Barney Graham, who for decades helped lead U.S. vaccine development efforts, said Wednesday that the lack of cooperation among U.S. agencies is hindering the country’s response to the H5N1 bird flu outbreak among dairy cattle, echoing criticisms that have been building over the past six months.
“The USDA and the CDC and the NIH are not sharing and coordinating,” Graham said, referring to the federal agriculture department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
Graham, speaking at the 2024 STAT Summit in Boston, said that sometimes high-income countries criticize pandemic preparedness efforts in low-income countries, which is where most pandemic threats originate. He noted that the H5N1 outbreak in cattle, so far seen only in the U.S., is different. But he suggested the problems with the U.S. response raise concerns about any global effort that would be needed should the virus evolve to spread more efficiently among people — an outcome that could set off a pandemic.
“Even within a high-income country, with a virus that could be threatening to the population, even to the global population, we have not been able to coordinate our agencies and our decision-making well enough,” Graham said in a conversation with STAT senior writer Helen Branswell. “How do we get from there to having a global coordinated response in which we’re well prepared, everybody knows what to do ahead of time, and we can work across high-income, low-income country disparities?”
Graham, who worked at the NIH for two decades and retired in 2021 after serving as deputy director of the agency’s Vaccine Research Center, noted he was involved in responses to various health emergencies in his career. Some, he said, were chaotic — like the West African Ebola crisis — and some were more coordinated, as when U.S. government agencies collaborated in response to the Zika epidemic. He described Operation Warp Speed, the program launched by the Trump administration that helped develop Covid vaccines in record time, as another well-coordinated effort.
“There’s a lot of work to do, and it’s all feasible, because we have the technologies and, frankly, I think we have the money if we can know how to spend it,” Graham said about the H5N1 response. “It is frustrating to me that we cannot do this better because we have the tools to do it better.”
Graham, who is now the founding director of the David Satcher Global Health Equity Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine, was more sanguine when asked about resistance to vaccinations.
He said that false information has been spread about the safety of vaccines dating back to the time of English doctor Edward Jenner and the development of an early smallpox vaccine. But he argued that the effectiveness of vaccines will carry the day.
“The value of vaccines eventually, I think, will win out, but some people will suffer in the meantime,” Graham said, adding that more than 200,000 people in the U.S. who died from Covid could have been vaccinated but weren’t.
Graham is planning on offering a course about misinformation and disinformation to his medical students.