Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is advising against vaccinating poultry as American farmers struggle to contain a devastating bird flu outbreak that has caused egg prices to skyrocket.
In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Kennedy explained that his main concern with inoculating chickens is that if the vaccine does not completely prevent infection it could help spawn new variants of bird flu that may be more likely to infect humans.
“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,” the HHS secretary said in the interview, which aired Tuesday.
“It’s much more likely to jump to animals if you do that,” Kennedy argued, noting that 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.”
Kennedy’s warning comes after Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced last month that the US Department of Agriculture would spend $100 million on vaccine research to combat the bird flu as part of a $1 billion strategy to curb the disease’s impacts.
“The Biden administration did little to address the repeated outbreaks and high egg prices that followed. By contrast, the Trump administration is taking the issue seriously,” Rollins said last month. “American farmers need relief, and American consumers need affordable food. To every family struggling to buy eggs: We hear you, we’re fighting for you, and help is on the way.”
When poultry flocks become infected with bird flu, the birds are typically culled by farmers to prevent the disease from spreading.
The practice has caused egg shortages and rising prices.
The average cost of a dozen eggs rose to a record $4.95 last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“Most of our scientists are against the culling operation,” Kennedy said. “They think that we should be testing therapeutics on those flocks. They should isolate. You should let the disease go with 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 the wild population.”
“We’ve killed 166 million chickens. That’s why we have an egg crisis,” Kennedy told Hannity, noting that bird flu is not transmissible through eggs or food.
The HHS secretary also spoke on the measles outbreak in Texas, where 223 cases of the disease have been identified since late January resulting in 29 hospitalizations and the death of one school-aged child, according to state officials.
Kennedy, who said he spoke to the family of the child killed in the outbreak, blamed unvaccinated populations as well as the measles vaccine itself for the outbreak.
“We had 16 measles outbreaks last year, some years we have hundreds of outbreaks. We have measles outbreaks every year and, you know, part of that is that, there are people that don’t vaccinate, but also the vaccine itself wanes,” he said, claiming that the vaccine becomes less effective over time, making the elderly more susceptible to the disease.
“It used to be when you and I were kids, everybody got measles and measles gave you a lifetime protection against measles – the vaccine doesn’t do that,” Kennedy said. “The vaccine is effective for some people for life, but in many people it wanes.”
He also said the vaccine “does not appear to provide maternal immunity,” meaning unvaccinated breastfeeding children do not receive the protection the vaccine offers from their mothers.
“So you’re now seeing measles hit very, very young kids and hitting older people within whom the vaccine has waned,” RFK Jr. explained. “And that is something that we need to worry about and that we’re looking at at HHS.”
Despite his concerns with the vaccine, Kennedy said HHS is providing measles vaccines as well as vitamin A to Texas as it tries to contain the outbreak.
The HHS secretary also encouraged people to get the measles shot.
“What we need to do is give [people] the best information and encourage them to vaccinate,” he said. “The vaccine does stop the spread of the disease.”
