RFK's 'Hands Off' Approach To Bird Flu

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. One of the things we've committed to doing on this show during Trump's first 100 days is a Health & Climate Tuesdays section of the show. This builds on and expands the Climate Story of the Week that we had been doing on Tuesdays the last two years. Our thinking right now is that there are so many headlines coming from the new administration. Often, health and climate stories fall under the radar.

We'll start today's Health & Climate section with health, a look at H5N1, colloquially known as bird flu, and RFK's position on it. Then on climate, we'll look at the court order ruling last week that could bankrupt Greenpeace and its implications for any kind of protest. On bird flu, with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., at the helm of our country's health agencies, he is tasked with the job of quelling the disease that's killed millions of birds and infected some humans along the way, generally known as bird flu. A few weeks ago, RFK Jr. sat down with Fox News' Sean Hannity at a Steak 'n Shake in Florida to talk about what he's doing to curb bird flu infection. Here's a minute of that conversation. Spoiler alert, RFK opposes vaccines.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: All of my agencies have advised 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. They're teaching the organism how to mutate. It destabilizes and it's much more likely to jump to animals if you do that. All of my agency heads from NIH, CDC, and FDA have all said we should not be vaccinating.

It's dangerous for human beings to vaccinate the birds. The question is, should you cull those flocks? Most of our scientists are against the culling operation. They think that we should be testing therapeutics on those flocks. They should isolate them. You should let the disease go through them and identify the birds that survive, which are the birds that probably have a genetic inclination for immunity. Those should be the birds that we breed like the wild population.

Brian Lehrer: RFK Jr. with Sean Hannity on Fox recently. Is letting bird flu run through flocks a good idea? Various infectious disease experts and veterinarians have been saying otherwise. Joining me now to discuss is Apoorva Mandavilli, reporter for The New York Times, who focuses on science and global health. Apoorva, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Apoorva Mandavilli: Thank you. It's always my pleasure.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with vaccination of birds. We know RFK Jr.'s position on vaccination of people for various things is highly controversial. Is it controversial when it comes to chickens?

Apoorva Mandavilli: It is controversial when it comes to chickens because there are some very good reasons to do it. Number one being to control the outbreaks as much as we can, but it does have massive trade implications. I think one of the biggest reasons that the US has been reluctant to move forward is because there's worry that if you do vaccinate the chickens, they may still get infected. They may have low-level infection that goes undetected and that countries will ban imports from the US because they don't want to take the risk that some of those chickens or those products might have virus in them.

That's a big concern. Also, separately, we do know that Mr. Kennedy is not exactly a big fan of vaccines. He has been on the record talking about both the vaccines for people and vaccines for chickens is not actually dangerous and not a good idea. It's a very complicated issue. It's not straightforward. It would be logistically also a huge challenge to vaccinate chickens. Among the veterinarians and the scientists I talk to, there's this feeling that we may not be able to get out of this without thinking about some way to vaccinate chickens.

Brian Lehrer: One other thing that jumped out at me from that clip, there were several. There was really a lot in that one minute. When he said if they vaccinate, they're teaching the organism how to mutate. It reminded me of some of the unscientific conspiracy theories with respect to the COVID vaccine because it's an mRNA-based vaccine and people would say, "Oh, RNA, it's changing your genetics," which you can confirm it or refute it. I think the scientists say, "No, that's not what it does at all." Here he is saying this about birds. Give a bird a vaccination, give a chicken a vaccination, and it becomes a mutation factory. Was it ever based in science with respect to humans and is it with respect to chickens?

Apoorva Mandavilli: Well, they have some scientific basis to think that if you vaccinate large numbers of people that essentially, now, the virus has to fight against that immunity rather than a bunch of genetically susceptible hosts. It's not completely irrational to think that you are getting the virus to a point where it has to now think about how it needs to evolve against this new vaccine-derived immunity.

However, what we learned during COVID, which you brought up, is very much applicable here too, which is that it's far more dangerous to let a virus run wild through large numbers of people or birds and let it evolve and mutate in that way than to vaccinate and protect a significant fraction of that population. It's not without risk, but it is definitely more risky to not vaccinate a population and to let the virus just mutate and evolve in an uncontrolled way through the population.

