Former Baltimore Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen told “Face the Nation” that the FDA should authorize the bird flu vaccine.
“I feel like we should have learned our lesson from COVID, that just because we aren’t testing doesn’t mean the virus isn’t there,” Wen, the former president of Planned Parenthood, said Sunday.
“We should be having rapid tests, home tests, available to all farm workers, to their families, for the clinicians taking care of them, so that we aren’t waiting for public labs and CDC labs to tell us what’s bird flu or not,” she added.
She noted that a bird flu vaccine is already developed.
“There actually is a vaccine developed already against H5N1. The Biden administration has contracted with manufacturers to make almost 5 million doses of the vaccine,” Wen said. “However, they have not asked the FDA to authorize the vaccine. There’s research done on it. They could get this authorized now and also get the vaccine out.”
She went on to discuss the incoming Trump administration’s possible actions on bird flu. “We don’t know what the Trump administration is going to be doing around bird flu,” Wen said. “If they have people coming in with anti-vaccine stances, could they hold up vaccine authorization? If they don’t want to know how much bird flu is out there, could they withhold testing? That’s a possibility.”
Wen acknowledged that the recent cases of bird flu have been mild, but warned the virus may affect “vulnerable” populations more severely.
“When you get to children, to pregnant women, to older individuals with chronic illnesses, we don’t know how deadly how dangerous bird flu is going to be for those individuals and again that’s one more reason why we don’t want it to spread and apply more mutations,” she said.
