px_eliezer_ Bad times ahead, RFK Junior wants to let bird flu spread to see which birds survive.
That’s a bad idea.
It depends on one’s point of view. The status quo is if bird flu is discovered on a farm, all chickens have to be culled – meaning it’s a guaranteed 100% death rate.
Farmers must currently cull infected flocks to contain the disease before it spreads. They’re financially compensated for the culled birds by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
If they let it rip, the worse that it can happen is also a 100% death rate – can’t be any worse than that. This can be tried a few times, and if there are no survivors out of a few millions birds, than it can be concluded that the approach is not working. But it needs to be tried first. One obvious danger of this approach is that this can help the spread of the virus. However, big commercial operations are usually reasonably self contained. so facilities could be quarantined off to prevent the spread of the disease.
IMHO, the best solution would be vaccination against bird flu, but there are some significant oppositions to that.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced plans to spend $100 million to study bird flu vaccines to fight the disease in concert with meat chicken, egg and turkey groups. That’s part of a larger $1 billion effort to invest in more protections to keep the virus off farms that President Donald Trump believes will help lower egg prices.
Chicken meat producers remain the most resistant to vaccines because of concerns they could harm meat exports, which totaled nearly $4.7 billion last year. Egg and turkey producers sell most of their products in the U.S. and have been hit hardest by the virus.
Another possibility would be to create a GMO chicken that is inherently resistant to bird flu, but that’s another can of tasty, not necessarily brain eating red worms…. 🙃