Health chief warns next pandemic ‘could kill half of those infected’

Dr. Robert Redfield, former head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has shared an ominous prediction about bird flu becoming a potential trigger for a new global pandemic. He said it could lead to deaths for half of those it infects.

Dr. Redfield, who led the CDC from 2018 to 2021, is sounding the alarm that bird flu, or bird flu, is the next major health threat looming after the Covid-19 pandemic. Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) recorded a death in Mexico caused by the H5N2 strain of bird flu – the first human victim associated with the virus.

“I think it’s very likely that at some point it’s not a question of if, but more of a question of when we’re going to have a bird flu pandemic,” Dr. Redfield told NewsNation. The United States is already seeing its livestock ravaged by the virus, leading to several outbreaks affecting dairy cows and infecting more than a thousand poultry flocks, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture.

Recent statistics from the CDC revealed that four people in the US have contracted bird flu, Mirror US reports. All the infected people, who were agricultural workers, were unrelated and had relatively mild symptoms such as cough and conjunctivitis. There is currently no evidence of person-to-person transmission of the virus, and therefore the CDC perceives a low risk to the general public from bird flu.

But Dr Redfield said: “Unfortunately, when (bird flu) gets into humans, it has significant mortality. Probably somewhere between 25% and 50% mortality”.

In contrast, the death rate from Covid-19 is 0.6%. Between 2003 and 2024, about 889 cases of human H5N1 bird flu were reported worldwide in 23 countries, according to WHO records. Of these, around 463 patients died, resulting in an alarming mortality rate of 52%.

According to Dr Redfield, there is a similarity between Covid-19 and bird flu, as “it is likely to spread through aerosols and droplets”. For bird flu to affect humans, five amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—need changes in their key receptors.

“Once the virus acquires the ability to attach itself to human receptors and then move from person to person, then you have a pandemic,” Dr. Redfield said. “Like I said, I think it’s just a matter of time.”

As for the duration of amino acid adaptation, Dr. Redfield admitted that he was not sure. However, he expressed concern about its detection in cattle across the US.

The latest CDC figures suggested that about 90 dairy herds had succumbed to it, spanning 12 states. But the main concern for Dr. Redfield is not just animal-to-human transmission of the virus, which includes the three human cases linked to US dairy cows. He’s more concerned about an outbreak stemming from lab-grown bird flu.

“I know exactly which amino acids I need to change because in 2012, against my advice, the scientists who did these experiments actually published them,” he admitted. “So the recipe for making bird flu highly infectious to humans already exists.”