Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thinks that the bird flu should be allowed to spread unchecked to identify birds that could be immune.
Kennedy said in a recent Fox News interview that farmers “should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds that are immune to it,” an idea that experts say would be dangerous and hurt the poultry industry.
“That’s a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, told The New York Times.
Every new infection of the H5N1 virus is a chance that it will mutate and become more powerful and spread further, although it still hasn’t been proven to spread between people. But if it were allowed to spread through millions of birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Hansen said.
While Kennedy’s department doesn’t have any regulatory powers over farms, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins agrees.
“There are some farmers that are out there that are willing to really try this on a pilot as we build the safe perimeter around them to see if there is a way forward with immunity,” Rollins said on Fox News in February.
If this plan actually goes into effect, the virus would spread among a larger number of birds, putting more people and other animals at risk of infection. Right now, if a poultry farm has a positive test for the virus, they are reimbursed for culling their flocks to prevent its spread.
If the virus were allowed to spread on purpose, bird flu “infections would cause very painful deaths in nearly 100 percent of the chickens and turkeys,” Dr. David Swayne, a poultry veterinarian and former USDA employee, told the Times, adding that it would be “inhumane, resulting in an unacceptable animal welfare crisis.”
Kennedy isn’t even operating on the right information: He claimed in one interview that the virus didn’t seem to affect wild birds, but there are many documented cases of wild birds dying from H5N1. Kennedy also theorizes that some chickens and turkeys may be immune, but scientists say that poultry lacks the genes needed to resist the virus.
It seems that Kennedy’s pseudoscience is spreading unchecked as well. He’s already been putting his anti-vaccine beliefs into practice at HHS by curtailing multiple vaccine research projects and directing resources towards researching the debunked conspiracy that vaccines cause autism. His latest idea on the bird flu is dangerous and could end up having disastrous consequences for public health and U.S. agriculture.
The post RFK Jr. Unveils Disturbing Plan to Combat Bird Flu appeared first on New Republic.
