Bird Flu Has Faded but It Is Far From Gone: Expert Panel

Quickly falling egg prices are a positive sign in the United States but not proof that the highly pathogenic avian influenza crisis is over.

A man shops at a grocery store with an egg shortage in New York City on March 12, 2025. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Egg prices are dropping in the United States, pushing highly pathogenic avian influenza out of the political and economic spotlight. However, the disease won’t likely be cowed by the temporary reprieve, health experts have warned.

“I keep hearing a sort of a hope, a wish, and perhaps a belief ... that this is going to blow over,” Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, said at a panel focused on the U.S. experience with H5N1 bird flu. “I’m here to say that it’s not going to blow over somehow, that this is really a long-term situation that we have to deal with.”

On March 31, the American Enterprise Institute gathered health, agriculture, and economic observers to discuss the current status of the bird flu crisis as well as the price of eggs. They said that a robust vaccination program is likely the only long-term solution to the persistent disease challenge.

The panel, hosted by Vincent Smith, the director of agricultural policy studies at the Institute, included Barry Goodwin, a William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor at the Departments of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Economics at North Carolina State University; Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health; Kay Russo, a veterinarian at RSM Consulting; and Robert Yaman, the founder of Innovate Animal Ag.

Since the end of February, the wholesale price of eggs dropped sharply. The latest figures, published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on March 28, said the national wholesale price of large, white shell eggs was $3 a dozen. In mid-February, that price was above $7.70. At retail, also according to a USDA report published on March 28, Americans are paying an average of $4 a dozen for large, white, conventionally raised shell eggs.

When egg prices set a record high, Goodwin said, the cost of eggs quickly became a political issue, leaving Washington scrambling for answers.

At the end of February, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced a five-point plan to get the disease under control. In a March 20 statement, Rollins said the country is seeing “meaningful progress” in its fight against bird flu.

The lower price of eggs, Goodwin said, is driven by a stabilizing egg supply paired with slightly lower consumer demand. The pace of bird flu outbreaks, and therefore depopulations, is down markedly since the winter ended. This is taking the public and political spotlight off the commodity.

Nevertheless, Yaman said the experience since the current bird flu outbreak began in 2022 should show that whenever there is a significant bird loss, the price will spike.

“When I speak to producers in the ag industry and folks that are on the ground, what I hear overwhelmingly is that we’re not currently on track to ensure that this is not going to happen again,” Yaman said.

Vaccination

Three of the speakers—Nuzzo, Russo, and Yaman—agreed that the time will eventually come in the United States when the country will look at vaccinating birds instead of euthanizing them. The approach, they say, will help to ensure security of the food supply and prevent a mutation that could be dangerous to human health.

Since the H5N1 bird flu was identified nearly 30 years ago, the disease has spread across the globe. The virus, Nuzzo said, is now entrenched in the environment in a number of bird and mammal species around the world. As long as there is a source of introduction, the virus will continue to spread and challenge commercial poultry operations.

Furthermore, Nuzzo said she believes there has been an underreaction to the presence of bird flu in the American dairy herd and an underestimation of the risk it poses to farm workers in dairy and poultry.

The current solutions—culling sick animals, stepped-up biosecurity, and greater availability of funding for indemnity payments—are all what Yaman called reactive measures designed to address an active problem. The only way, he said, to proactively counter the disease is by offering a vaccine to the egg-laying industry.

Vaccination isn’t easy, however, because of the massive potential trade ramifications of vaccinating any commercial poultry in the United States. Current trade agreements are drawn up so that if the United States were to vaccinate any number of egg-laying hens, Yaman said, numerous trading partners would block U.S. chicken imports entirely. Additionally, there are massive logistical challenges associated with actually vaccinating hundreds of millions of laying hens in barns across the country.

Nevertheless, the vaccination tools are out there, and there is a track record of vaccination success in a peer nation, Russo said. In France, farmers and public health authorities are working together to execute a bird flu vaccination and observation plan. Additionally, Russo said the vaccines exist and are ready to be used if the political will can be summoned.

The global animal health company Zoetis has ready a traditional vaccine made from a heat-killed version of an H5N2 variant, designed to work in livestock populations against circulating variants of the H5N1 virus.

“We have been given sticks, as veterinarians in the United States, to take to a gunfight,” Russo said. “We could pull those [vaccines] off the shelves and use them within days if not weeks.

“We don’t have a year to sit on this. We probably don’t even have six months. We are gambling with, and compromising, animal health, human health and food security in this country by stalling this further. This does not have to turn into a human pandemic to be devastating. It already is. We need vaccines.”