THE SET-UP: “The price of eggs” was shorthand for voter dissatisfaction with inflation throughout the 2024 Presidential campaign. But the problem wasn’t “inflation.” The problem was, and still is, a raging pandemic that’s been largely obscured from and/or ignored by the American public—the H5N1 strain of avian flu.
Avian flu was absent from the campaign and mostly missing from the national news media. It has since mutated … jumping into cows and pigs and humans. And it’s spread to scores of farms in a dozen states. As a result, the price of eggs is still climbing. And when challenged on the rising price of eggs, Trump’s profusely mendacious Press Secretary said this:
As far as the egg shortage, what’s also contributing to that is that the Biden administration and the Department of Agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore a lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage.
Never once did Karoline Leavitt mention “bird flu” or “avian flu.” Apparently, 100 million chickens were killed for no apparent reason. It’s as if H5N1 avian flu simply doesn’t exist.
It was a similar story on Capitol Hill.
I heard it mentioned only once during the first day of hearings for Health and Human Services (HHS) nominee RFK Jr., and that was in passing at the end of the hearing.
Given the bailiwick of the Secretary of HHS—which includes food safety and the health care system—you’d expect it come up a few times. Nope.
Given RFK Jr.’s stance on both COVID and vaccines, you’d expect him to be asked how he’ll handle avian flu vaccines, both extant and in development … and how he’ll handle a full-blown pandemic should it make the leap to human-to-human transmission. Nope.
And no one mentioned yet another big business bailout by taxpayers that somehow doesn’t redound to taxpayers’ benefit. Egg producers are raking in millions as Uncle Sam covers their losses. Profits are up. But the price of eggs? Still rising.
It’s an old story … big business socializes the price of taking risks and they privatize the profits. Unfortunately, they are risking far more than just the price of eggs. - jp
TITLE: How U.S. Taxpayers Bailed Out the Poultry Industry, and Helped Entrench Avian Flu
https://sentientmedia.org/us-taxpayers-poultry-industry-avian-flu/
EXCERPTS: As avian flu rapidly circulates in the U.S., Cal-Maine Foods, the nation’s largest egg producer, appears to be having a bumper year, bolstered in part by taxpayer bailouts in the multi-millions.
The company’s stocks recently soared to a record high, as its net sales rose by a staggering 82 percent last quarter. Cal-Maine Foods expanded its operations last spring, paying around $110 million in cash to acquire the assets and facilities of another egg producer, ISE America. Despite culling at least 1.6 million hens on infected farms last year, the poultry corporation is getting richer and bigger.
U.S. taxpayers have given the poultry giant a lift. The company has received $44 million in indemnity payouts to compensate for bird deaths tied to the avian flu outbreak. Despite the company’s growth, Cal-Maine Foods is the fourth largest recipient of indemnity payments for the ongoing outbreak from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS)’s indemnity program.
The compensation system, distinct from the agency’s program for livestock, pays poultry farmers and producers for the market value of the birds and eggs. It does not pay for birds that directly die from avian flu. It only pays for “infected or exposed poultry and/or eggs that are destroyed to control the disease,” — i.e. deliberately killed to prevent the spread of the virus. The agency also provides compensation for other virus control activities, such as destroying contaminated supplies and disinfecting a barn after an outbreak.
Nearly three years since the first H5N1 outbreak in U.S. poultry, the USDA has concluded that the agency’s compensation system has not worked as it intended. By bailing out poultry producers with few stipulations, the system has, inadvertently, lowered the economic risk of biosecurity lapses on farms, encouraging the virus’s spread. In other words, farmers have not been effectively incentivized to make changes to protect their flocks.
As the outbreak has continued to spread, the government bailout of the poultry industry has ballooned too. As of January 22nd, 2025, APHIS has dolled out $1.46 billion in indemnity payments and additional compensation over the outbreak’s course, according to a figure provided to Sentient by a USDA spokesperson. This includes $1.138 billion for the loss of culled eggs and birds and $326 million for measures to prevent the virus’s spread.
A significant share — $301 million — of the indemnity payments have gone to just the top four producers, according to government spending data.
