RFK Jr. Says Maybe We Should Just Let The Bird Flu Run Rampant | EUROtoday

In an interview with Fox News this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proposed a novel repair to the nation’s chook flu epidemic: Let the virus unfold.

“They should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flocks so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it,” Kennedy stated of poultry farmers and federal authorities.

It is the nation’s agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, who has authority over the nation’s poultry administration, not Kennedy. But Rollins seems to lend a hand together with her counterpart at HHS. As The New York Times famous, she floated the thought of a pilot program that will enable the illness to ravage a flock, whereas further layers of safety contained the unfold inside a sure perimeter. The surviving birds may then be studied.

But there are causes that scientists advocate instantly culling contaminated flocks, and letting the virus run rampant may have dire penalties.

The chook flu, H5N1, has a close to 100% fatality price in chickens and turkeys, and has already killed tens of millions of untamed birds.

One of the methods it could possibly unfold to wholesome poultry farms is by a single contaminated duck visiting a flock and shedding the virus by way of feces. H5N1 kills comparatively shortly, inflicting respiratory misery, swelling, lack of coordination and different signs earlier than dying. (Culling is subsequently thought-about extra humane.)

The virus has cropped up on farms and in yard flocks across the nation, leading to some 166 million birds culled to date — ensuing within the alarmingly excessive egg costs seen across the nation.

Although not frequent, people can turn out to be contaminated with H5N1, and one particular person within the U.S. has died of the an infection. Most of the human instances to date have been seen in those that have had extended contact with contaminated birds or dairy cows. There has been no human-to-human transmission noticed within the United States to date.

But that would change. As with different viruses, mass unfold offers H5N1 the prospect to mutate because it multiplies, working the chance of a mutation that enables the virus to unfold simply from human to human. Experts are already alarmed at the truth that the virus has jumped from birds to dairy cows, because it represents a leap between completely different species.

The mortality price in people is estimated to be round 50%.

“Hens bred specifically for maximum egg production tend to have inherently fragile immune systems,” Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner throughout Trump’s first time period, defined in an op-ed for Stat. “Worse, permitting unchecked transmission could inadvertently incubate viral mutations, potentially transforming the outbreak into an even more dangerous threat.”

Emily Hilliard, the HHS deputy press secretary, instructed The New York Times that Kennedy was merely making an attempt to say that “culling puts people at the highest risk of exposure” because of the shut contact it requires, which is why the secretary and National Institutes for Health “want to limit culling activities.”

“Culling is not the solution. Strong biosecurity is,” Hilliard stated.

Allowing the virus to proliferate, nevertheless, would nonetheless danger a mutation that would make H5N1 a much bigger menace to people.