New strain of bird flu is detected in a Nevada dairy worker, CDC says
NEW YORK — A dairy worker in Nevada was infected with a new type of bird flu that's different from the version that has been spreading in U.S. herds since last year, federal health officials said Monday.
The illness was considered mild. The person's main symptom was eye redness and irritation, similar to most bird flu cases associated with dairy cows. The person wasn't hospitalized and has recovered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The newer strain had been seen before in more than a dozen people exposed to poultry, but this is the first time an infection was traced to a cow. The Nevada dairy worker was exposed at a farm in Churchill County, in the west central part of the state, state health officials said.
CDC officials said there is no evidence the virus has spread from this person to any other people. The agency continues to say the virus poses a low risk to the general public.
The bird flu currently spreading through animals, and some people, is known to scientists as Type A H5N1 influenza. But there are different strains.
A version known as B3.13 was confirmed in March after spreading to cattle in late 2023, scientists said. It has infected 962 cattle herds in 16 states, the vast majority of them in California.
The newer version, known as D1.1, was confirmed in Nevada cattle on Jan. 31. It was found in milk collected as part of a monitoring program started in December.
That discovery meant distinct forms of the virus spread from wild birds into cattle at least twice. Experts said it raises questions about wider spread and the difficulty of controlling infections in animals and the people who work with them.
At least 68 people in the U.S. have been reported infected with bird flu in the last year, according to CDC data. All but a small handful worked closely with cows or poultry.
Most caught the B3.13 version. The CDC previously said the D1.1 version had been seen only in cases in Louisiana and Washington state. But on Monday, the agency revealed that available data indicates D1.1 last year likely infected a total of 15 people in five states — Iowa, Louisiana, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin — all related to poultry.
The D1.1 version of the virus was linked to the first U.S. death tied to bird flu and to a severe illness in Canada. A person in Louisiana died in January after developing severe respiratory symptoms following contact with wild and backyard birds. In British Columbia, a teen girl was hospitalized for months with a virus traced to poultry.
While the risk to the general public is low, the CDC says bird flu poses a greater threat to people with close or prolonged contact with infected cows, birds or other animals. Those people are encouraged to wear protective equipment and take other precautions.
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The Hill
2 hours ago
- The Hill
How Kennedy's overhaul could make vaccines more expensive
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s moves to upend decades of vaccine policy could hit patients hardest in their wallets, as shifting guidance over shots could make insurance coverage confusing and scattershot. For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) independent advisory panel recommended which shots Americans should get and when. The Affordable Care Act requires all insurance companies to cover, for free, all vaccines the panel recommends. Those recommendations also help states decide which shots should be mandated for schoolchildren. Kennedy's most recent move to purge the entire advisory panel and replace them with his own handpicked members, including several vocal vaccine critics, is throwing that process into doubt. 'If we have a system that has been dismantled — one that allowed for open, evidence-based decisionmaking and that supported transparent and clear dialogue about vaccines — and then we replace it with a process that's driven largely by one person's beliefs, that creates a system that cannot be trusted,' Helen Chu, a newly ousted member of the panel and professor of infectious disease at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said during a press conference. Vaccine prices vary, but without insurance, coronavirus vaccines can cost nearly $150, the MMR shot ranges from $95 to nearly $280, and the HPV vaccine can exceed $300, according to CDC data. Individual pharmacies could charge even more. Candace DeMatteis, policy director at the Partnership to Fight Infectious Disease, said she worries about creating a two-tiered system. 'Out of pocket costs for vaccines become an issue where we could end up with a system where some people can afford vaccinating themselves and their families and others cannot,' DeMatteis said. Prior to enactment of the Affordable Care Act, vaccine coverage varied significantly depending on the type of insurance a person had. If the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) changes recommendations for existing vaccines or doesn't recommend new ones, maintaining access will be difficult. 