Jennie-O Turkey Store, based in Minnesota, tops the list for indemnity payouts: the popular turkey brand has received $120 million since the beginning of the H5N1 outbreak in 2022, according to government spending data. Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch, which supplies McDonald’s cage-free eggs, has received the second largest bailout at $89 million. Center Fresh Egg Farm, part of a group of farms owned by Versova, one of the largest U.S. egg producers, has received $46 million. (This data reflects the legally obligated amount of indemnity owed to each company, which means that the USDA may not have dispensed these payments in full yet.)
By comparison, when the first outbreak of avian flu swept the U.S. between 2014 and 2015, farmers and producers received just over $200 million in indemnity payments.
“The current regulations do not provide a sufficient incentive for producers in control areas or buffer zones to maintain biosecurity throughout an outbreak,” APHIS stated in December, which introduced new emergency guidelines in an attempt to remedy this incentive problem.
One of the preferred methods farms use to cull birds is by sealing off the air flow to the barn and then pumping in heat or carbon dioxide. Known as Ventilation Shutdown Plus (VSD+), this is a cheap way to kill an entire flock by heat stroke or suffocation, and is approved by the USDA for indemnity payments only under “constrained circumstances.” The top 10 recipients of indemnity payments all used VSD+ to often exterminate millions of birds at once, according to APHIS records obtained by Crystal Heath, a veterinarian and the executive director of Our Honor, through a FOIA request.
By compensating farmers for VSD+, this system has helped make what many animal welfare advocates consider an unnecessarily cruel death part of the industry standard.
The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) recently released a draft of new guidelines for depopulation, which notes when the heat fails, VSD+ can result in an “unacceptable numbers of survivors” — birds that are severely injured, but not yet dead, and then need to be killed by another means. Yet the AVMA’s draft guidelines, closely relied upon by the USDA, still include this method as an option.
Some animal protection advocates contend that poultry companies should not receive indemnity payments at all, regardless of biosecurity, arguing that the industry should be responsible for its own losses.
“Why should this high-risk business be bailed out?” Heath, a longtime critic of AVMA’s guidelines, tells Sentient. As an animal protection advocate, Heath has also been closely tracking indemnity payments throughout this outbreak. “What we’re seeing is the largest corporations are receiving the most in indemnity payments, and they’re using the most brutal methods of depopulation,” referring to the culling methods.
By sheltering producers from risk, researchers have observed that indemnity payouts can, under some circumstances, inadvertently encourage lapses in biosecurity, enabling the spread of disease. And this can potentially create a system where farms are too indemnified to fail — the risks of operating a business highly susceptible to disease are absorbed by the government.
“What we are finding is that ‘unconditional indemnity’ disincentivizes livestock producers to adopt biosecurity because they know that if the disease strikes their system then they would be indemnified,” Asim Zia, a professor of public policy and computer science at the University of Vermont who researches livestock disease risk, tells Sentient. According to Zia, “unconditional indemnity” means indemnity payments with next-to-no requirements to qualify.
TITLE: Trump Administration’s Halt of CDC’s Weekly Scientific Report Stalls Bird Flu Studies
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/cdc-trump-mmwr-bird-flu-studies-blocked-meddling/
EXCERPTS: The Trump administration has intervened in the release of important studies on the bird flu, as an outbreak escalates across the United States.
One of the studies would reveal whether veterinarians who treat cattle have been unknowingly infected by the bird flu virus. Another report documents cases in which people carrying the virus might have infected their pet cats.
The studies were slated to appear in the official journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The distinguished journal has been published without interruption since 1952.
Its scientific reports have been swept up in an “immediate pause” on communications by federal health agencies ordered by Dorothy Fink, the acting secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Fink’s memo covers “any document intended for publication,” she wrote, “until it has been reviewed and approved by a presidential appointee.” It was sent on President Donald Trump’s first full day in office.
That’s concerning, former CDC officials said, because a firewall has long existed between the agency’s scientific reports and political appointees.
“MMWR is the voice of science,” said Tom Frieden, a former CDC director and the CEO of the nonprofit organization Resolve to Save Lives.
