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CBS ran a very encouraging story yesterday headlined, “RFK Jr. warns vaccinating poultry for bird flu could backfire.” Because, I mean, what could go wrong with that plan?
According to new HHS Secretary Kennedy, “Federal health agencies oppose the use of bird flu vaccines in poultry right now.” It was a “a sharp turn from the Biden administration” since, as CBS reported, “U.S. Department of Agriculture officials said last month that they were ramping up planning on potentially deploying a vaccine for poultry.”
“There's no indication that those vaccines actually provide sterilizing immunity, and all three of my health agencies — NIH, CDC, and FDA — the acting heads of those agencies have all recommended against the use of the bird flu vaccine," Kennedy told Fox News this week.
Kennedy didn’t mince his words. Vaccinating chickens without sterilizing immunity, he warned, risks “turning those birds into mutant factories”—fueling dangerous viral mutations. It “could actually accelerate the jump to human beings,” Kennedy said.
In other words, science. Kennedy was not wrong.
The gold standard for how not to do mass poultry vaccination comes courtesy of a little pharmaceutical disaster called Marek’s disease—a chicken virus that used to be about as scary as the common cold. But in the 1970s, government-prodded farmers rolled out a leaky vaccine, meaning it didn’t provide sterilizing immunity—it just stopped chickens from dying while still letting the virus spread.
The lamentable result was, instead of snuffing out the disease as promised, the vaccine transformed Marek’s into an unstoppable monster. The germ mutated into multiple ultra-lethal strains, which would have quickly burned out in an unvaccinated herd (since dead hosts don’t spread much), but thanks to the magic of half-baked vaccination, those hyper-virulent strains thrived.
To this day, unvaccinated chickens drop dead from Marek’s within ten days of being exposed. The virus won. The chickens — and we — lost. But at least Big Pharma got a permanent customer base. Great job, $cience.
This evolutionary train wreck proved what should be painfully obvious by now: if you stop symptoms but not transmission, you’re not stopping the virus—you’re turning it into a supervillain. Leaky vaccines don’t “protect.” They breed stronger enemies. (Yes, for covid, too.)
Instead of solving Marek’s, the FDA locked chickens into permanent vaccine dependency—every new generation must be vaccinated, or they face instant death. And now, bureaucrats want to throw the dice again, but this time with bird flu, which has far more potential to jump to humans.
What could possibly go wrong?
Before you ask, not one of the articles about Kennedy’s decision mentioned the Marek’s disease disaster. Not one. But why would they? Because informing people was never the point. They’re protecting the narrative. Instead of using the obvious and on-point Marek’s example, media just quoted a bunch of unchallenged Chicken Little scientists who called Kennedy names. You really don’t hate the corporate media enough.
The researchers tested whether leaky vaccines could be a potential driver in the evolution of higher virulence in a system where evolution to high virulence of a virus infecting chickens has been rapidly observed since the introduction of vaccines in the 1980s. The virus known as Marek’s disease virus, infects chickens worldwide, and with its climbing levels of virulence has been costing the industry over $2 billion/year in recent years. Using an experimental setup to infect vaccinated and unvaccinated birds with viruses of different levels of virulence, Read and colleagues found that although vaccines reduced the concentration of virus shed by birds, by extending survival, vaccinated individuals shed cumulatively higher amounts of highly virulent virus.
Similar results came from individuals that received maternal antibodies: immunity extended survival and increased the amount of the most virulent virus that could then be transmitted to unvaccinated individuals. These highly virulent strains that survived in vaccinated or immune-protected individuals were then shown to be lethal in unvaccinated individuals. The results suggest that disease interventions that aim to prevent disease symptoms without preventing transmission can have dangerous evolutionary consequences and need to be considered in cases with imperfect vaccines. The findings were published this month in PLoS Biology and can be accessed here. The video press release is also available here.
http://epidemics.psu.edu/articles/view/leaky-vaccines-promote-the-transmission-of-more-virulent-virus