The Price of Eggs...?

Abandon culling. It's outdated, unnecessary, ineffective, and costly

Excerpted from my soon-to-be-released book, “Zero Accountability in a Failed System: How Big Pharma Weaponizes Vaccines, Public Health, and the Law.”

The price of eggs has been in the news lately.

Between March 2016 and 2022, the average cost for a dozen eggs had been below $2.00 USD. Beginning in 2022, the cost of a dozen eggs doubled to around $4.00 per dozen. As of January 2025, the average cost of a dozen eggs was at an all-time high at $4.95, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The pandemic and inflation contribute to rising egg prices, but the real culprit is indiscriminately killing millions of chickens and ducks due to an outbreak of H5N1. The current outbreak started in early 2022 and quickly grew, possibly due to widespread testing. More than 166 million chickens, turkeys, and waterfowl across the country have been killed since January 2022.

Are we doing anything meaningful other than decimating the food supply and our food budgets?

Old Player in a New Game

The first highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus was isolated on the Italian peninsula in 1878. Like many human immigrants of the Ellis Island era, “Fowl Plague,” as it became known, reached the shores of the US via New York City sometime in 1924. The initial outbreak, along with another that occurred five years later, was contained through the destruction of the poultry in the entire area.

Culling, the widespread killing of an entire population of infected animals, is based on a long-held assumption that once a viral outbreak occurs, the only way to eliminate transmission is to massacre every possible host, even if the animal is completely healthy, because the virus is thought to be transmitted indefinitely through the stool.

The practice has been accepted as a legitimate public health measure since it was first used in the UK in 1714 to contain an outbreak of rinderpest, a diarrheal disease in cattle. Both wild and domestic animals have been targeted, in an attempt to manage or curb outbreaks of zoonotic disease, an infectious illness that can be transmitted between animals or from animals to humans.

For bird flu, when one chicken becomes sick or tests positive for the HPAI virus, killing the entire flock is the first course of action recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), and the World Health Organization (WHO). Vaccination of a herd or flock is of no value if “disease-free status” must be proven because it is not possible to distinguish between vaccinated and infected animals.

Historically, between 1997 and 2003, the H5N1 outbreak in Hong Kong and the H7N7 outbreak in the Netherlands resulted in the brutal destruction of more than 31.5 million chickens. I will spare you the details of the gruesome and horrifying ways these family birds were killed in the name of “public health.”

Killing the Chickens, Destroying the Economy

Records show that since 1959, there have been 21 reported outbreaks of HPAI worldwide. The majority have occurred in Europe, with a few emerging in Mexico and Canada. Of the 21 incidents, five resulted in significant losses to regional economies. Minor outbreaks occurred sporadically throughout the US and abroad until 1983, when a major epidemic of highly pathogenic H5N2 appeared on farms in rural Pennsylvania. Two years and $70 million later, the outbreak had been controlled. Nearly 17 million birds – chickens and domestic ducks – had been destroyed, leading to escalated consumer costs of approximately $350 million, mostly due to a 30 percent jump in retail egg prices.

Does this sound familiar?

Years later (2001), in another part of the world, H5N1 viruses were isolated from geese brought to the central slaughterhouse at the Western Wholesale Food Market in Hong Kong. Widespread testing was undertaken, and many healthy birds throughout the province were found to be positive. This prompted authorities to order the slaughter of virtually all poultry—chickens, ducks, geese, and quail—in the territory. The slaughter resulted in losses for the farms and markets across the region more than $10 million.

In February 2004, an outbreak of H5N2 viruses afflicted poultry on a single farm in Gonzales County, located in south-central Texas. This was the first outbreak of a highly pathogenic strain in the US in more than 20 years. Detected through routine monitoring for the presence of pathogenic influenza viruses, the affected birds were quarantined and the area was disinfected. The quarantine was lifted March 26, 2004, and, after five days, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that the Texas outbreak had been completely eradicated.

Less than a month later, highly pathogenic H7N2 was identified in a flock of chickens in Pocomoke City, Maryland. On Sunday, March 7, 2004, a total of 118,000 farm birds were culled, and 210,000 birds on a second farm under the same ownership were destroyed the following day. Later that week, another 40,000 chickens from a third farm owned by the same farmer were also destroyed. Officials then included another 71 farms within the quarantine area. They killed 328,000 more chickens at its center, containing the outbreak to 12 large chicken houses.

And now, twenty years later in 2024, the media is recycling the fear-factor about H5N1 and governments are culling millions of chickens and also thousands of cows. In fact, between 2020 and 2024, more than 250 million chickens and other birds have been culled globally due to the current outbreak of HPAI H5N1. Officials have been poking around farms for the last year, checking to see if the H5N1 virus has landed on any other farm animals. And even though most cows have no signs of illness, inspectors have unnecessarily slaughtered them, with some farms losing up to 10% of their herd.

Culling is Ineffective

What is disturbing and has apparently been overlooked by public health and agriculture offices around the world is a study done in 2016 by an independent expert panel in the UK. Researchers concluded that culling was ineffective in reducing infection in a herd of cattle. The panel also concluded that proactive culling was also ineffective because it is “resource intensive” in terms of manpower, time, and financial loss. Another immediate argument against culling is that animals suffer both emotional and physical pain between the moment they are grabbed to be culled (shot, poisoned, strangled, suffocated, etc.) and put to death. The way chickens are killed is ruthless.

As of June 2024, bird flu had been detected in approximately 85 herds across 12 states, but only three farm workers had been sickened, two of them with an eye infection (conjunctivitis). While public health officials say “the risk to humans is low, the ominous threat continues,” with whispers of “concerns are growing.” Officials started requesting that persons working with or around farm animals wear protective clothing and masks, and calls for testing began.

The ranchers and workers complied. They’ve trained us well, haven’t they?

The preceding chronology documents that avian influenza outbreaks have occurred in the US with varying degrees of severity for many years. In fact, since 2022, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), a part of the USDA, has detected and reported that H5N1 virus has been found in more than 23 species of mammals. Looking at the list of animals that were tested in many states across the US, including black bears and bottle-nosed dolphins, it makes me shake my head: Don’t the officials at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, have more important things to do?

Taken in context, there is real concern for the poultry industry's economic losses. Keep in mind past experiences with H5N1 and other HPAI outbreaks in various parts of the world over the last few decades have a striking similarity to the current bird flu outbreak that is generating global attention. Here’s a table put together by the WHO tracking H5N1 globally in 2003-24.

The importance of this chart is that there have only been 462 bird flu-associated deaths worldwide since 2003. Further, there have only been eight deaths in the last four years. Sometime in the last few years, bird flu (H5N1) has mutated to a mild disease only causing conjunctivitis, commonly known as “pink eye.”

Why all the hysteria and fear-mongering? Don’t be scared and don’t be fooled. Fool me once? Shame on me. Fool me twice? It ain’t gonna happen.