USDA details new plan to tackle bird flu and lower egg prices

Soaring egg prices have consumers boiling, and on Wednesday, the United States Department of Agriculture blamed rising costs on the bird flu epidemic and said it will take new steps to quell the outbreak.

The new plan appears to have refocused the department’s efforts around the goal of lowering egg prices. Speaking to reporters at the White House, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said it could take a few months for egg prices to drop.

“It’s going to take a little while to get through, I think the next month or two, but hopefully by summer.”

In a new op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday and a press release issued later in the day, Rollins outlined the new five-pronged approach, which will focus on increasing biosecurity on egg-laying farms and helping farmers who have lost flocks recover more quickly. She said USDA may temporarily allow imports of eggs to expand supply.

Rollins said USDA was also exploring the use of vaccines and therapeutics in chickens to cut down on culling of birds, but the agency has not yet authorized any for use.

“To every family struggling to buy eggs: We hear you, we’re fighting for you, and help is on the way,” Rollins wrote.

The USDA will invest $1 billion in the new plan, which will be paid for, in part, by Department of Government Efficiency cuts. According to Rollins’ op-ed:

Some felt the plan was not aggressive enough.

It doesn’t, for example, expand the surveillance of milk to cover all states. Contaminated milk can contain high levels of virus before pasteurization. Out of 70 human H5N1 infections in the US this year, 41 of them have been associated with dairy farming, while 24 have been associated with poultry culling, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Doug Corwin, a duck farmer on Long Island who recently had to cull his flock of 99,000 ducks after the virus was detected, said he was disappointed that the plan didn’t put more emphasis on poultry vaccines.

Corwin says while biosecurity and surveillance is always helpful, he believes vaccines are the only way to stabilize the situation.

“It is a step in the right direction, but essentially they are doubling down on biosecurity,” he said.

The USDA recently issued a conditional license for a bird flu vaccine from the company Zoetis. There are other bird flu vaccines that are licensed in the US, too, including one from German company Boehringer-Ingelheim that has been used in other countries, including France and Mexico.

“We need tools like vaccines to protect poultry from H5N1 because the virus is lethal to them and the endless, expensive cycle of culling doesn’t seem to be working to stop the virus from infecting flocks,” said Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo who directs the Pandemic Center at Brown University. “Though the vaccine may not prevent flocks from infection, making the the virus less lethal to birds may alleviate some of the financial tolls of H5N1.”

Use of vaccines and drugs, Rollins said, could cut down on the need for culling entire flocks of birds.

Culling, or killing all the birds in a flock where some have been infected, can be an effective way to stop an outbreak. In the last major wave of bird flu to hit the United States, in 2014, aggressive culling stopped the spread of the virus within a year. In the current epidemic, however, culling hasn’t been enough to extinguish the contagion. More than 166 million birds have died since the February 2022, according to the USDA.

Taxpayers have borne the costs in multiple ways, facing higher prices for eggs at the grocery store, but also footing the bill for the dead birds. Over the past three years, the US government has paid poultry producers more than $1.25 billon dollars to compensate them for the loss of their flocks.

Last year, the USDA said that strategy hadn’t worked as intended, as roughly 20% of those payments have gone to farms that have become infected multiple times. In December, USDA added a new requirement that farms had to pass a biosecurity audit before they would qualify for the indemnity payments.

On Wednesday, Rollins said poultry farmers had been overregulated, and pledged to roll back rules that made it tough for them to restart their operations after losing their flocks, though she didn’t specify what those might be.

Poultry producers have resisted the use of bird flu vaccines, which are costly and labor intensive to administer to millions of birds. The US is a major exporter of poultry products, and many countries won’t accept vaccinated birds.

“We will also work with our trading partners to minimize potential negative trade effects for US producers and to assess public-health concerns,” Rollins wrote in the WSJ.

The World Organization for Animal Health, or WOAH, says vaccination may now be a necessary measure to control the spread of bird flu, which has moved from being a seasonal scourge for birds to becoming a year-round threat for many different species of mammals, including dairy cattle.

WOAH recommends vaccination of flocks, but not as a standalone measure. Vaccines don’t stop the birds from becoming infected, but they can prevent severe disease if they are. That can help farmers save their flocks and reduces the chances that people or other wildlife may catch the infection from a sick flock. Vaccines don’t eliminate the risk of transmission entirely however.

For that reason, countries that opt for this strategy should make sure they’re using high quality vaccines that are regularly updated to match the circulating viruses; they also need to have adequate surveillance to monitor vaccinated birds in case they are infected, but don’t look sick. For that reason, WOAH recommends robust testing to rule out silent spread of the disease. It also says farmers and poultry producers should commit to sharing data on how long protection from the vaccines lasts.