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By David Corn December 3, 2024 |
re you ready for another pandemic?
Last week, David Kessler, who headed the Food and Drug Administration during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations and who served as the Biden administration’s chief science officer during Covid-19, issued a stark warning regarding “the possibility that the spreading avian flu might mutate to enable human-to-human transmission.” So far, he noted, there has been no person-to-person spread of H5N1. But he pointed out we may be two or three mutations away from a virus that can cause a pandemic. “The incoming Trump administration needs to be prepared,” he said.
Kessler, perhaps too politely, did not state the obvious: Donald Trump has proposed a public health team that will not be prepared and that may well do more harm than good. As Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine, surgery interventional cardiologist, and CNN medical analyst, put it in a tweet: “If a new pandemic comes to the US next year we’ll have an NIH director [Jay Bhattacharya] who advocated for letting COVID burn through the US, an HHS Sec [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] who believes in raw milk but not vaccines, an FDA commissioner [Marty Makary] who said COVID would be over by 4/2021, and a CDC director [Dave Weldon] who supported the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism.” (I added the names to Reiner’s post.)