'It's a seismic shift, if you will, away from facilitating access by removing coverage and cost barriers, to one where there's great uncertainty and coverage and cost issues become barriers,' DeMatteis said. It's not clear what the vetting process was for the eight people Kennedy appointed to the ACIP, or how prepared they will be for their first meeting, which is scheduled to occur in less than two weeks. According to a Federal Register notice, the panel is scheduled to vote on recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines as well as meningococcal, HPV, influenza, and RSV vaccines for adults and maternal and pediatric populations. Health experts said they have serious questions about what direction the new panel will take and whether Americans will still have access to free vaccines, including the coronavirus shot, in time for fall respiratory season. If the ACIP is no longer a reliable, independent authority on vaccines, it 'will be replaced by a patchwork of different policies by different states, and each state will have to make its own decisions,' Chu said. 'Washington state is a place where we have experts and scientists who work together. There are other states where this may not exist, or where they may not choose to recommend vaccines. So that is going to create a lot of chaos,' she added. Some state health officials have already begun taking steps in that direction. The Illinois Department of Health said on social media it will be convening its own vaccine advisory committee and national experts 'to ensure we continue to provide clear, science-backed vaccine guidance for our residents.' When Kennedy unilaterally changed the COVID-19 vaccine guidance earlier this month to remove recommendations for pregnant women and change the open recommendation for children, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services said it would continue to recommend the shots for every person at least 6 months old. 'The recent changes in CDC guidance were not made based on new data, evidence, or scientific or medical studies, nor was the guidance issued following normal processes,' the agency said in a statement. Tina Tan, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said her organization as well as other major medical groups including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics Academy have been speaking with insurance companies to urge them to continue paying for shots, even if the panel changes recommendations. Tan mentioned an initiative launched in April by a group of public health experts called the Vaccine Integrity Project, which is working to create an alternative process to maintain vaccine access. The initiative is funded by a foundation backed by Walmart heiress Christy Walton and led by Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. Federal law is specific that insurance provisions are tied to the ACIP. Specialty organizations may have expertise to make their own recommendations, but they will still require the cooperation of insurance companies. States are also more limited, and they don't have the same power as the federal government to force coverage. 'I think it remains to be seen what the insurers are going to do,' Tan said. 'However, hopefully, with the discussions going on, they can get the insurers to understand that vaccines are extraordinarily safe and effective and are the best tool that we have to protect persons of all ages against serious vaccine preventable diseases.'
Washington Post
6 hours ago
- Washington Post
How one meeting in 2020 and a GOP senator helped create RFK Jr.'s vaccine wreck
In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe. But that meeting was when the committee's eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support. In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent. Why did they do this? Social justice. The word 'equity' came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from 'marginalized communities.' Only after a backlash did sanity prevail. I've thought a lot about that meeting as I've watched the havoc Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wreaking as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services — including, most recently, firing all the members of the ACIP panel and replacing them with advisers more to his liking. That 2020 committee meeting was one of many widely publicized mistakes that turned conservatives against public health authorities. It wasn't the worst such mistake — that honor belongs to the time public health experts issued a special lockdown exemption for George Floyd protesters. And of course, President Donald Trump deserves a 'worst supporting actor' award for turning on his own public health experts. But if you were a conservative convinced that 'public health' was a conspiracy of elites who cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives — well, there was our crack team of vaccine experts, proudly proclaiming that they cared more about progressive ideology than saving lives. This is one of the reasons we now have a health and human services secretary who has devoted much of his life to pushing quack anti-vaccine theories. That's not to say that public health experts deserve all of the blame. They don't even deserve most of the blame, which properly belongs to Trump, who appointed Kennedy to curry favor with Kennedy's supporters, and to the Republican senators who confirmed Kennedy to curry favor with Trump. When Kennedy was being considered for the nomination, I interviewed Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute about what that might mean for HHS. Levin, a former George W. Bush staffer who worked on health-care policy, said that as secretary, Kennedy would have significant power to shape our vaccination policy, thanks to his control over advisory boards such as ACIP. 