created in 2022 by Congress to coordinate pandemic response across agencies. During the campaign, Trump said he would likely get rid of the office and criticized President Joe Biden’s efforts to prepare for another pandemic.
“He wants to spend a lot of money on something that you don’t know if it’s gonna be 100 years or 50 years or 25 years,” Trump said of Biden in a July interview with Time magazine. “And it’s just a way of giving out pork.”
“It doesn’t mean that we’re not watching out for it all the time,” Trump said. “But it’s very hard to predict what’s coming because there are a lot of variations of these pandemics.”
Trump’s key Cabinet officials who will be overseeing the federal response have given little insight into their strategy.
Rollins said during her Senate confirmation hearing last month that one of her top four priorities would be to put a team in place to stem the spread of avian flu, though she didn’t say what changes she would like to see the Agriculture Department make.
“There is a lot that I have to learn on this, and if confirmed, this will be, as I mentioned in my opening statement, one of the very top priorities,” Rollins said when asked about her response to avian flu. “We are hyperfocused on finding the team right now. I’m sure they’re already working. I have, obviously, respected the process and not gotten too involved. I know that the current team and the future team will be working hand in hand to do everything we can on animal disease.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday, said during his confirmation hearing that he would focus more on tackling chronic disease, like heart disease and diabetes, and less on infectious diseases. When asked about devoting resources to avian flu during his confirmation hearing, Kennedy said he “intends to devote the appropriate resources to preventing pandemics. That’s essential for my job.”
Previously, Kennedy has said the currently available vaccines for avian flu that the U.S. has stockpiled may be dangerous and ineffective. Researchers are working on developing a new generation of avian flu vaccines based on the same mRNA technology used to develop the Covid vaccines, which Kennedy called the “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” though studies have shown it to be safe.
Kennedy has also been a proponent of drinking raw milk, which can put people at risk of foodborne illness, including avian flu. The CDC has warned that it might be possible to contract bird flu from drinking raw milk and urged Americans to drink only pasteurized milk.
Agriculture industry officials and infectious disease researchers have been calling on the federal government to significantly ramp up its response with greatly expanded testing, funding for research to better understand the virus and develop new treatments, and more assistance for dairy farmers to encourage them to test their cattle.
The United Egg Producers, an advocacy group for the egg industry, is urging the federal government and Congress to devote more resources to researching how the virus is spreading and evolving and to develop more effective and widespread vaccinations for animals. The industry group has also been calling for more rules and enforcement around the testing and movement of animals, and additional funding for local laboratories to provide quick and accurate test results.
“Our industry needs more from our state and federal government animal health partners — and we need it fast,” the United Egg Producers said in a statement.
The organization says its industry has lost more than 100 million egg-laying hens since 2022, including more than 29 million over the past four months. Once a flock of birds is infected with the highly pathogenic strain of the avian flu, the virus quickly spreads and is fatal in the vast majority of birds. When a flock becomes infected, farmers and veterinarians are supposed to notify the USDA, which will kill the entire flock and decontaminate the facilities. The federal government reimburses the farmers for the live birds that are culled in the process.
Public health researchers have said the Biden administration didn’t react quickly enough to stop the spread of the virus among dairy cattle after it was first detected in herds in March. It wasn’t until December that the Agriculture Department rolled out a national milk testing program, and three of the country’s top milk-producing states still aren’t a part of that federal surveillance effort.
The Trump administration will have to work with officials in states that still aren’t regularly testing their milk to try to get them on board, said Morrison. Texas’ state agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller, told NBC News that surveillance milk testing was unnecessary in Texas since there weren’t any active cases of bird flu in the state’s commercial cattle or poultry.
“From April until the end of the Biden administration, the response was slow and sluggish,” said Morrison. “We are still not testing animals and humans at the level that is needed, we still don’t have a coherent strategy and a system of accountability, and we still don’t have in place the kind of compensation mechanisms needed for those dairy farmers who suffer losses because of infections in their herds.”
Researchers worry the U.S. is running out of time to strengthen its response.
“If we don’t act now, we’re only giving the virus more opportunity to continue to adapt and potentially evolve into something more dangerous in a human population,” said Erin Sorrell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Now is the time to act.”
