Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cautioned against vaccinating chickens amid bird flu concerns.
Speaking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Kennedy said, “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 explained that the illness is “much more likely to jump to animals if you do that,” noting, “It’s dangerous for human beings to vaccinate the birds.”
“Most of our scientists are against the culling operation,” Kennedy added. “They think that we should be testing therapeutics on those flocks, they should isolate them, they should let the disease go through them and identify the birds that survive, which are the birds that probably have a genetic inclination for immunity. And those should be the birds that we breed like a wild population.”
“Right now, the White House’s strategy is to repopulate those farms that have been depopulated – we’ve killed 166 million chickens. That’s why we have an egg crisis,” he said. “The disease does not pass through food. So you cannot get it, as far as we know, you cannot get it from an egg, or milk, or meat, from an infected animal.”
Kennedy explained that domestic birds are often exposed to avian influenza due to open-air poultry farms when a mallard infiltrates the farm and infects the flock. Armoring and insulating domestic flocks from such infiltration is a better means of protection from bird flu, Kennedy explained.
