Since the current bird flu outbreak was first detected in the US more than three years ago, officials say it posed almost no risk to humans, but worries that the virus could evolve and become harmful to people has prompted the government to pursue a costly strategy: entire chicken flocks are wiped out at the first sign of infection. But what if there’s a more effective and less costly solution? Lisa Fletcher reports.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

On this 500-acre property in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Joel Salatin and his family have been farming for more than 60 years. While bird flu hasn’t hit here so far, the issue is always on his mind.

Lisa: How would you describe the response to avian influenza in the US right now?

Joel Salatin: Insane.

Lisa: Why?

Joel Salatin: Any farmer knows that if you have a sickness go through your herd or flock or whatever it is. The last thing you do is kill survivors. You don’t kill the survivors. But that’s our US policy. We find one sick bird and a hundred thousand; we kill 99,999. It’s not science, it’s not reasonable.

Lisa: But Joel, it’s what the experts say. It’s what the USDA mandates.

Joel Salatin: Right. The experts told us to use hydrogenated vegetable oil. They told us to use DDT. They told us to use genetically modified organisms. We have “expert-philia” in our country, unfortunately, and a lot of times they’re wrong.

Salatin may be in the minority when it comes to how to deal with bird flu, but he’s not the only one questioning the science and common sense of the current policy to kill the entire flock of birds if even only one of them has bird flu.

When it comes to commercial poultry farming, the numbers are incredible. Nine billion broiler chickens bred for their meat, and 390 million hens producing 109 billion eggs in the US each year. Around two million jobs are linked to the industry.

But the current outbreak of bird flu has hit hard. More than 166 million chickens have been killed in the last three years due to the bird flu, costing taxpayers more than $1.4 billion to compensate farmers, while consumers are spending more and more as egg prices keep rising.

Which is why some are increasingly asking if authorities have been taking the wrong approach.

The head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently suggested an alternative to identify poultry with natural immunity.

Kennedy: They should isolate them, you should let the disease go through them and identify the birds that survive, which is the birds that probably have a genetic inclination for immunity, and those should be the birds that we breed, like the wild populations.

He got panned in the mainstream press for it, but Salatin says Kennedy is onto something.

Salatin: And in fact, there is not a flock on the globe yet that has registered even in the worst outbreak, more than a 90% infection rate, which means 10% were survivors. Well, wouldn’t you want to keep the egg and the sperm from those 10% survivors and breed them?

In March, the US Department of Agriculture, led by newly appointed Secretary Brooke Rollins, joined Trump officials looking for a new approach. She launched a new five-point plan to deal with bird flu.

It includes more money for biosecurity on farms, to help stop the virus getting into flocks in the first place. And says the government will “explore ways to reduce depopulation” – meaning trying to get away from the mass slaughter of flocks. There’s also a plan to invest $100 million to research vaccines, both for birds and humans, who can also get sick from the virus.

Lisa: I want to talk about vaccinating birds a little bit because obviously, it’s a very divided community on whether or not that works. There are some countries, France, Mexico, that’ve had some success with it. What do you think about vaccinating birds for bird flu?

Salatin: I don’t believe in any vaccinations because if you give everything a crutch, you don’t know which beings actually have immunity or not.

Lisa: Do you feel there are any parallels here to Covid? Because listening to you right now, I’m thinking, well, when Covid first happened, we were being told a lot of things as fact that we later found out and are still finding out we’re false.

Salatin: The parallels are unbelievable. In the last 24 months, the US has killed 166 million chickens, most of them layers, and what people don’t realize is probably no more than a million of those were even sick. Most of them were not sick.

Since the beginning of the outbreak, that’s been the policy: if even one chicken is infected, the whole flock is isolated, culled, and the farm is disinfected; no new chickens can be brought in to restart egg production for weeks.

Salatin believes his flock is healthier than most, in part because of the way he raises and selectively breeds his chickens. The goose, by the way, is to scare off the hawks and keep these layer hens in line.

Salatin: All we ask is, are you old, are you healthy, are you productive? If you’re old, healthy, and productive, we want you. And so we call this survivor genetics, and if you do that over and over and over again, you’re going to get extremely robust, robust birds.

Bird flu is one of the first challenges for a new administration promising new approaches to pandemics.

For Full Measure, I’m Lisa Fletcher in Virginia.

Watch video here.