“This idea that science cannot continue until there’s a political lens over it is unprecedented,” said Anne Schuchat, a former principal deputy director at the CDC. “I hope it’s going to be very short-lived, but if it’s not short-lived, it’s censorship.”
White House officials meddled with scientific studies on covid-19 during the first Trump administration, according to interviews and emails collected in a 2022 report from congressional investigators. Still, the MMWR came out as scheduled.
“What’s happening now is quite different than what we experienced in covid, because there wasn’t a stop in the MMWR and other scientific manuscripts,” Schuchat said.
Neither the White House nor HHS officials responded to requests for comment. CDC spokesperson Melissa Dibble said, “This is a short pause to allow the new team to set up a process for review and prioritization.”
News of the interruption hit suddenly last week, just as Fred Gingrich, executive director of the American Association of Bovine Practitioners, a group for veterinarians specializing in cattle medicine, was preparing to hold a webinar with members. He planned to disclose the results of a study he helped lead, slated for publication in the MMWR later that week. Back in September, about 150 members had answered questions and donated blood for the study. Researchers at the CDC analyzed the samples for antibodies against the bird flu virus, to learn whether the veterinarians had been unknowingly infected earlier last year.
Although it would be too late to treat prior cases, the study promised to help scientists understand how the virus spreads from cows to people, what symptoms it causes, and how to prevent infection. “Our members were very excited to hear the results,” Gingrich said.
Like farmworkers, livestock veterinarians are at risk of bird flu infections. The study results could help protect them. And having fewer infections would lessen the chance of the H5N1 bird flu virus evolving within a person to spread efficiently between people — the gateway to a bird flu pandemic.
At least 67 people have tested positive for the bird flu in the U.S., with the majority getting the virus from cows or poultry. But studies and reporting suggest many cases have gone undetected, because testing has been patchy.
Just before the webinar, Gingrich said, the CDC informed him that because of an HHS order, the agency was unable to publish the report last week or communicate its findings. “We had to cancel,” he said.
Another bird flu study slated to be published in the MMWR last week concerns the possibility that people working in Michigan’s dairy industry infected their pet cats. These cases were partly revealed last year in emails obtained by KFF Health News. In one email from July 22, an epidemiologist pushed to publish the group’s investigation to “inform others about the potential for indirect transmission to companion animals.”
Jennifer Morse, medical director at the Mid-Michigan District Health Department and a scientist on the pending study, said she got a note from a colleague last week saying that “there are delays in our publication — outside of our control.”
A person close to the CDC, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about reprisal, expected the MMWR to be on hold at least until Feb. 6.
TITLE: Exclusive: USDA inspector general escorted out of her office after defying White House
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/usda-inspector-general-escorted-out-her-office-after-defying-white-house-2025-01-29/
EXCERPTS: Security agents escorted the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture out of her office on Monday after she refused to comply with her firing by the Trump administration, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Phyllis Fong, a 22-year veteran of the department, had earlier told colleagues that she intended to stay after the White House terminated her Friday, saying that she didn’t believe the administration had followed proper protocols, the sources said.
The White House defended the firing of Fong and the other inspectors general, saying "these rogue, partisan bureaucrats... have been relieved of their duties in order to make room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy."
The USDA inspector general has a broad mandate, pursuing consumer food safety, audits and investigations of the Agriculture Department as well as violations of animal welfare laws. The USDA has been at the heart of concerns about bird flu, which has spread among cattle and chickens and killed a person in Louisiana.
In 2022, the inspector general’s office launched an investigation of Elon Musk’s brain implant startup Neuralink, which remains ongoing, sources said. In recent years, the office has also taken on animal abuse at dog breeders for research labs and the listeria outbreak at Boar’s Head, among other issues.
Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help President Donald Trump get elected in November and has emerged as a key player in the president’s orbit.
Fong served as the first chairperson of CIGIE from 2008 through 2014, according to her biography on USDA’s website.
In response to the Reuters story, Senator Mazie Hirono criticized Trump's firing of the watchdogs.
"Egg prices are soaring. Bird flu is out of control. USDA should be fixing this problem. Instead, Trump is stacking the federal government with yes-men. He doesn’t care about your grocery prices," she wrote on X.