The Bird Flu: Should we be exterminating the entire flock?
Recently I watched a YouTube interview with Dr. Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms and Dr. Peter McCullough on how bird flu fear mongering is damaging agriculture, and how unhygienic, Confined Feeding Operations (CFO’s), accelerate the spread of disease.
The avian “bird” flu (H5N1) has been around for about one hundred years and usually comes in waves. But is bird flu that lethal to humans? According to Dr. McCullough, it’s a long way to getting bird flu and death. Normally a person does not die of the flu; they die from untreated complications.
Currently, USDA policy is to cull (euthanize) chickens as the only response to the bird flu. In the last twenty-four months 166 million birds (5-10% of all laying chickens) have been killed. However, a very small percentage of these chickens actually had the flu or were even showing symptoms.
USDA ordering culling of healthy egg-laying chickens
Tragically, of the 166 million chickens that have been killed by the USDA, probably 164 million have been healthy. The protocol has been to kill the entire flock, horribly, by foam suffocation. The policy is, if one or two chickens on your farm shows any trace of bird flus from a PCR test (polymerase chain reaction), then automatically, all your chickens are killed. The problem with the PCR test is that there are many false positives.
Worldwide, there has never been one single flock wiped out by the bird flu. At the very most, only 5-10% of any flock has been lost by the virus.
The fact is most of the chickens that have been killed have been healthy and most would have been survivors. The survivors are the ones that are adapting to the virus. When you have a sickness in the chicken population; you don’t want to kill the survivors. That’s just crazy!
Culling prevents emerging flock immunity
Every single organism on earth is constantly adapting. As viruses mutate to become more virulent, at the same time, chickens are adapting to become more immune. This is called herd immunity. We want to encourage immunological fight-back with the surviving chickens.
Not only does killing the survivors not stop the virus, but it also stops the adaptability to keep pace with whatever the virus is doing. Maybe we shouldn’t kill all the survivors. What we want to encourage in our farm animals is adaptability.
Two days before Joe Biden left office, he gave Moderna $500 million (public taxpayer funds) to develop a bird flu vaccine. The economic incentives for the pharmaceutical companies to develop a bird flu vaccine, so the FDA can mandate vaccinating the chickens is not going to solve the problem.
Dr. Salatin is adamant that the chicken farmers need to have freedom of choice of whether to euthanize their entire flock. This is similar to informed consent. What he is trying to get through to the powers that be is “flock immunity”. If Dr. Salatin chooses a different remedy for treating his chickens, he will accept the losses. In the interview Salatin lists alternative remedies that are showing great promise. However, the USDA refuses to test these.
Extermination of chickens has no benefit
The proper use of culling is to get rid of the sick birds and keep the survivors. Dr. Salatin prefers the word exterminate. “They are actually exterminating the birds and it’s a much more powerful description of what is going on. It has no health outcome. The official narrative is completely bogus to call this culling or euthanasia.” A visual has been presented to the public that the entire flock is ill and they are all staggering around and dying. Nothing could be further than the truth.
Even if you euthanize your entire flock of chickens, shut down your facility for a couple of months, and then repopulate, there is the chance the virus will be re-introduced by infected migratory waterfowl. This is the insanity of the current USDA policy.
Interestingly, nearly 100% of the cases of bird to human cases occur during the extermination procedure, even with protective gear. The new D1.1 variant suggests the virus is mutating and will put more workers at risk.
What needs to happen is a change in the way we raise chickens; eliminate Confined Feeding Operations (CFO’s), which crowd the birds together and create a petri dish for sickness. Chickens need an open-air environment where they are exposed to sunshine and can eat bugs and grass in addition to their feed. We need to give chicken farmers the choice to cull out the sick birds and keep the still healthy chickens to establish herd immunity. Lastly, the farmers need the freedom to use alternative remedies and work with their local veterinarians to maintain the health of their flock.