Brian Lehrer: Similarly, I think what he's been saying about measles, correct me if I'm wrong, is that measles should just be allowed to go through the population and that's how a population-based immunity will develop over time. That's what he's saying about chickens. If you let the bird flu run rampant, you're going to see which chickens survive. Then I guess you'd be able to breed those chickens that have that genetic tendency toward immunity to bird flu and that's the best thing in the long run. Does that analogy hold? Again, I'm trying to make these comparisons between his positions with respect to how to treat infectious disease in humans and infectious disease in birds, but I feel like I hear him saying the exact same things in that clip.

Apoorva Mandavilli: Yes, the analogies really don't hold because we know that measles does create immunity in people, but it also can kill people. He left that piece of it out. In fact, he said in that same interview that measles vaccine kills people every year. That's actually not true at all. We've not heard of those kinds of vaccine injuries from the measles vaccine. He makes the point that the measles vaccine is somehow more dangerous and also that it's not as effective as just getting infected.

With regard to the chickens, he's again saying that the infection may actually help us in some way by helping identify some chickens that naturally have immunity, but that is just not true. Fortunately, measles doesn't kill every single person it infects, but bird flu kills pretty much every chicken that it infects. In fact, the veterinarians I talked to said something like 95% or more will die very, very quickly.

These chickens that we grow in these farms are pretty much genetically identical to each other. You're looking at the same kind of chicken throughout. When something comes through that they are susceptible to, which in this case is bird flu, they all react in pretty much the same way. In this case, that's dying, a pretty horrible, gruesome death, and pretty quickly.

Brian Lehrer: Well, bird flu kills a lot of chickens. In that Fox News interview, Kennedy put the number of chickens killed by the US government in order to curb bird flu at 166 million. Is that an accurate figure? What percentage of the chickens in the country would that represent?

Apoorva Mandavilli: That is correct, but that number is from 2022 on. It's not current necessarily for this particular year or even last year. It's since we've seen this virus come through into North America. It's a huge number, for sure. I think there are about 350 million birds, so it's a significant number of the birds altogether.

Brian Lehrer: That would be about half the birds.

Apoorva Mandavilli: That's since 2022, so you can't compare directly because you do get new chickens. Let's pick a different number. In January, they culled about 23 million birds in this country because of H5N1. We don't know exactly how many of those were infected because the policy right now is when the virus appears on a farm, the farmers want to identify quickly, and then they notify the authorities, and they kill the birds pretty quickly. We don't know if all 23 million of them were infected or they moved to kill them. He's making the point that it's a mistake to kill them, that if we just let the virus go through, maybe we wouldn't need to kill all of them, and we wouldn't have these rising egg prices.

I think that's where the experts I talked to are telling me that he's very wrong because not only would they all die and we would still see the same really high egg prices, but we are basically playing with fire in that case because we're letting the virus replicate uncontrolled in these chickens. We're exposing all the people and the animals on those farms to huge amounts of virus that would come out of those chickens as they are infected and breathing and dying and gasping for breath. That creates just a really dangerous scenario.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we are in our Health & Climate Tuesdays section of the show, which we're doing every week at least through the first 100 days of the Trump administration, making sure those issues don't fall under the radar with everything else that's coming at us. We're doing the health section right now. We're going to do the climate section coming up.

Our guest right now is Apoorva Mandavilli, who writes about global health and science for The New York Times. We're talking about RFK's approach to bird flu. Anybody have any questions or comments on that? Any chicken farmers out there or anyone else? 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, call or text. Instead of vaccinations, RFK Jr. is recommending therapies. Here's another 17 seconds of him on that Sean Hannity show on Fox.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: For example, you put a therapy in half the population. If that half that is treated survives, now, you have a drug that potentially is useful in human beings to treat avian flu. That's what we should be doing.

Brian Lehrer: Apoorva, are there therapies, medications, I guess that is, for infected birds?

Apoorva Mandavilli: There are not. We have antivirals for people and even those are not hugely effective. He seems to be suggesting that if we give antivirals to these birds, we are somehow going to arrive at an antiviral that is also useful for people. That kind of experimentation and research takes years and years. We're talking about a situation that is really dire right now where the bird flu is basically decimating our chicken populations every year. We're talking about two completely separate things there.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes-- Sorry, that already blanked off my screen, so I'll try to come back to that text. As the head of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. isn't necessarily in charge of farms. That would be Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary. Do you know if she's for or against the mass infection of the flocks that RFK Jr. seems to be advocating and do they have shared authority here?

