Lambert here: If Bird Flu achieves human-to-human transmission, we won’t be having an origins controversy: We will have done it to ourselves as the outcome of an enormous experiment on the human population run by Big Ag, the USDA, and CDC. Everybody will have played their part.
Kate Wells is a Peabody Award-winning journalist currently covering public health for Michigan Public Radio. Originally published at Kaiser Health News.
Greg Herbruck knew 6.5 million of his birds needed to die, and fast.
But the CEO of Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch wasn’t sure how the family egg producer (one of the largest in the U.S., in business for over three generations) was going to get through it, financially or emotionally. One staffer broke down in Herbruck’s office in tears.
“The mental toll on our team of dealing with that many dead chickens is just, I mean, you can’t imagine it,” Herbruck said. “I didn’t sleep. Our team didn’t sleep.”
The stress of watching tens of thousands of sick birds die of avian flu each day, while millions of others waited to be euthanized, kept everyone awake.
In April 2024, as his first hens tested positive for the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 virus, Herbruck turned to the tried-and-true U.S. Department of Agriculture playbook, the “stamping-out” strategy that helped end the 2014-15 bird flu outbreak, which was the largest in the U.S. until now.
Within 24 to 48 hours of the first detection of the virus, state and federal animal health officials work with farms to cull infected flocks to reduce the risk of transmission. That’s followed by extensive disinfection and months of surveillance and testing to make sure the virus isn’t still lurking somewhere on-site.
Since then, egg farms have had to invest millions of dollars into biosecurity. For instance, employees shower in and shower out, before they start working and after their shifts end, to prevent spreading any virus. But their efforts have not been enough to contain the outbreak that started three years ago.
This time, the risk to human health is only growing, experts say. Sixty-six of the 67 total human cases in the United States have been just since March, including the nation’s first human death, reported last month.
“The last six months have accelerated my concern, which was already high,” said Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious diseases physician and the founding director of Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases.
Controlling this virus has become more challenging, precisely because it’s so entrenched in the global environment, spilling into mammals such as dairy cows, and affecting roughly 150 million birds in commercial and backyard flocks in the U.S.
Because laying hens are so susceptible to the H5N1 virus, which can wipe out entire flocks within days of the first infection, egg producers have been on the front lines in the fight against various bird flu strains for years. But this moment feels different. Egg producers and the American Egg Board, an industry group, are begging for a new prevention strategy.
Many infectious disease experts agree that the risks to human health of continuing current protocols are unsustainable, because of the strain of bird flu driving this outbreak.
“The one we’re battling today is unique,” said David Swayne, former director of the Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and a leading national expert in avian influenza.
“It’s not saying for sure there’s gonna be a pandemic” of H5N1, Swayne said, “but it’s saying the more human infections, the spreading into multiple mammal species is concerning.”
For Herbruck, it feels like war. Ten months after Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch was hit, the company is still rebuilding its flocks and rehired most of the 400 workers it laid off.
Still, he and his counterparts in the industry live in fear, watching other farms get hit two, even three times in the past few years.
“I call this virus a terrorist,” he said. “And we are in a battle and losing, at the moment.”
When Biosecurity Isn’t Working … or Just Isn’t Happening
So far, none of the 23 people who contracted the disease from commercial poultry have experienced severe cases, but the risks are still very real. The first human death was a Louisiana patient who had contact with both wild birds and backyard poultry. The person was over age 65 and reportedly had underlying medical conditions.
And the official message to both backyard farm enthusiasts and mega-farms has been broadly the same: Biosecurity is your best weapon against the spread of disease.
But there’s a range of opinions among backyard flock owners about how seriously to take bird flu, said Katie Ockert, a Michigan State University Extension educator who specializes in biosecurity communications.
Skeptics think that “we’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” Ockert said, or that “the media is maybe blowing it out of proportion.” This means there are two types of backyard poultry enthusiasts, Ockert said: those doing great biosecurity, and those who aren’t even trying.
“I see both,” she said. “I don’t feel like there’s really any middle ground there for people.”
