The United States is entering its fourth year of a near-continuous outbreak of the highly pathogenic avian influenza.
Despite leadership changes at the country’s top agricultural and public health authorities, the government is continuing the strategy of culling millions of birds to limit the spread of the disease.
A senior official who spoke with The Epoch Times said the culling is continuing because there is no better option available.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) refers to the strategy as “stamping out.”
Avian influenza, or bird flu, was first identified in China in the 1990s and has since spread worldwide through migratory wild birds.
The disease first hit the United States at the end of 2014. At the time, America successfully deployed the stamping out strategy to stop the bird flu outbreak in less than a year.
During the 2014 outbreak, 70 percent of bird flu cases were spread from farm to farm, according to the USDA.
A farm-to-farm transmission occurs when a worker or a piece of equipment moving from one farm to another carries the disease and it spreads to the other birds.
Carol Cardona, one of the nation’s foremost experts on avian influenza, said the U.S. egg industry learned from its experience and significantly improved its biosecurity practices to reduce farm-to-farm transmission.
Cardona, a professor in the Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Minnesota, said the disease has mutated since 2015 and is being spread to farms either by wild birds or potentially by domestic and wild mammals that carry the disease into poultry houses.
She said the disease is on its way to becoming endemic, or regularly recurring, among wild birds.
The USDA’s effort to stamp out the virus has led to the loss—through culling and disease—of at least 166 million birds since the latest outbreak began in February 2022, according to figures from the USDA released on March 5.
The high amount of culling, and its dramatic effect on the egg supply, without an apparent drop in infections is leading to criticism of the culling plan.
Dr. Robert Malone, a vaccine pioneer known for his skepticism of the U.S. public health establishment’s approach to COVID-19, agreed with Cardona’s assessment that the disease is becoming endemic.
He said the protocol is now needlessly driving up the cost of a staple good and contributing to political tension surrounding inflation.
“[Culling] is basically wasting resources. It’s not doing anything anymore,” Malone told The Epoch Times. “So when something repeatedly isn’t working, you probably ought to think through another policy that makes sense.”
Why Culling Continues
The price of eggs, combined with the country’s already elevated cost of living, is spurring action in Washington.President Donald Trump has directed the USDA to take steps to lower the price of eggs as quickly as possible.
During a speech to a joint session of Congress on March 4, Trump blamed his predecessor, saying: “[President] Joe Biden especially let the price of eggs get out of control.”
He went on to address his Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins and said she “inherited a total mess from the previous administration.”
Meanwhile, there has been some momentum coming from the White House to stop or limit culling.
During an interview with CBS’s Face The Nation that aired on Feb. 16, Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, said Biden’s USDA was “just randomly killing chickens within a perimeter where they found a sick chicken.”
He advocated for finding alternatives to culling.
Malone suggested that farmers let the disease run its course in the poultry house and then breed any surviving birds that have developed an immunity.
Alternatively, he said the industry should investigate so-called heritage breeds of chickens that have demonstrated greater resilience against bird flu and breed those animals in an effort to find a long-term solution.
A senior USDA official who spoke with The Epoch Times said the agency remains open to alternative approaches, but so far hasn’t found anything that works.
The senior USDA official said there is little evidence that any alternative to culling will keep the birds alive.
All of the previous attempts the USDA is aware of to isolate a healthy portion of a flock from sick birds have ended up with the healthy ones becoming infected and dying, too, the official said.
As for developing herd immunity, the senior official said the USDA believes attempting to create natural immunity in a field setting would be extremely risky.
An uncontrolled, untreated bird flu circulating freely in a commercial poultry house would represent a significant risk of spreading to other birds and potentially mutating and spreading to other animals, including humans.
The USDA, the official said, does encourage breeders to attempt developing more resistant strains in a controlled, laboratory setting where infected animals can be isolated and humanely euthanized if they become ill with the virus.
This, along with maybe even attempting gene editing techniques, may be an effective way to develop bird-flu-resistant genetics, the official said.
Indemnity Payments
In testimony on Feb. 26 before the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, Tony Wesner, CEO of Indiana-based egg producer Rose Acre Farms, spoke at length about the egg industry’s perspective on the unfolding crisis.Wesner, who was summoned before the committee on behalf of the United Egg Producers, a national egg farmer group, said that depopulation is “mandatory” once a farm is infected with bird flu.
He said that is a stipulation of the Animal Health Protection Act.
If farmers do not cull their birds after detection of bird flu, they are not entitled to receive money from the government to recover their losses and assist in restarting operations.
In his testimony, Wesner said the indemnities only partly compensate “for a loss of value that the government imposes on producers.”
Without the compensation “many farms would likely exit production,” he said.
Since the start of the current outbreak through the end of November 2024, Wesner said federal indemnity payments have totaled about $1.25 billion.
However, he called the current formula the USDA uses to calculate the value of those payments “inadequate.”
He also said even if the agency uses a new, updated formula recommended by the United Egg Producers those elevated payments would “not come close to making producers whole.”
On Feb. 26, the USDA boosted the amount of money available to be paid out in indemnities by $400 million.
Long Term Questions
Enhancing farm biosecurity is a key plank of the new USDA playbook for bird flu.The agency said in late February that it will dedicate up to $500 million to “gold-standard biosecurity measures for all U.S. poultry producers.”
A senior official at the USDA said biosecurity was and will remain the most critical aspect of disease control since keeping bird flu off the farm is the most valuable way of fighting its spread.
The next step in combating this could be using a vaccine to control the spread of the disease and limit the number of bird deaths.
In his testimony, Wesner said the egg industry wants to adopt an “aggressive” vaccination strategy to control the disease.
Cardona agreed that vaccination will likely be necessary once the disease becomes endemic.
However, the decision to vaccinate would likely trigger significant international trade issues and potentially raise difficult public health questions.
Vaccination would trigger serious consequences for the much larger chicken meat industry.
