Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, recently shared that he thinks birds with the avian flu should be isolated, not culled, and then left to breed — amid reports that staffers have not been hired for the existing federal office for pandemic preparedness.
The White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR) had a staff of approximately 20 people and was established by Congress in 2022 after the Covid-19 pandemic.
As archives from President Joe Biden’s White House explain, the office “coordinates actions related to preparedness for, and response to, known and unknown biological threats and pathogens that could lead to a pandemic or to significant public health-related disruptions in the United States.”
However, according to a report by CNN, only one staffer remains in the office, and its website has been taken down from the Internet. The OPPR, the outlet quotes a source as saying, “has fallen into the abyss.”
The pandemic response office operated “very much behind the scenes,” former OPPR director Dr. Paul Friedrichs, a physician and retired Air Force major general, told CNN, which reports that until Jan. 20, the office was conducting regular meetings to plan a response to health threats like the bird flu.
Dr. Gerald Parker has been tapped to lead OPPR, CBS reports; however, as Friedrichs told CNN, he hasn’t met with Parker, a former associate dean of Global One Health at Texas A&M University to discuss OPPR’s work. Under Biden, Parker was head of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, and CNN reports that Parker, who sits on the National Security Council, is already attending bird flu meetings.
The shift in the pandemic office comes amid a worsening avian flu pandemic that has sickened 70 Americans — resulting in the death of one man in Louisiana — and the culling of more than 166 million birds, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
However, in a recent interview, Kennedy said he thinks it’s better to let the birds with avian flu breed.
“They should isolate them. You should let the disease go through them and identify the birds that survive, which are the birds that probably have a genetic inclination for immunity, and those should be the birds that we breed,” Kennedy told Fox News host Sean Hannity during a March 11 interview.
Kennedy advised “intensively test[ing] therapeutic drugs on those flocks” to help develop “a drug that potentially is useful in human beings to treat avian flu. That’s what we should be doing.”
“We’ve killed 166 million chickens,” Kennedy said. “That’s why we have an egg crisis.”
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