Vaccinating chickens will create 'mutation factories,' RFK Jr. warns



U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has raised the alarm against vaccinating poultry in order to bring down America's astronomical egg prices. Kennedy suggested in a recent interview that doing so might transform farms into incubators for mutant viruses, creating problems far more serious for the population than eggs that cost $1 a piece.

Egg prices have spiraled out of control in recent months and years.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicate that between 1994 and 2022, the price of a dozen grade A eggs remained south of $3, and with few exceptions, hovered around or below $2. Prices began to skyrocket in 2022 and have hit record highs in recent weeks.

Last month, egg prices hit an all-time average high of $4.95 per dozen. In the first week of March, egg prices were reportedly averaging about $6.85 nationally. In some places, the Associated Press reported that consumers have been shelling out as much as a dollar per egg. The USDA predicted that egg prices will increase by 41.1% this year.

While there are multiple factors at play, these unprecedented egg prices are largely the result of mass exterminations of commercial and backyard bird populations ordered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

'They're teaching the organism how to mutate.'

The stated purpose of these culls is to curb the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza A (H5) viruses. The agency has directed the extermination of over 166.41 million birds since the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspect Service first confirmed HPAI belonging to the clade 2.3.4.4b in a commercial flock in the U.S. on Feb. 8, 2022.Well over 30 million egg-laying birds have been culled since Jan. 1.

Absent these interventions, the virus would supposedly inflict devastating economic damage and possibly even pose health risks to humans — even though there has only been one recorded human death from HPAI in the U.S., and there are no documented cases of person-to-person spread.

Desperation over egg prices has prompted renewed interest in possibly vaccinating birds against the virus. The administration appears to be receptive.

While Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins noted that vaccines "aren't a stand-alone solution," she recently indicated that the USDA is committing $100 million for vaccine research and development.

There are multiple avian HPAI vaccines available, one of which received a conditional license from the USDA last month for use in chickens. However, the U.S. and the U.K. have resisted large-scale rollouts because vaccination could mask infections, delay detection, and ultimately lead to the need for larger culls. Another concern over vaccines that has been expressed on both sides of the Atlantic is the possibility that vaccination would prompt a false sense of security, thereby compromising biosecurity and again undermining efforts to protect supply.

Vaccination would also amount to an admission that the virus has become endemic rather than epidemic.

Kennedy, more than happy to acknowledge the wild endemicity of HPAI, raised an entirely different concern in a recent interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity.

"All of my agencies have recommended against the vaccination of birds," said Kennedy, "because if you vaccinate with a leaky vaccine — in other words, a vaccine that does not provide sterilizing immunity, that does not absolutely protect against the disease — you turn those flocks into mutation factories."

"They're teaching the organism how to mutate," continued Kennedy. "And it's much more likely to jump to animals if you do that."

Kennedy indicated that the agency heads at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration have suggested that vaccinating chickens "is dangerous for human beings."

'Those should be the birds that we breed.'

Not only did the HHS secretary advocate against vaccinating birds, he cast doubt on the value of culling flocks, suggesting that "you should let the disease go through them."

The culling operations cost Americans both at the grocery store and in their taxes.

The federal government pays poultry producers market value of the birds they are directed to cull. Farmers do not alternatively receive compensation for animals that die of the virus. As of January, over 1,200 producers received these federal indemnity payments, costing taxpayers over $1.1 billion.

Governing.com reported that 67 companies that have received indemnity payment have had at least two infections. There have been 18 facilities with three or more outbreaks. Since 2023, half of these payments have reportedly gone to just a handful of giant corporations.

Rather than shell out more money to kill flocks, delay the acquisition of immunity, and possibly incentivize complacency where biosecurity is concerned, Kennedy suggested, "We should be testing therapeutics on those flocks; they should isolate them; 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 should be the birds that we breed."

Kennedy intimated that shoppers should not be concerned about consuming eggs or poultry products from a bird population where HPAI is endemic. After all, the CDC has indicated that "cooking poultry and eggs to an internal temperature of 165˚F kills bacteria and viruses, including avian influenza A viruses."

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Cleaning up Biden’s bird flu mess falls to Trump



The Biden administration’s brilliant plan to address avian flu involved using a non-sterilizing, leaky vaccine on chickens — two years into the pandemic, when most live chickens have already been exposed to the virus. Where have we heard that idea before, and how did it end again?

Over the past four years, I’ve examined numerous studies and firsthand accounts showing how imperfect vaccines, notably the COVID shots, can lead to negative efficacy. The problem with a leaky vaccine is that it allows the most resilient mutations to thrive and become dominant strains. This doesn’t mean the vaccines cause these mutations, but they do foster natural selection that favors the worst variants.

This administration urgently needs to signal a shift away from Biden’s disastrous biosecurity policies, especially concerning avian flu.

The mass vaccination of chickens against Marek’s disease in the 1970s is a stark example of this problem. The use of a leaky vaccine in that case led to the emergence of more virulent strains, making the disease far deadlier for unvaccinated chickens.

As Quanta magazine warned in 2018:

The problem with leaky vaccines, Read says, is that they enable pathogens to replicate unchecked while also protecting hosts from illness and death, thereby removing the costs associated with increased virulence. Over time, then, in a world of leaky vaccinations, a pathogen might evolve to become deadlier to unvaccinated hosts because it can reap the benefits of virulence without the costs — much as Marek’s disease has slowly become more lethal to unvaccinated chickens. This virulence can also cause the vaccine to start failing by causing illness in vaccinated hosts.

