Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., says that vaccinating the nation’s poultry flocks against pervasive H5N1 bird flu could turn them into “mutation factories.”
“All of my agencies advise against vaccination of birds, because if you vaccinate with a leaky vaccine, in other words a vaccine that does not provide sterilizing immunity, that does not absolutely protect against the disease, you turn those flocks into mutation factories,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “They’re teaching the organism how to mutate.”
But, vaccines could be key to the administration’s response going forward — at least, according to the Department of Agriculture. H5N1 bird flu infections have resulted in the deaths of more than 166 million poultry, and one Louisiana resident. Pathways toward vaccine production were a part of its billion-dollar strategy to get both infections and egg prices down. The administration is investing $100 million into vaccine research, specifically.
The department issued a conditional license for a vaccine for use in chickens in February. Vaccines for cows are also under development, according to the American Society for Microbiology.
Whatever the method, Kennedy said that bird flu would “never be eradicated.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., told Fox News this week that vaccinating the nation’s poultry flocks against rapidly spreading H5N1 bird flu could turn them into “mutation factories.” But, the Trump administration’s Agriculture Department is already investing $100 million into vaccine research (Getty Images)
“It’s much more likely to jump to animals if you do that,” he said of vaccination, noting that agency heads — the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration — “have all said, ‘We should not be vaccinating. It’s dangerous for human beings to vaccinate the birds.’”
That’s something Kennedy had repeated from a previous interview with the network, according to CBS News.
The secretary said that most of their scientists were against culling, and believe that therapeutics should be tested on the birds.
“The White House strategy now … and I am all on board with this, [is] that we should armor the domestic populations to insulate them from wild infiltration,” Kennedy told Hannity. “I think that that is the best strategy and then also to intensively test therapeutic drugs on those flocks,” he said.
Exploring pathways toward therapeutics was listed alongside vaccines in the Agriculture Department’s plan.
After it was released, states and farm groups voiced their support vaccines for avian flu in birds.
While researchers say vaccination can help to control the spread of the virus, the U.S. government has resisted (AFP via Getty Images)
Scientists say that vaccination would need to be implemented with strict biosecurity measures. However, relying on immunity from poultry surviving bird flu infections, which Kennedy proposed, could pose a far greater risk than vaccination, Daniel Perez, chair in poultry medicine at the University of Georgia, told CBS News.
“This implies a potentially dangerous misunderstanding of how avian influenza works. Allowing highly pathogenic avian influenza to spread through a poultry flock is extremely risky and counterproductive,” he said.
While researchers say vaccination can help to control the spread of the virus, the U.S. government has resisted. Any vaccination strategy would also have to account for the fact that vaccines would not completely eliminate infections or illnesses.
Vaccinating birds could result in international trade issues, Matt Koci, a virus expert and professor with North Carolina State University’s Prestage Department of Poultry Science, said. If a World Trade Organization country vaccinates its poultry products, other countries don’t have to take the birds.
“We do have vaccines that have been proven efficacious,” Andrew Bowman, an influenza expert at Ohio State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, told NBC News.
However, he added, “to put a vaccine on the market, we’d also have to change the entire testing assurance strategy and we’d have to negotiate that with all our trade partners.”