Covid Booster Time | Bird Flu Dangers
- Don Mosier | Rimini Road
The peak of the winter flu season, one of the worst in many years, has passed. Hospitalizations and deaths in San Diego County have declined since mid-February after 178 deaths were reported since last July 1st, most beginning in December 2024. For comparison, there have been 234 deaths due to COVID since July 1st, many occurring during the late summer outbreak.
COVID
It is time for another booster if you got your last shot in September or October 2024. The current COVID vaccine recommendation for those over 65 is every 6 months. COVID cases are not following the seasonal pattern of influenza cases. They continue at a low but steady rate of about 50 hospitalizations per week, mainly in older individuals. As we learned last summer, good weather doesn’t reduce the risk.
BIRD FLU
The risk of the H5N1 bird flu gaining the mutations necessary for efficient human-to-human transmission keeps increasing, while our ability to monitor what is happening is decreasing due to cutbacks to research capacity and information sharing at the CDC.
Here is the troubling news. A single mutation in the H5 hemagglutinin protein of the virus associated with cow-to-human transmission (E627K for sequence experts) in a Texas case reported last year has now been detected in multiple cattle herds in California. Importantly, the bird flu virus H5 from the Texas case was the one used in the report from Scripps Research Institute (cited in the February Sandpiper) that found that only one additional mutation was required for efficient infection of human cells.
The news of the infection of cattle by this more dangerous variant of the bird flu virus was reported by the Los Angeles Times of March 12th, 2025. The discovery came from a review of virus sequences stored at the USDA’s National Veterinary Laboratory Services by Henry Niman, a scientist with Recombinomics Inc., a virus and vaccine research company in Pittsburgh. This critical information was provided by a for-profit private company, not the CDC, NIH or other federal entity, although the sequence data were in a federal-funded (for how long?) repository. It seems like the era of privatization of public health measures has arrived.