Marie-Anne Rameix-Welti, the medical director at the Paris-based Pasteur Institute’s respiratory infections center, told Reuters on Nov. 27 that avian flu poses the risk of a possible pandemic, whose consequences would be worse than Covid-19. Officially, Covid-19 caused 5.9 million deaths between Jan. 1, 2020 and Dec. 31, 2021, although other studies have placed the number of deaths at more than twice that.
The world-renowned Pasteur Institute was among the first European labs to develop and share Covid-19 detection tests, making protocols available to the World Health Organization and other labs.
Dr. Rameix-Welti stated, “What we fear is the [avian flu] virus adapting to mammals, and particularly to humans, becoming capable of human-to-human transmission, and that virus would be a pandemic virus….
“A bird flu pandemic would probably be quite severe, potentially even more severe than the [Covid-19] pandemic we experienced,” she added. Bird flu viruses, once they make the species jump to humans and undergo human-to-human transmission, would kill healthy individuals, including children, Rameix-Welti stressed.
