Former CDC Chief Warns Bird Flu Could Be ‘More Catastrophic Than COVID’

Health officials in Louisiana announced Monday the first bird flu death in the United States. The elderly individual, who had underlying medical conditions, was exposed to the virus from a backyard flock and wild birds.

There have been 66 reported cases of bird flu in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the risk remains law, the CDC’s former director has urged Americans to take the virus seriously.

Robert Redfield, who led the CDC during the first Trump administration, spoke with The Daily Signal last year about bird flu. He predicted bird flu, also known as H5N1, would be “much more catastrophic than the COVID pandemic.”

Redfield served on a nonpartisan commission on China and COVID-19, which last year released a report, “Holding China Accountable for Its Role in the Most Catastrophic Pandemic of Our Time: COVID-19.” He spoke to The Daily Signal about its recommendations in July.

An excerpt from our conversation is below. The full interview is available from “The Daily Signal Podcast.”

Rob Bluey: Could you share with us about some of the steps that you think policymakers in Washington should take now that they’ve had the benefit of seeing your COVID-19 report and some of the findings?

Robert Redfield: We need a 9/11-type commission to go through and really take this apart—a nonpartisan commission to really see what happened here, what went right, what went wrong, because I’m of the view, and some people may disagree with me, but I’m of the view that the most important national security threat that our nation has right now is biosecurity.

I think it’s a time for our nation to step back and realize that the playing field has changed, similar to what happened when, say, the atomic bomb came into the theater, and we’ve really realized that nuclear and atomic issues had a central piece in our national security posture. Well, I’ll argue biosecurity needs to have that central piece.

So, part of it is to go through … and take a good look at it. And really start to look at what is it that we need to do to be better prepared because I’m also of the point of view that we are going to have another pandemic. I do believe it’s going to be much more catastrophic than the COVID pandemic. I refer to the COVID pandemic as the lesser pandemic. The great pandemic is coming.

I think it’s going to be a bird flu pandemic. You hear a lot about it. We have over 100 million chickens and turkeys infected in the United States already. But that virus likes to go in chickens and turkeys and ducks. It doesn’t really know how to go in humans yet. But it has moved into 27 different mammals in the United States, including dolphins and seals and polar bears and brown bears and black bears and skunks and mice.

It’s in a lot of species. And it gets into those species, it’s trying to learn how to, “OK, how can I get in the species? OK, the next thing, how can I get that species now to transmit to itself?” All right? And eventually, there’ll be changes.

We know that it only needs four amino acid changes. Four amino acids is all needed to take COVID bird flu that can’t infect humans to make it a bird flu that’s highly infectious for humans. Now, in biological terms, you may say four is not very many, but in biological, that’s a huge species barrier for it to overcome.

That could take 10 years, 100 years, 500 years, who knows, OK? But if one does purposeful gain-of-function research, where I and the laboratory make those four amino acid changes, I can make this virus in months.

And this is why I’ve called for a moratorium on gain-of-function research until we can have a broader public debate about it and how we can have it really much more regulated—if the society decides it needs to be done. I’m not convinced it needs to be done. I don’t think there’s really any benefit from it. Some of my colleagues disagree with me, but I think we shouldn’t do it until we know how we do it in a safe, responsible, and effective way and we clearly can’t do that at the present time.

Bluey: Do you think it’s possible to have a 9/11-style commission and what would it take? Would it take a president to endorse that type of idea?

Redfield: You need a president to want to provide the leadership for it, for sure, and you need Congress to really want to get behind it and let people see.

I think it is a really important first step and we have now journalists on both sides of the spectrum calling for it. I know Chris Cuomo, who’s fairly liberal, is a very aggressive advocate now to get a 9/11 commission. And I think many of us, like myself and others, and now the commission report, believe it’s our first recommendation. So, I think it’s gonna be really important.

I think people don’t realize COVID is here to stay. COVID is now the third or fourth leading cause of death in America. So, it’s not gone away.

I’m still practicing medicine one and a half days a week. Seventy-five percent of my practice now is long COVID, which is probably about anywhere from 5% to 20%. We probably have about 15 million Americans right now who are significantly debilitated from long COVID. Good news, it’s likely going to get better over time with them. But the bad news, it’s quite a debilitating illness.

And so, even though they may be frustrated with COVID and the policies … that went with it, I think they need to, we need to really get aggressive in recognizing—what I started saying—that the national security implications of biosecurity are substantial. And that when, and I don’t think it’s if, I think when bird flu learns how to go human to human, our nation and the world will go through really a catastrophic period of time that will make the COVID pandemic look like sort of grade school.

So far we’ve had 888 individuals in the world since 2003 infected with what we call H5N1, which is the dominant bird flu that’s going around now. There’s some other viruses also. Of those 888 individuals, 52% of them died. So, it’s mortality, whereas COVID’s mortality was about 0.6%. Bird flu’s mortality is going to be north of 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%. It’s going to be catastrophic.

And we can prepare by—and I’ve argued this, and I will continue to argue it. I think that since this is such a national security threat, we should have a response proportional to the threat.

We have a Defense Department, which I spent 23 years in, that has a $900 billion-a-year defense group of which most of those resources are really to the private sector, to defense contractors to make sure that we have the defense capacity we need with planes and missiles and bullets and drones, etc. I will argue we need to build the same capacity, maybe not $900 billion worth, but we need to have a proportional to the threat response grounded in government.

I would propose the Department of Energy and then most of it is private sector contractors that have antiviral drug development, that have vaccine development, that have diagnostics, that have preventive material that we can use to protect ourselves, and that also can predict what kind of medical devices that we would need for a respiratory.

Many people don’t know, when COVID happened, it originally was causing a lot of respiratory deaths because that original virus liked to replicate in the lower lung. The current omicron and beyond goes upper airway, throat, so we don’t see the same degree of respiratory disease.

But in early COVID, we had a lot of respiratory disease. And the one thing we found out right away, as did Italy, is we didn’t have enough ventilators. And so, Vice President [Mike] Pence very rapidly went up to Ford, up in Michigan, and asked the Ford company if they would shut down their car lines and turn it over to make ventilators so we’d have ventilators. We ought to do that prospectively. We shouldn’t be just sitting here saying, “Oh, this will never happen.” It is going to happen and we should be as prepared as possible to minimize the impact.

And I will argue the No. 1 thing that we need to do is have a huge push on developing antiviral agents so that we have not just two that we have right now for COVID but that we have multiple antiviral agents that could be used that would be effective to minimize the impact that this virus has.

Antiviral agents do two things. It can keep you alive, which is good thing. But antiviral agents can also change the infectivity of the individual, so they infect less people. And antiviral can also be used prophylactically so that if I take it, I’m less likely to have the virus actually successfully infect me. So we ought to be aggressive there. That’s our best defense.

Vaccines are important, but as we know from COVID, they didn’t stop 1.1 million Americans from dying, all right? They did keep certain people alive, and we’ve saved a lot of lives, particularly the vulnerable. I’ve always been an advocate of vaccines for the vulnerable. I’ve never been an advocate for mandating vaccines. I think that was a big public health mistake, and I don’t think we should advocate vaccines for people that don’t have a risk for bad outcome, which is most of us under the age of 50. But if you’re old like me, 73 years old tomorrow or the next day, then my life can be saved by the vaccine.

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