Trump admin. fires USDA staff working on bird flu, immediately backpedals
Over the weekend, the Trump administration fired several frontline responders to the ongoing H5N1 bird flu outbreak—then quickly backpedaled, rescinding those terminations and attempting to reinstate the critical staff.
The termination letters went out to employees at the US Department of Agriculture, one of the agencies leading the federal response to the outbreak that continues to plague US dairy farms and ravage poultry operations, affecting over 160 million birds and sending egg prices soaring. As the virus continues to spread, infectious disease experts fear it could evolve to spread among humans and cause more severe disease. So far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has documented 68 cases in humans, one of which was fatal.
Prior to Trump taking office, health experts had criticized the country’s response to H5N1 for lack of transparency at times, sluggishness, inadequate testing, and its inability to halt transmission among dairy farms, which was once considered containable. To date, 972 herds across 17 states have been infected since last March, including 36 herds in the last 30 days.
