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As if the public hasn’t been subjected to enough panic in recent years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is back at it, this time stoking fears about a new potential pandemic.

The agency recently confirmed the first severe U.S. human case of H5N1 bird flu in a 65-year-old Louisiana man who had contact with sick backyard birds.

Predictably, experts are now sounding the alarms about the virus’s supposed mutations and potential for human transmission.

According to AP, genetic analysis of the virus revealed mutations in the hemagglutinin (HA) gene, which experts claim could increase the virus’s ability to infect humans.

These mutations were allegedly absent in samples from the infected birds on the patient’s property, suggesting that the virus may have mutated post-infection.

This case is not isolated. A similar infection was reported in a teenager in British Columbia, Canada, earlier this year, with both cases exhibiting mutations that facilitate human infection.

Despite these warnings, the CDC maintains that the current risk to the general public remains low.

Politico reported:

Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator during the first Trump administration, excoriated the CDC in a CNN interview Friday morning for failing to learn the right lessons from Covid-19.

“Our No. 1 principle in preventing pandemics is detect, and if you go to the CDC website, you can see that they are monitoring more than 10,000 exposures, but they’ve only tested 530,” she said. “That means we’re not testing enough. And we know from other viruses that a lot of the spread can be asymptomatic. So we kind of have our head in the sand about how widespread this is from the zoonotic standpoint, from the animal to human standpoint.”

Birx added that her greatest fear is someone getting infected with bird flu during the regular seasonal flu, potentially triggering mutations that make the former far more infectious to humans.

“We should be providing tests free of charge to dairy farm workers so they can test anonymously and weekly, because they’ll want to know if they have both cases of potential flu co-circulating in their own body to protect their families,” she said.

Scott Gottlieb, another health policy veteran from Trump’s first administration, echoed Birx’s warning of inadequate testing in posts on X this week, writing that if H5N1 ultimately develops into a pandemic, “The U.S. will have only itself to blame.”

“Agricultural officials did just about everything wrong over last year, hoping the virus would burn out, and it didn’t,” said Gottlieb, who formerly headed the FDA.

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