The Trump administration plans to make vaccination a central part of its strategy to control bird flu, even as farm industry groups are divided on whether that’s the best approach.
National Economic Council Chair Kevin Hassett said in an interview with CBS Sunday that the plan to be released soon would emphasize “biosecurity and medication” and de-emphasize depopulation. His comments came two days after drug company Zoetis announced it had received a conditional license for a bird flu vaccine that can be used in poultry.
Bird flu was detected in the U.S. in wild birds in January 2022 for the first time since 2016 and has since moved through poultry flocks, hitting egg layers hardest. In early 2024 it made its way into dairy herds in Texas, where it’s believed wild birds first infected cows, which then spread to other states through transportation of cows.
More than 100 million chickens have been destroyed, at a cost to the government of about $1.4 billion in indemnity payments. Nearly 1,000 dairy herds in 17 states have been infected.
The Biden administration, with then-Secretary Tom Vilsack at USDA, gradually stood up a number of programs, including requirements for interstate transport of lactating cows and, most recently, a bulk milk testing program. But the virus continues to circulate, and recent testing has found cows in three states with a strain that had been detected only in wild birds.
The latest discovery of that strain in Arizona “is not unexpected, because genotype D1.1 represents the predominant genotype in the North American flyways this past fall and winter and has been identified in wild birds, mammals, and spillovers into domestic poultry,” USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service said Friday.
“Whole genome sequencing indicates that this detection is a separate wild-bird introduction of [highly pathogenic avian influenza] to dairy cattle, now the third identified spillover event into dairy cattle. This finding may indicate an increased risk of HPAI introduction into dairies through wild bird exposure.”
Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins
Hassett and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins have blamed the Biden administration for the spread, which has resulted in sharply higher egg prices.
“The Biden plan was to just, you know, kill chickens, and they spent billions of dollars just randomly killing chickens within a perimeter where they found a sick chicken,” Hassett said.
But Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, said perimeters around affected premises, which are determined by state animal health officials, “are not for depopulation; they are for surveillance and permitted movement.”
Typically, for HPAI in poultry, that is a 10-kilometer radius around an infected flock, he said. Also typically, Poulsen said farms within that radius “have additional testing to ensure they are not affected and may have what we call ’permitted movement,’ which means that a subset of the animals are tested prior to movement to the next stage of production.”
“We don’t depopulate flocks that do not have virus,” he said. “That is important.”
On X, Rollins said “bad policy, overregulation, and the avian flu created the perfect storm, resulting in record-high egg prices. My team and I are working on immediate actions to help lower the cost of eggs and food in general for the American people.”
“Policy matters. Over-regulating matters,” Rollins said on Fox and Friends. She said USDA would be “rolling out more tools in the toolkit on how to approach [bird flu].” She added that “this is going to take just a little while to bring these [egg] prices back down after the last four years.”
Both egg and turkey industries have suffered significantly from bird flu. Poulsen told Agri-Pulse the industry has “lost 25 million layers since January 1. That's of 280 million total.”
That level of production is “not going to come back for 75 days minimum, and it's going to take longer, because the outbreak is still going,” he said. Poulsen added that a vaccine is not a panacea but could be an important tool.
“It's not as simple as a solution in a syringe,” he said. “You’re talking about vaccinating hundreds of millions of birds, and it's still an injection-based vaccine, and you need to vaccinate every one very quickly, in a very organized manner, because as soon as you start using vaccine, you're going to start pressuring further reassortment [of the virus], and then you still have to think about, how is this going to impact international trade?”
Keith Poulsen, Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic LaboratoryPoulsen said that while vaccinating “will decrease mortality and lower the amount of virus in the environment, it doesn’t stop infection, and birds in a flock will still shed some virus,” resulting in depopulation.
That happened in France in 2023, where ducks were vaccinated. “Some of those vaccinated flocks still were affected and needed to be depopulated, but the overall number of flocks affected throughout the migration season was fewer,” Poulsen said.
Potential loss of exports is at the heart of opposition to a vaccine. The USA Poultry & Egg Export Council says many trading partners do not allow imports of vaccinated birds or other animals from a country where poultry is vaccinated.
“Most countries do not recognize countries that vaccinate as free of HPAI due to concerns that vaccines can mask the presence of the disease,” USAPEEC says. “Therefore, they do not accept exports from countries that do vaccinate – either for specific product categories that are vaccinated, regions that vaccinate, or for all poultry from the country.”
In a letter to Rollins, four members of Congress said, “In other words, if an egg-laying hen in Michigan is vaccinated for HPAI, the U.S. right now would likely be unable to export an unvaccinated broiler chicken from Mississippi.”
From inquiries USDA has made with trading partners, USAPEEC estimates that “dozens of countries … would have some level of restrictions” if U.S. poultry were vaccinated.
“The value of the markets we have heard a negative response from comes to over $3.1 billion worth of poultry product exports in 2024,” the group said. “This accounted for 55.3% of U.S. total exports worldwide last year,” not including Mexico, the largest U.S. poultry export market.
The National Chicken Council, which represents broiler producers, said last week it was “seeking assurances to protect U.S. chicken exports should vaccination be contemplated as part of any government strategy” to fight bird flu.
Greg Tyler, USAPEEC
Both groups warned of oversupply leading to lower prices, if exports are rejected.
“Any product that is not being exported is going to stay back here on the U.S. market,” President and CEO Greg Tyler of USAPEEC told Agri-Pulse. “So that's going to drive prices down, but it's also going to make producers say, ‘Well, if we can't export it, we're going to scale back on production.'”
That, in turn, would have an impact on growers of soybeans and corn, who supply feed for broilers. It also would cause job losses, Tyler said.
However, the National Milk Producers Federation, International Dairy Foods Association, United Egg Producers, and National Turkey Federation wrote Rollins last week in support of vaccination.
The groups’ leaders asked USDA “and its federal partners [to] bring a new sense of urgency and preparedness to the ongoing response by supporting the development of effective H5Nx vaccinations for dairy cows, turkeys and egg-laying hens that can be deployed to ensure this virus does not continue to negatively impact U.S. public and animal health.”
Field trials on vaccines for dairy cows are going on but it’s not clear when they will be completed.
Vaccine supporters call it “imperative that a science-based surveillance strategy be developed in which infected animals can be distinguished from vaccinated animals, and that any validated, risk-based surveillance strategy must be agreed upon by our international trading partners.”
In a separate statement, the National Turkey Federation said it "recognizes the significant trade and logistical challenges that must be addressed” before starting a vaccine program. “Renegotiation of international trade standards, developing reliable surveillance methods and overcoming logistical hurdles for vaccination should be a top priority.”
Poulsen cautioned, “The bottom line is that the current situation for poultry is not sustainable, but use of vaccine and changing policy is a very complex issue that isn’t as easy as approving a vaccine and all is well. The downstream effects of that could cost more than the problem now.”
Noah Wicks contributed to this report.
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