And the challenges of biosecurity are completely different for backyard coops than massive commercial barns: How are hobbyists with limited time and budgets supposed to create impenetrable fortresses for their flocks, when any standing water or trees on the property could draw wild birds carrying the virus?
Rosemary Reams, an 82-year-old retired educator in Ionia, Michigan, grew up farming and has been helping the local 4-H poultry program for years, teaching kids how to raise poultry. Now, with the bird flu outbreak, “I just don’t let people go out to my barn,” she said.
Reams even swapped real birds with fake ones for kids to use while being assessed by judges at recent 4-H competitions, she said.
“We made changes to the fair last year, which I got questioned about a lot. And I said, ‘No, I gotta think about the safety of the kids.’”
Reams was shocked by the news of the death of the Louisiana backyard flock owner. She even has questioned whether she should continue to keep her own flock of 20 to 30 chickens and a pair of turkeys.
“But I love ’em. At my age, I need to be doing it. I need to be outside,” Reams said. “That’s what life is about.” She said she’ll do her best to protect herself and her 4-H kids from bird flu.
Even “the best biosecurity in the world” hasn’t been enough to save large commercial farms from infection, said Emily Metz, president and CEO of the American Egg Board.
The egg industry thought it learned how to outsmart this virus after the 2014-15 outbreak. Back then, “we were spreading it amongst ourselves between egg farms, with people, with trucks,” Metz said. So egg producers went into lockdown, she said, developing intensive biosecurity measures to try to block the routes of transmission from wild birds or other farms.
Metz said the measures egg producers are taking now are extensive.
“They have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in improvements, everything from truck washing stations — which is washing every truck from the FedEx man to the feed truck — and everything in between: busing in workers so that there’s less foot traffic, laser light systems to prevent waterfowl from landing.”
Lateral spread, when the virus is transmitted from farm to farm, has dropped dramatically, down from 70% of cases in the last outbreak to just 15% as of April 2023, according to the USDA.
And yet, Metz said, “all the measures we’re doing are still getting beat by this virus.”
The Fight Over Vaccinating Birds
Perhaps the most contentious debate about bird flu in the poultry industry right now is whether to vaccinate flocks.
Given the mounting death toll for animals and the increasing risk to humans, there’s a growing push to vaccinate certain poultry against avian influenza, which countries like China, Egypt, and France are already doing.
In 2023, the World Organization for Animal Health urged nations to consider vaccination “as part of a broader disease prevention and control strategy.”
Swayne, the avian influenza expert and poultry veterinarian, works with WOAH and said most of his colleagues in the animal and public health world “see vaccination of poultry as a positive tool in controlling this panzootic in animals,” but also as a tool that reduces chances for human infection, and chances for additional mutations of the virus to become more human-adapted.
But vaccination could put poultry meat exporters (whose birds are genetically less susceptible to H5N1 than laying hens) at risk of losing billions of dollars in international trade deals. That’s because of concerns that vaccination, which lowers the severity of disease in poultry, could mask infections and bring the virus across borders, according to John Clifford, a former chief veterinary officer of the USDA. Clifford is currently an adviser to the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council.
“If we vaccinate, we not only lose $6 billion potentially in exports a year,” Clifford said. “If they shut us off, that product comes back on the U.S. market. Our economists looked at this and said we would lose $18 billion domestically.”
Clifford added that would also mean the loss of “over 200,000 agricultural jobs.”
Even if those trade rules changed to allow meat and eggs to be harvested from vaccinated birds, logistical hurdles remain.
“Vaccination possibly could be on the horizon in the future, but it’s not going to be tomorrow or the next day, next year, or whatever,” Clifford said.
Considering just one obstacle: No current HPAI vaccine is a perfect match for the current strain, according to the USDA. But if the virus evolves to be able to transmit efficiently from human to human, he said, “that would be a game changer for everybody, which would probably force vaccination.”
Last month, the USDA announced it would “pursue a stockpile that matches current outbreak strains” in poultry.
“While deploying a vaccine for poultry would be difficult in practice and may have trade implications, in addition to uncertainty about its effectiveness, USDA has continued to support research and development in avian vaccines,” the agency said.