'In practice, the secretary can more or less remove and add individuals to these advisory boards at his discretion,' Levin told me. I concluded that column by begging senators not to confirm him. For a moment it looked as if they might actually put principle over party. On Feb. 3, our Editorial Board praised Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) for the probing questions he asked during Kennedy's confirmation hearing, pressing him to admit that there's no good evidence vaccines cause autism. The next day, Cassidy, who is a medical doctor, made one of the clearest and most forthright defenses of vaccination in a speech on the Senate floor: 'Vaccines save lives. They are safe. They do not cause autism. There are multiple studies that show this. They are a crucial part of our nation's public health response.' Alas, he said those things while explaining why he was voting to confirm Kennedy. His excuse was that Kennedy had promised that he was committed to vaccination … including to maintain ACIP 'without changes.' Now Levin's warning has proven prophetic. Kennedy's ACIP moves were entirely predictable to anyone who has read his book 'Vax-Unvax.' If Cassidy believed Kennedy's assurances, he was a fool, and if he didn't, he's a disgrace to his office. Not all the ACIP appointments are terrible, and one could argue that the board is now better positioned to reestablish credibility with vaccine-skeptical conservatives, something Cassidy talked about in his floor speech. But I'm afraid I can't make that argument very convincingly. Two of his appointments, Vicky Pebsworth and Robert Malone, are known for their hostility to vaccines. Most of the rest seem to be experts in fields other than vaccination. Vaccination specialists, of course, tend to have a long paper trail of public disagreement with Kennedy's theories. I'm no believer in blind deference to experts. Science isn't an answer; it's a process, and sometimes that process spits out answers that have to be revised. But I agree with Cassidy that vaccines are one of the greatest public health achievements in humanity's history. The evidence is clear that they protect millions of Americans from diseases that can kill or cripple. So if it's a choice whether to trust my health to experts who might recommend a somewhat suboptimal vaccination schedule to score political points, or to experts selected by a guy who has casually suggested that the polio vaccine has killed more people than polio, well, that's not a hard decision. And it shouldn't have been hard for Republicans to spare us that decision, either. Instead they made the same mistake as that ACIP committee, only more so: They let politics get in the way of the job they'd been given by the American public. Before writing this column, I re-listened to a recording of that 2020 committee meeting. Almost five years on, it remains equal parts enraging and mystifying. During the brief discussion period — the committee had allocated a full 10 minutes for deciding who would live or die — the panel's members didn't seem to have much to say, other than 'equity good.' But each of them said it anyway, commending one another on their high ethical standards before voting to condemn thousands of innocent people to death. The speeches were wholly unnecessary, except as a signal to fellow experts, who were then caught up in the moral fervor of America's racial reckoning. Listening, I wondered whether any of them harbored private qualms at the time, even as they publicly declared their fealty to the politics of the moment. I wonder, too, whether any of them now wake up at night, blushing in shame and humiliation, as they remember what they did, and the pompous, self-congratulatory little speech they gave about it. And that's also the question I'd really like to ask Cassidy.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Bill Cassidy Blew It
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. It's easy to forget that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s assault on vaccines—including, most recently, his gutting of the expert committee that guides American vaccine policy—might have been avoided. Four months ago, his nomination for health secretary was in serious jeopardy. The deciding vote seemed to be in the hands of one Republican senator: Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. A physician who gained prominence by vaccinating low-income kids in his home state, Cassidy was wary of the longtime vaccine conspiracist. 'I have been struggling with your nomination,' he told Kennedy during his confirmation hearings in January. Then Cassidy caved. In the speech he gave on the Senate floor explaining his decision, Cassidy said that he'd vote to confirm Kennedy only because he had extracted a number of concessions from the nominee—chief among them that he would preserve, 'without changes,' the very CDC committee Kennedy overhauled this week. Since then, Cassidy has continued to give Kennedy the benefit of the doubt. On Monday, after Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the vaccine advisory committee, Cassidy posted on X that he was working with Kennedy to prevent the open roles from being filled with 'people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.' [Read: The doctor who let RFK Jr. through] The senator has