PARIS, Nov 27 (Reuters) – The bird flu virus that has been spreading among wild birds, poultry and mammals could lead to a pandemic worse than COVID-19 if it mutates to transmit between humans, the head of France’s Institut Pasteur respiratory infections centre said.

The highly pathogenic avian influenza, commonly called bird flu, has led to the culling of hundreds of millions of birds in the past few years, disrupting food supplies and driving up prices, though human infections remain rare.

“What we fear is the virus adapting to mammals, and particularly to humans, becoming capable of human-to-human transmission, and that virus would be a pandemic virus,” Marie-Anne Rameix-Welti, medical director at the Institut Pasteur’s respiratory infections centre, told Reuters.

The Institut Pasteur was among the first European labs to develop and share COVID-19 detection tests, making protocols available to the World Health Organization and labs worldwide.

NO ANTIBODIES AGAINST H5 BIRD FLU

People have antibodies against common H1 and H3 seasonal flu, but none against the H5 bird flu affecting birds and mammals, like they had none against COVID-19, she said.

And unlike COVID-19, which mainly affects vulnerable people, flu viruses can also kill healthy individuals, including children, Rameix-Welti said.

“A bird flu pandemic would probably be quite severe, potentially even more severe than the pandemic we experienced,” she said in her Paris laboratory.

There have been many cases of people infected by H5 bird flu viruses in the past, including the H5N1 currently circulating among poultry and dairy cows in the U.S., but these were often in close contact with infected animals.

A first-ever human case of H5N5 appeared in the U.S. state of Washington this month. The man, who had underlying conditions, died last week.

In its latest report on bird flu, the WHO said there had been nearly 1,000 outbreaks in humans between 2003 and 2025 ― mainly in Egypt, Indonesia and Vietnam, of which 48% had died.

HUMAN PANDEMIC RISK STILL LOW

However, the risk of a human pandemic developing remains low, Gregorio Torres, head of the Science Department at the World Organisation for Animal Health, told Reuters.

“We need to be prepared to respond early enough. But for the time being, you can happily walk in the forest, eat chicken and eggs and enjoy your life. The pandemic risk is a possibility. But in terms of probability, it’s still very low,” he said.

Rameix-Welti also said that if bird flu was to mutate to be able to be transmitted between humans, the world was better prepared than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The positive point with flu, compared to COVID, is we have specific preventative measures in place. We have vaccine candidates ready and know how to manufacture a vaccine quickly,” she said.

“We also have stocks of specific antivirals, that, in principle, would be effective against this avian influenza virus,” she added.

LONDON, Nov 20 (Reuters) – Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson oversaw a toxic, chaotic and dithering response to the COVID pandemic, with a delay to locking the country down resulting in about 23,000 more deaths, a report by a public inquiry concluded on Thursday.

Britain recorded more than 230,000 deaths from COVID, a similar death rate to the United States and Italy but higher than elsewhere in western Europe, and it is still recovering from the economic consequences.

An inquiry, which Johnson ordered in May 2021, delivered a blistering assessment of his government’s response to COVID, criticizing his indecisive leadership, lambasting his Downing Street office for breaking their own rules and castigating his top adviser Dominic Cummings.

“There was a toxic and chaotic culture at the centre of the UK government during the pandemic,” the inquiry chair, former judge Heather Hallett, said in her report.

Hallett said Johnson had failed to appreciate the seriousness of the virus after it emerged at the start of 2020, believing it would amount to nothing and was distracted by other government business, with Britain at the time bogged down in talks over its departure from the European Union.

“Mr Johnson should have appreciated sooner that this was an emergency that required prime ministerial leadership to inject urgency into the response,” the report said.

When he appeared before the committee in 2023, Johnson said his government had been too complacent and had “vastly underestimated” the risks, saying he understood the public’s anger.

Hallett said by the time Johnson announced a lockdown on March 23 it was too little, too late, a repeated criticism she leveled at the British government and the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Had Britain locked down just a week earlier on March 16, as the consensus of evidence said it should, the number of deaths in the first wave up to July would have been reduced by about 23,000 or 48%, the report concluded.

A failure to act sooner again as cases rose later in the year also led to further national lockdowns, it added.

Hallett said the inquiry recognized Johnson had to wrestle with profound decisions, but said he repeatedly changed his mind, failing to make timely decisions despite a clearer understanding of the virus.

(Reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Kate Holton)