At this point, Metz argued, the industry can’t afford not to try vaccination, which has helped eradicate diseases in poultry before.
“We’re desperate, and we need every possible tool,” she said. “And right now, we’re fighting this virus with at least one, if not two, arms tied behind our back. And the vaccine can be a huge hammer in our toolbox.”
But unless the federal government acts, that tool won’t be used.
Industry concerns aside, infectious diseases physician Bhadelia said there’s an urgent need to focus on reducing the risk to humans of getting infected in the first place. And that means reducing “chances of infections in animals that are around humans, which include cows and chickens. Which is why I think vaccination to me sounds like a great plan.”
The lesson “that we keep learning every single time is that if we’d acted earlier, it would have been a smaller problem,” she said.
Set chickens free. Go vegan for all life on earth including your own
Setting them free does nearly nothing to solve this particular problem.
The extent of mental capture by the animal exploitation industry is amazing. The above comment is a testament. How do you even argue that there wouldn’t be widespread chicken flu without widespread chicken raising?
If anyone needs this spelled out: farmed chickens have a very short lifespan. So yes, the problem would go away if the industry went away (of course, we’d have to find a way to vaccinate wild birds if there has been extensive spillover). It’s not like we would be living with millions of birds in petting zoos for decades.
I think you’re misunderstanding the extent to which H5N1 is present in wild flocks. It is endemic. Even if we waved a magic wand and all of the farmed chickens on earth disappeared, we’d still have an H5N1 problem. If we set all the chickens free as sadness wrote, we’d have an even larger H5N1 problem.
For context, in WA State we have had infected bobcats, infected seals, infected racoons, infected people, and that’s not even touching on the wild birds who are the primary victims of the virus.
Empty egg cases at all 3 groceries near me for the last 3 weeks, and costco only gets one pallet a day now (Limit 3 per customer). They used to be chronically low but now there’s just nothing there.
Yes, the cheapest food for the money isn’t available all that much, your tell will be when the new and improved 6 packs (limit 1) show up as the only size option.
What about other chicken parts, post egg variety?
Is there any shortage/price increases on the usual suspects such as the Costco $4.99 chicken…
Curious if this isn’t a regional thing since New England tends to source fresh food from within New England or occasionally NY state.
WinCo supermarket here used to have hundreds of cartons of dozens and 18’s, and the last few times they’ve been down to dozens of each size, with a limit 1 on all egg products. I thought I’d buy some cartons of eggs sans shells-as they last longer, and not 1 of 3 different brands were in stock.
The Trader Joe’s near our house had $3.99 per dozen cage free eggs this morning with no limit.
Wow, might be worth the drive, whereabouts?
All of WinCo’s eggs come from Petaluma, Ca.
Trader Joe’s is a national chain, maybe that explains it?
Could it be a scale thing? Are the artisanal chicken farmettes and gardens air-gapped from eachother enough that the flu does not spread between them all and does not so easily spread from the industrial chicken gulags to the artisanal chicken farmettes?
I would guess not, since the article is partly about backyard poultry, and the one human death in the US had a backyard flock, not industrial. This strain seems to spread pretty quickly even outside large farms.
Market basket in Massachusetts had Pete and Jerry eggs yesterday a dozen for about 3.89. I was surprised.
USDA/China Academy of Sciences Collab
https://www.ars.usda.gov/research/project/?accnNo=440252
“The unifying approach is to examine how virus strains from the H5NX (especially clade 2.3.4.4), H7N9 and H9N2 lineages, which pose the greatest current risk to both animals and humans, change at the quasi species level under various selective pressures: host switches, host immunity and virus competition. We will use in vitro and in vivo systems as complementary approaches that allow virus evolution to be interrogated at relatively high throughput at tissue level and at lower throughput but whole organism level…. in vitro and in vivo through two approaches: (1) Using chicken, quail, and duck embryonic fibroblasts and tracheal organ cultures as models of domestic and wild bird hosts; secondly, in vivo passage of viruses through mallard ducks and Chinese goose species to predict evolution in natural hosts; thirdly, viral evolution and transmission dynamics of avian influenza virus (AIV) infection in Japanese quail as an indicator species of potential to jump into mammalian hosts”
Would be nice if stopping this type of research was our first line of defense.
