Robert F. Kennedy’s Plan For Bird Flu Could Have Dire Consequences For The World’s Health

Currently, avian influenza is devastating chickens in the US, with over 20 million birds dying of the disease, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). At the moment, though the infection has caused many distressing deaths in poultry and livestock, humans are relatively safe from the disease.

“Since April 2024, 70 human cases of avian influenza A(H5) virus infection have been reported in the United States. Of these, 41 cases were associated with exposure to sick dairy cows and 26 were associated with exposure to avian influenza A(H5N1) virus-infected poultry,” the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) explains. 

“The source of the exposure in three cases, could not be determined. To date, human-to-human transmission of influenza A(H5) virus has not been identified in the United States. The immediate risk to the general public from H5 bird flu remains low.”

However, that might not always be the case. As the world no doubt remembers from COVID-19, all it takes is a few mutations for a disease to spread amongst humans. Proper management of the disease in birds – including culling infected animals, enhancing biosecurity, and reporting of cases – is needed to keep the disease from making that sustained leap to humans, where human-to-human transmission could develop.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, US Secretary of Health and Human Services, outlined a different idea, saying 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,” per The New York Times.

Though decisions on farm policy fall to the USDA rather than the health department, agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins has floated the same idea, reportedly telling Fox News “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.”

The problem with this idea? Just about everything, according to experts. The primary risk to humans is that letting it loose through farms would give the virus more chance to mutate into one that can be transmitted from human to human.

“Every new infection in an animal and person is like throwing a pair of thousand-sided dice,” Dr James Lawler of the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Global Center for Health Security in Omaha told MedPageToday. “It may take a while, but eventually it will come up snake-eyes.”

While Kennedy claimed that some chickens may have natural immunity to the disease, which could be identified as the virus devastates a flock, experts are not impressed

“The way we raise birds now, there’s not a lot of genetic variability,” Dr Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, added to The New York Times. “They’re all the same bird, basically.”

“You’re setting yourself up for bad things to happen,” Hansen added. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

As well as being terrible for humans, the disease causes a lot of pain and discomfort for the birds, nearly all of which will end up dying of the disease. Symptoms include respiratory distress, coordination loss and tremors, swollen heads, and hemorrhages. Surely, like pretty much all of them, that is a disease we should keep as contained as we can.