Dr. Deborah Birx, ex-President Donald Trump’s White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, is calling for every dairy cow in the United States to be tested weekly for bird flu.
Birx joined CNN’s Kasie Hunt to hype bird flu as the next possible viral contagion, pushing for mass testing of cows and farm workers to help tackle the issue before it starts.
“We’re not testing to really see how many people have been exposed and got asymptomatically infected,” Birx said, adding, “We should be testing every cow weekly.”
Deborah Birx says we must test every cow in America (on a weekly basis) for bird flu.
"We should be testing every cow, weekly," Birx says adding, "we could be pool testing every dairy worker."
There are around 40 million cows in the United States.
Trust the science! pic.twitter.com/0xnCAE0T9e
— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.today (@JordanSchachtel) June 5, 2024
The scarfed immunologist went on to promote the use of PCR tests for diagnostics, despite their propensity for false positives during the Covid era.
“We could be pool testing every dairy worker,” Birx urged, claiming without evidence that people could have asymptomatic bird flu infections, similar to Covid.
“I do believe that there’s undetected cases in humans because we’re once again only tracking people with symptoms.”
“We have to switch from symptoms to actual definitive laboratory testing. We have the capacity for that.”
X AI assistant Grok estimates there are roughly 9.36 million dairy cows and about 150,000 dairy workers in the US.
Birx did not discuss the cost of such a massive endeavor, or whether the project is a feasible undertaking.