History not only repeats itself but also rhymes. Last weekend, South Dakota-based veterinary biologics company Medgene announced that the USDA was nearing conditional approval for its H5N1 vaccine for dairy cattle. What happens if this vaccine spreads to the animal kingdom and eventually reaches humans?

The risks of non-sterilizing, leaky vaccines are well documented. Despite the disastrous outcomes linked to the COVID vaccines, the government has not paused its push for respiratory viral vaccines. Instead, it is actively promoting the new RSV shots, ignoring the potential dangers.

Even Anthony Fauci acknowledged these risks in a 2023 academic paper, co-authored with David Morens, then a senior scientific adviser at NIAID. The paper, published in the journal Cell in January 2023, admitted that flu-like vaccines are non-sterilizing and have significant shortcomings.

“Deficiencies in these vaccines reminiscent of influenza vaccines have become apparent,” Fauci conceded, adding that “they elicit incomplete and short-lived protection.” This admission underscores the need for a more cautious approach to vaccine approval and distribution.

Why are we still allowing the flu vaccine to continue, and why are we even calling it a vaccine? Flu shots do not sterilize the virus. In fact, Fauci expressed concerns about “disease tolerance” and “immune tolerance,” which result from “immune defense mechanisms that allow hosts to ‘accept’ infection and other antigenic stimuli to optimize survival.”

In other words, leaky, waning vaccines that rely on suboptimal antibodies against rapidly mutating viruses can lead to immune tolerance and imprinting. This can cause the immune system to misfire, resulting in negative efficacy. Any short-term protection against severe disease often comes at a long-term cost as the viruses adapt and grow stronger.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Australia and New Zealand saw almost no fatalities in 2020, before vaccines were introduced. However, deaths surged only after vaccination campaigns began. Renowned cardiologist and epidemiologist Dr. Peter McCullough warns that we may be repeating the same mistakes with avian flu vaccines.

“Remember, when we have bird flu, it’s always a mixture of strains, not a single strain,” McCullough said on my podcast last week. “It’s going to nudge the overall population to more virulent strains. The southeast Asians have now been vaccinating poultry for several decades, and there’s tons of information that it’s backfiring.”

What’s worse is that human vaccines are also in the works. “We’re even more concerned about the human bird flu vaccines,” McCullough said. “We have a CSL Seqirus vaccine that was FDA-cleared in 2021. It's an antigen-based vaccine; in the randomized trials of normal human volunteers, they died with this vaccine. So it frankly looks dangerous from the onset.”

Fortunately, this vaccine was not made commercially available. But why should we think that future efforts would succeed when we have failed to concoct safe and effective respiratory viral vaccines?

This administration urgently needs to signal a shift away from Biden’s disastrous biosecurity policies, especially concerning avian flu. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins outlined a five-part plan with $1 billion in subsidies but did not suggest pausing the vaccination campaign or halting the harmful culling of chickens.

She might be reconsidering. This week, Rollins acknowledged that “not enough research has been done” and emphasized the need to ensure that a vaccine would help contain the virus rather than strengthen it or cause it to spread to other species.

Now it’s up to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to scrap this plan entirely. RFK was made for a moment like this. His first major test began the moment he took office, and the clock is ticking.

Covid Fearmongering Worked So Well, The Government Is Now Creating A Poultry Panic

As avian flu is making headlines, fears that 'they’re coming for your chickens' are being realized.

Bird flu deaths cause egg prices to spike just in time for Easter



American families looking to pick up Easter eggs to color at the grocery store or who just want a protein-packed breakfast are in for an unpleasant surprise.

While inflation is already slamming grocery shoppers in their pocket books, the price of eggs is predicted to surge even higher because of a bad case of the bird flu.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Inspection Service said Monday that 21 states have confirmed cases of highly pathogenic avian influenza, which is infecting and killing poultry both on commercial farms and in people's backyards.

The agency said that more than 17 million chickens and turkeys have died because of the disease. An estimated 3% of the total U.S. flock — more than 11 million egg-laying chickens — have died, as well as two million commercially raised turkeys.

Thankfully, there have been no reported cases of humans contracting the bird flu. According to the World Health Organization and the CDC, bird flu is transmitted when people come into contact with the saliva, mucous, or feces of infected birds. There is no evidence that the disease can be transmitted from poultry that has been cooked properly, and the USDA and National Turkey Federation have said that bird flu does not pose a food safety concern.

But the widespread deaths of egg-producing poultry has created a supply shock at the same time seasonal demand for eggs will increase over the upcoming Easter and Passover holidays — meaning prices are going to go up.

Shelled egg prices have spiked more than 50% to $2.88 a dozen since Feb. 8, when the first case of bird flu was identified in a commercial turkey flock in Indiana, CNET reports.

The last time bird flu swept through U.S. farms in 2015, egg prices nearly doubled and the industry lost more than $1.5 billion.

"Egg availability heading into Easter is sure to be hampered," said Brian Earnest, an animal protein economist at CoBank. Earnest spoke to the Wall Street Journal about the rising prices, which he attributed to the population of egg-laying chickens declining in recent years, going from 340 million in April 2019 to around 322 million in February 2022.

Though prices are rising, industry analysts do not expect there to be a shortage of eggs anytime soon. They say that retailers have bought enough eggs to last through the holidays and to weather the supply constraints.

Rebecca Jarvis, a correspondent with ABC News, reports that shoppers should look into apps that can save on grocery bills, such as Ibotta and Checkout 51, that give customers cashback on groceries. Another app called Basket compares food prices to find the least expensive options for shoppers in their areas.