As bird flu continues to sweep through poultry farms, forcing the culling of millions of birds, United States Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is proposing a different approach: let the virus spread.
The unconventional idea has alarmed health officials, warning this “dangerous” method would likely kill more bids, devastate the U.S. poultry industry, and even increase the virus’s chances of spreading to humans.
Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity on March 11, Kennedy spoke about how the bird flu continues to spread through poultry farms, creating soaring egg prices.
Anytime the avian flu is detected on a poultry farm, the entire flock is slaughtered to help limit its spread. This is because the virus is incredibly contagious, spreading quickly among the flock.
This has led to hundreds of millions of chickens being culled.
Scientists are still figuring out the best way to protect poultry when avian flu is detected on farms, but so far, culling the flock and stopping the virus in its tracks has been the most effective approach.
However, Kennedy did not agree with this, instead suggesting the virus should rip through the flocks.
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“Should you cull those flocks?” he said. “You should let the disease go through them and identify the birds that survive, which are the birds that probably have a genetic inclination for immunity and those are the birds who should breed.”
Rocio Crespo, a poultry veterinarian at the North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine, disagreed with the idea, warning this not only gives the bird flu a higher chance to spread to other flocks and animals, but humans too.
“It is not right, it’s dangerous… it’s like putting Ebola in the middle of New York City and not isolating people,” she said.
Matthew Koci, a professor of immunology and virology at North Carolina State University’s poultry science department, echoed these sentiments.
The more animals the virus infects, he said, the more we are “rolling the dice” for a mutation to happen and turn into “the next pandemic.”
“It increases the risk of jumping to humans…. letting the virus rip through billions of chickens is giving Mother Nature more and more time to find the virus mutation that will jump to human and spread human to human,” he said.
Although rare, humans can become infected with avian flu, with the U.S. just reporting its first bird flu death earlier this year. Most of the human cases so far have been seen in those who have had prolonged contact with infected birds or dairy cows.
There are other repercussions to letting the bird flu run its course.
The virus is nearly 100 per cent fatal in birds. This means that if you let bird flu run through a flock, there will be no more birds left, Koci warned.
“There will be no more chicken industry, as 95 per cent of them will be dead and it will decades for the industry to populate. This will decimate reproduction.”
The genetic selection of finding immune birds isn’t as simple as it sounds, he added.
For decades, scientists have been working to figure out how to protect birds from influenza, and if selecting for a specific breed were possible, “we would have done that by now,” Koci added.
Koci believes RFK Jr.’s idea aligns with his stance on COVID-19 and measles, which essentially boils down to “let evolutionary selection run its course, and those who survive won’t have to worry about it anymore.”
“But no pathogen has ever gone away just because it ripped through a population,” Koci said. “That’s not how it works.”
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