Apoorva Mandavilli: He doesn't have any authority on what the farms do. She does, but they do talk apparently. They are very much aligned per the USDA people and they do share views on a lot of these things. She herself has only said things along these lines mildly that there might be farmers who are open to it. She hasn't said it quite as eloquently as he has, but she's actually been much more focused on something that a lot of veterinarians I talk to are very supportive of, which is biosecurity, making sure that the virus doesn't get into the farms, to begin with.

That's actually an actual positive in the plan that she's proposed, which is that the USDA would help these farms figure out how to prevent animals that might bring the virus in or birds that might fly overhead and poop a bunch of the virus onto the farm, and then somebody tracks it into where the chickens live, things like that. They're trying to help 10 states this year start to really figure out where their holes are literally and figuratively and fill those gaps so that the virus has less opportunity to come in.

She has actually been quite pragmatic in some ways. We're also talking about importing eggs from other countries to lower egg prices. Mr. Kennedy is really in charge of the people because he's not the HHS. He's in charge of the CDC and the FDA. I'm not exactly sure why he's talking about the farms. So far, at least, the USDA has not shown any inclination to accept those policies, so I think we're okay for the moment.

Brian Lehrer: Here's the text I was looking for. Listener writes, "Question for the bird flu segment. Do concentrated animal feeding operations and the general way we treat chickens in our economic system lead to more spread of bird flu?"

Apoorva Mandavilli: 100%, there's no doubt. The birds are housed very close together. If one bird gets infected with something, they all get it very quickly. They're often in very, very close quarters, poorly ventilated barns. Often, they're kept in cages that are very close together. There's just the way that we raise these chickens doesn't leave a lot of room for them to escape a virus that's affecting other birds on the farm.

Brian Lehrer: On the killing of the birds that we were talking about before that some farmers are doing to try to prevent the spread of bird flu, listener asks, "I've heard that the FDA reimburses farmers whenever they have to cull their animals," it's called culling, "Is there any chance that this funding is at risk?"

Apoorva Mandavilli: Not at the moment. It's the USDA actually that reimburses them. No, the plan is very much for farmers who signal very quickly that they have an infection and then take care of it by culling the birds that they get reimbursed by the USDA. That's the policy. I've not heard anything about that changing.

Brian Lehrer: Another one on the concentrated animal feeding operations as they're called factory farming. Listener writes, "I understand the virus is not affecting Canadian flocks because of vastly smaller farming practices." Do you know if that's true?

Apoorva Mandavilli: I don't know if that's true. I do know that we've had outbreaks in pretty much every country all over the world. I don't know that Canadian poultry flocks have been spared. If that's true, maybe there are some things we can learn from them.

Brian Lehrer: Stephanie in Huntington, you're on WNYC. Hello, Stephanie.

Stephanie: Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. The reason I'm calling was the comment that was made a little while ago about the spread of bird flu and how it would be hazardous to the people who work with the birds. There's another issue also, which is every additional animal who becomes ill with it presents a new opportunity for the virus to mutate into a form that could be more transmissible to humans. That's why they're required to cull as soon as they discover any sick birds within a population. You're asking for it to spread.

Brian Lehrer: Again, RFK is against the culling, but any thought, Apoorva, on the science that the caller is asserting?

Apoorva Mandavilli: Yes, that's absolutely correct. Every new infection is a chance for the virus to gain new mutations. Every time the virus replicates inside a person or inside a bird, it can change its genetic code a little bit. It can have an opportunity to have a new mutation. When we have five million birds infected, it's actually not even just five million opportunities. It's every time the virus replicates in those five million birds. We are talking about just a huge number of opportunities for the virus to get what it needs to become better at infecting people and spreading between people.

Brian Lehrer: One more clip of RFK before we end the segment. RFK on Fox with Sean Hannity. This one's just 10 seconds. Tell me if maybe you do agree with his assertion on this and it should be reassuring to people. Listen.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: The disease is not passed through food, so you cannot get it. As far as we know, you cannot get it from an egg or milk or meat from an infected animal.

Brian Lehrer: Not passed through food to humans, true?

Apoorva Mandavilli: We have not seen it so far, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible. We have seen cats get very sick and die from eating tainted raw pet food, which means that if it is in a turkey, for example, that is not cooked properly, a person could, in theory, also get sick. Fortunately, we haven't seen that yet, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.

Brian Lehrer: We leave it there with Apoorva Mandavilli, reporter for The New York Times, focusing on science and global health. Thank you so much for joining the Tuesday Health & Climate section of the show.

Apoorva Mandavilli: It's my pleasure. Thank you.

 

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