Robert F Kennedy Jr is warning against vaccinating chickens against bird flu over fears a ‘leaky’ vaccine could create a deadly new strain of the virus.
The newly-appointed health secretary said if a bird flu vaccine can’t completely protect against infection, it could spur new mutations that could spread to humans.
RFK Jr said ‘all of [his] agencies’ – the FDA, CDC, and National Institutes of Health, among others – ‘advise against vaccination of birds.’
‘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.
‘It’s much more likely to jump to animals if you do that.’
The grave warnings come after the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a $100million project on vaccine research to combat bird flu, which has spread to 12,500 birds and nearly 1,000 dairy herds during the current outbreak.
Additionally, 70 Americans have been struck by the H5N1 bird flu strain and one has died.
Rather than vaccines, RFK Jr instead suggested farmers ‘should consider the maybe the possibility of letting [H5N1] run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it’ rather than culling birds, pointing to egg shortages.
Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr (pictured here) warned against using a ‘leaky vaccine’ to prevent the spread of bird flu
RFK Jr suggested letting bird flu, also known as H5N1, ‘run through’ farms ‘so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it’
While some evidence has backed up RFK Jr’s ‘leaky vaccine’ theory in poultry diseases like Marek’s disease, experts also told DailyMail.com that while a vaccine will never completely eliminate H5N1, it could still help reduce transmission.
They also warned letting H5N1 spread throughout farms is ‘scientifically unsound’ and allowing widespread infection would increase the risk of mutations that could spread to humans.
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Dr Paul Offit, a top infectious disease specialist in Philadelphia, told DailyMail.com: ‘Leaky vaccine is an imprecise word. What he means is that he is trying to get a vaccine that completely eliminates flu transmission between chickens.
‘That is just not going to happen because the virus has such a short incubation period, making it great at transmission.
‘These vaccines are imperfect, like with the flu vaccine that we give every year [in humans] — that provides 60 to 65 percent protection against severe disease.
‘I think as a general rule, the less a virus is circulating the less likely we are going to get worrying mutations.’
When poultry flocks become infected with bird flu, the birds are culled to keep the disease from spreading.
Since 2022, 166million birds have been culled across the country.
However, this practice has resulted in rising egg prices and shortages.
RFK Jr said in an interview with Fox News: ‘Most of our scientists are against the culling operation. 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 166million chickens. That’s why we have an egg crisis.’
Trump-appointed Secretary of Agriculture Brook Rollins has also voiced support for this strategy, telling Fox News last month: ‘There are some farmers that are out there that are willing to really try this on a pilot as we build the safe perimeter around them to see if there is a way forward with immunity.’
The above map shows the human cases of bird flu reported in the current outbreak. According to the latest CDC data, 70 humans have been infected to far. There has been one death
The above shows workers in the Eden Valley, Minnesota, in 2015. They were responding to a bird flu outbreak at a poultry farm
Dr Jessica Steier, a public health scientist in Massachusetts, wrote on Instagram: ‘The “let it rip” approach to H5N1 bird flu management proposed by RFK Jnr is scientifically unsound because the virus kills infected chickens too quickly for them to develop resistance or survive infection.
‘[But] allowing widespread infection would increase mutation risk and potentially create more dangeous variants that could affect humans.’
Some evidence supports RFK Jr’s opposition to a bird flu vaccine for poultry.
In the 1970s, scientists developed a vaccine for Marek’s disease, a highly contagious virus that when infected birds shed the virus from their feather follicles. It’s then inhaled with dust by other chickens.
While the virus was gradually brought under control, within 10 years, it started mutating into more virulent strains.
A 2015 paper argued unvaccinated birds were killed by the more virulent strains so quickly that they shed very little of the virus, whereas vaccinated birds with the same strains shed more of it than those with the least virulent strain.
This suggested the vaccine caused more severe strains to spread.
