One of the most prominent public faces of the government response to the Covid pandemic, Dr. Deborah Birx, is back — this time suggesting weekly tests for all cows in America for bird flu as well as testing every dairy employee. 

“We should be testing every cow, weekly,” Dr. Birx said during an interview with CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “The great thing about America is we’re incredibly innovative and we have the ability to have these breakthroughs, we could be pool testing every dairy worker.”

The suggestion is already facing pushback by farmers who say the weekly testing would be logistically impossible and prohibitively expensive. 

 “A couple of allotments I have gathered out here are 50,000 acres,” one colt starter, Braxton McCoy, wrote on X. “Margins are already thin for cow calf guys so forgetting the absurdity of gathering, corralling, and running a 1,000 pairs through a chute once a week, this would bankrupt even the biggest family ranch.”

Dr. Birx, who served as the White House’s Coronavirus Response Coordinator under President Trump, then went on to become the chief scientific and medical advisor at ActivePure, an air purification company. She told CNN that she thinks there are undetected bird flu cases in humans since “we’re once again only tracking people with symptoms.”

“When we did that with Covid, the virus spread throughout the Northeast undetected, because it took a long time to get to the vulnerable individuals,” she said, “but in the meantime, thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people were infected with asymptomatic or mild disease and never came to medical attention. We have to switch from symptoms to actually definitive laboratory testing.”

In the same interview, Dr. Birx acknowledged that the Covid lab leak theory was suppressed.

The World Health Organization announced on Wednesday the first laboratory-confirmed fatal case of avian flu in a human — a 59-year-old from Mexico.

“Although the source of exposure to the virus in this case is currently unknown, A(H5N2) viruses have been reported in poultry in Mexico,” WHO said in a statement. “According to the IHR (2005), a human infection caused by a novel influenza A virus subtype is an event that has the potential for high public health impact and must be notified to the WHO,” the statement added, noting that current risk to the public is low.