USA Today has had a number of good articles on bird flu lab leaks going back to 2015, their annoying number of ads aside.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2023/04/11/lab-leak-accident-h-5-n-1-virus-avian-flu-experiment/11354399002/
Hi Lambert! Did I miss something? You said in your intro, “We will have done it to ourselves as the outcome of an enormous experiment on the human population run by Big Ag, the USDA, and CDC.” I couldn’t find anything in the article that elaborated on this remark. Could you please elaborate? Thanks
For one answer to your question you might check out This Week in Virology’s Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin. Discussion of Bird Flu begins at minute 8:21. At minute 15:12 Dr. Griffin states, “What is shocking to me is that we are letting nature do this experiment…letting nature do this gain of function loss of function experiment.”
Dr. Racaniello responds with frustration that “you cannot stop nature from doing its thing” and reiterates his position criticizing anti-gain of function views as being counterproductive to the interests of disease research that produces positive human health outcomes.
Relevant articles discussed:
“We will have done it to ourselves” ? Noooo . . . Them will have done it to US.
Us did not ask Them and Them’s controllers to deliberately and on purpose foster all the conditions for an evolution of Spanish Flu 2.0 in hopes of adding it to the Jackpot Toolbox. Them decided to do it all on Thems’ own.
Wow. The world proves itself more and more surprising every day, at a seemingly accelerating pace.
Up-tempo beat to the Lemming Conga Line!
Latest from FluTrackers
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/cdc-bird-flu-cats-people.html
Trying again to post link … This is the article linked to in FluTrackers yesterday.
Eggs available all over Ohio. Just bought a dozen cage free organics for 4.99 at a kroger. Perks of living in flyover country perhaps.
We had some eggs available here in WA as well. Looks like there is something of reprieve, a few weeks ago most were cleaned out and what they had at Safeway were $8 a dozen for the non-organic eggs.
Only an observation by just watching: I haven’t seen any dead crows or sparrows around.
I just made pancakes with vegan egg replacer. Came out the same as ever and without the twinge of sulphur taste you get with eggs.
And I could lick the spoon without worrying about salmonella.
I work in an industrial kitchen and we have like multiple gross of eggs in the freezer and my coworkers keep stealing them.
So that idiom ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ need not apply?
Once this bird flu has reached a huge indstrial chicken gulag flock, it will spread to all the chickens in that flock. So why kill them? Why not let them all get this flu and see which ones ( if any) survive? If any survive and recover , they might be the founding basis for breeding up new types of flu-tolerant or flu-resistant chickens.
I remember years ago talking to someone in Saratoga Springs who claimed to own a multi-acre property south of town. He claimed to have several 80 foot tall American Chestnut trees on the property. He said that to reach that height they must have been blight-immune. He told me how when the Chestnut Blight was first spreading, that the authorities decided to cut down and kill a couple billion chestnut trees to make a “firebreak” that the blight could not spread over. But the blight spread over it anyway. He wonders how many blight-immune American chestnuts were killed in the Great Chestnut Cull, thereby being denied to the future as a breeding basis for a blight-immune American chestnut. If say one in a million American chestnut trees were blight-tolerant/immune and two billion trees were culled, that would mean the erasure of 2,000 blight-tolerant/immune trees not available to breed from.
Huh an interesting idea but on the other hand risky for humans that work with the chickens, sick birds would have a very high viral load.
Great point. I see many 60 – 90 year old elm trees gracing the streetscapes. They don’t know that they were all supposed to be dead 40 years ago.
@Rip Van Winkle at 4:53 pm
I have two elm trees growing in my backyard in Gatineau, Quebec. One is in the age range you cite, the other is about 15 years old. My cat loved sharpening Her claws on it.
Hope they don’t try to defend themselves against the massacre: Cows with Guns
We are seriously outnumbered: Counting your Chikens