failed, undeniably and spectacularly. One new appointee, Robert Malone, has repeatedly spread misinformation (or what he prefers to call 'scientific dissent') about vaccines. Another appointee, Vicky Pebsworth, is on the board of an anti-vax nonprofit, the National Vaccine Information Center. Cassidy may keep insisting that he is doing all he can to stand up for vaccines. But he already had his big chance to do so, and he blew it. Now, with the rest of America, he's watching the nation's vaccine future take a nosedive. So far, the senator hasn't appeared interested in any kind of mea culpa for his faith in Kennedy's promises. On Thursday, I caught Cassidy as he hurried out of a congressional hearing room. He was still reviewing the appointees, he told me and several other reporters who gathered around him. When I chased after him down the hallway to ask more questions, he told me, 'I'll be putting out statements, and I'll let those statements stand for themselves.' A member of his staff dismissed me with a curt 'Thank you, sir.' Cassidy's staff has declined repeated requests for an interview with the senator since the confirmation vote in January. With the exception of Mitch McConnell, every GOP senator voted to confirm Kennedy. They all have to own the health secretary's actions. But Cassidy seemed to be the Republican most concerned about Kennedy's nomination, and there was a good reason to think that the doctor would vote his conscience. In 2021, Cassidy was one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Donald Trump on an impeachment charge after the insurrection at the Capitol. But this time, the senator—who is up for reelection next year, facing a more MAGA-friendly challenger—ultimately fell in line. Cassidy tried to have it both ways: elevating Kennedy to his job while also vowing to constrain him. In casting his confirmation vote, Cassidy implied that the two would be in close communication, and that Kennedy had asked for his input on hiring decisions. The two reportedly had breakfast in March to discuss the health secretary's plan to dramatically reshape the department. 'Senator Cassidy speaks regularly with secretary Kennedy and believes those conversations are much more productive when they're held in private, not through press headlines,' a spokesperson for Cassidy wrote in an email. (A spokesperson for HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) At times, it has appeared as though Cassidy's approach has had some effect on the health secretary. Amid the measles outbreak in Texas earlier this year, Kennedy baselessly questioned the safety of the MMR vaccine. In April, after two unvaccinated children died, Cassidy posted on X: 'Everyone should be vaccinated! There is no treatment for measles. No benefit to getting measles. Top health officials should say so unequivocally b/4 another child dies.' Cassidy didn't call out Kennedy by name, but the health secretary appeared to get the message. Later that day, Kennedy posted that the measles vaccine was the most effective way to stave off illness. ('Completely agree,' Cassidy responded.) All things considered, that's a small victory. Despite Kennedy's claims that he is not an anti-vaxxer, he has enacted a plainly anti-vaccine agenda. Since being confirmed, he has pushed out the FDA's top vaccine regulator, hired a fellow vaccine skeptic to investigate the purported link between autism and shots, and questioned the safety of childhood vaccinations currently recommended by the CDC. As my colleague Katherine J. Wu wrote this week, 'Whether he will admit to it or not, he is serving the most core goal of the anti-vaccine movement—eroding access to, and trust in, immunization.' [Read: RFK Jr. is barely even pretending anymore] The reality is that back channels can be only so effective. Cassidy's main power is to call Kennedy before the Senate health committee, which he chairs, and demand an explanation for Kennedy's new appointees to the CDC's vaccine-advisory committee. Cassidy might very well do that. In February, he said that Kennedy would 'come before the committee on a quarterly basis, if requested.' Kennedy did appear before Cassidy's committee last month to answer questions about his efforts to institute mass layoffs at his agency. Some Republicans (and many Democrats) pressed the secretary on those efforts, while others praised them. Cassidy, for his part, expressed concerns about Kennedy's indiscriminate cutting of research programs, but still, he was largely deferential. 'I agree with Secretary Kennedy that HHS needs reform,' Cassidy said. Even if he had disagreed, an angry exchange between a health secretary and a Senate committee doesn't guarantee any policy changes. Lawmakers may try to act like government bureaucrats report to them, but they have limited power once a nominee is already in their job. Technically, lawmakers can impeach Cabinet members, but in American history, a sitting Cabinet member has never been impeached and subsequently removed from office. The long and arduous confirmation process is supposed to be the bulwark against potentially dangerous nominees being put in positions of power. Cassidy and most of his Republican colleagues have already decided not to stop Kennedy from overseeing the largest department in the federal government by budget. Now Kennedy is free to do whatever he wants—senators be damned. Article originally published at The Atlantic
