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Comment by zhengyi13 | Hacker News Reader

I mean, it'd be absolutely awful if we started having to deal w/ autistic chickens. I can't imagine how the Chinese do it.

Sarcasm aside, if the US isn't vaccinating our birds, what are the drivers for that? Cost concerns?

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Not exactly cost concerns but it’s definitely economic in nature. The US exports a lot of poultry (broilers, not eggs) and the importers test for avian flu with tests that are incapable of differentiating between a vaccinated bird and an infected one. If we were to vaccinate our birds, the broiler farmers would lose access to the much more lucrative export markets. Since the market is so competitive domestically, that would essentially spell the end for much of the industry (which is a national security concern, aka never gonna happen).

Instead the US performs cullings and reimburses the farmers, which has the knock on effect of wiping out all the egg laying hens our own domestic market depends on to protect the broiler export markets.

So the cost of "162,770,988 poultry affected as of 2/20/2025" is less than the cost of loss of export of chickens or of developing a better test?

https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html?co...

I can believe the export market is much larger than the number of chickens killed so far, but the cost of developing a better test seems likely to be lower, especially given future outbreaks.

Probably cost previously, certainly ideology now

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