The Avian Plague

[Update Spring 2023. While nobody is going to admit that locking 10,000 chickens up in a building that will asphyxiate them if the fans stop running is demonically stupid, there appears to be some sign that the government is backing away from the policy of euthanizing entire flocks based on a single PCR test — mostly because enough people pointed out how obviously insane this policy is. We hope for some positive change by next year. Maybe?]

Government policy suggests insanity

We are increasing our deposit per chicken to twenty dollars in 2023. This is because of the risk from the Federal Government’s response to Avian Influenza. Avian influenza is not a meaningful health risk to people, only to birds.

Nevertheless, for some unexplained reason (no corporate funding to explain it, likely), respiratory ailments such as avian influenza are dangerous to the profit margins of agribusiness corporations running huge, confined poultry flocks. It appears to be, in practice, U.S. government policy that commercial flocks kept in such close confinement that ventilation systems are required to filter out the aerosolized chicken manure (if they have access to the outdoors some of these birds may be sold as “free range”) could not possibly be a cause of respiratory ailments in said birds. Also, it appears that farmers are being told that it is a good idea to destroy wetlands habitat and other surface water sources on their farms to ensure the farm ecology is not shared with wild birds.

They don’t make insane, dictatorial bureaucracies like they used to

In a disappointingly weak and lackluster attempt to copy the illustrious Mao Zhuxi who, unlike the clownish erasthaipaeds in charge of the U.S. government*, had the knack of putting the “total” into “itarian”, the government (and big ag) blames wild birds for spreading avian influenza, and is particularly concerned that wild birds might breathe the same fresh, open air as domesticated poultry flocks. Fresh air is dangerous! To big ag profits?  

This story is not reminiscent of anything

To determine if a poultry flock is infected with the dreaded avian plague, the government uses a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, which has become the go-to test to detect something that isn’t there, since the PCR test, on its own, has always been and will always be invalid as a tool for diagnosis of any kind and was never intended for such a purpose, as stated explicitly by the man awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of said test.  But if you’re wondering why you aren’t seeing flocks of wild geese dropping out of the sky with the sniffles, but almost all poultry lost from “avian influenza” have been part of huge commercial CAFO flocks, you’re clearly a misinformation spreader, so stop asking such questions and be thankful that you live in a free country.

(There are occasional media reports of nameless “hunters” seeing unexplained dead wild birds. A flock of more than 50 wild turkeys mate and nest on the farm and the surrounding area and hundreds of wild geese and ducks come to the farm every year. If there were anything at all to see, we would know.)

Following any positive test result, regardless of how apparently specious, the typical government response is to immediately destroy all birds in the flock, similar to the typical government response to children in Yemen, wedding parties in Iraq, or democratically-elected leaders in Africa or South America. Note that even if the entire flock were to be infected, the birds could be quarantined, processed, cooked, and eaten in complete safety, if the purpose of government policy was to benefit the public, but this is not allowed. 

Why we’re raising our deposit on chickens

Unlike the corporate CAFO factory farms and their absentee investor owners, we can’t afford to cover the loss of an entire flock of poultry so that we can profit by raising the price on you next time while driving our smaller competitors out of business. Thus, we have increased the deposit amount on bulk chicken pre-orders, which is not refundable in the event we have chickens but are prevented by law or regulatory action from selling them to you.

Do you believe drug companies care about people over profits?

The good news is that while “leaky” avian influenza vaccines have been largely banned in the U.S. and Europe due to the risks and side effects of the vaccines being deemed worse than the disease, international veterinary pharmaceutical conglomerates have for years selflessly pawned off these potentially dangerous vaccines onto politically and economically disadvantaged farmers in the “global South”, and are ready to charitably sell their vaccines in the affluent U.S. and European markets just as soon as government policy creates a sufficient demand.

Let’s Recapitulate

Avian influenza is not significantly harmful to humans but is potentially detrimental to debt-leveraged corporate agriculture confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) poultry business profits. In contrast, healthy birds raised outdoors appear to be less susceptible to the disease. Also, decentralized and distributed small scale outdoor flocks are logically more likely to experience a self-contained outbreak in contrast with huge confined flocks which are served by delivery trucks and machinery going between multiple buildings every day and thus spreading potentially contaminated litter. However, the U.S. government blames migratory wild birds for spreading avian flu, not Big Chicken warehouses full of aerosolized manure and the industrial supply chains which serve them. The solution promoted by the U.S. government is to destroy any chicken flock in which avian influenza is suspected, regardless of how many birds actually have symptoms, and to promote CAFO poultry as the safest way of raising chickens. The net result is the deliberate destruction of small, less capitalized poultry farms and thus decreased competition for the major corporations which fund agribusiness lobbying. As a (very) small producer, we can’t afford to cover the cost of having the government come and kill all our chickens, so we’re raising our deposit per chicken.

* Of course there may be many well-meaning employees of the Government. All of our interactions with such employees have been cordial. Most Federal employees probably mean well and are trying to do the right thing. None of these people has any real power to set policy. Perhaps if the hard working government employees who actually want to do the right thing were put in charge, things would be different.

Marek's Disease and the Story of Non-Sterilizing Vaccinations

Two types of vaccine treatment

Fifty years ago Marek's caused mild paralysis in some chickens, reducing yields. This problem was solved with a vaccine. Almost all commercial chickens are now vaccinated against Marek's. Unlike the measles vaccine or the original polio vaccine, but like the flu vaccine, the avian influenza vaccine, and the vaccine which is 100 percent safe and effective after two shots, but also requires unlimited boosters, and correlates with decreased naturally immunity across all age groups and with increased danger from post-vaccination infection, and is associated with a larger incidence of extremely debilitating side effects than all other vaccinations combined, such as unexplained myocarditis in previously healthy children, and is now officially safe and effective for children despite more children dying in the vaccinated than in the unvaccinated group in the abbreviated and materially inconclusive (on the record!) efficacy trial, and which occasionally causes otherwise very healthy people with no prior risk of heart disease to drop dead from massive blood clots, which were previously "misinformation" and you were a liar if you said this happened but are now classified as "rare", and which is known to cause increased concentrations of potentially dangerous toxins in the ovaries, and correlates with an increase in miscarriages and a marked decline in fertility, the Marek's vaccine is "leaky".

Non-sterilizing vaccines: what could possibly go wrong?

"Leaky" is highly technical language. It may seem, to those of us who aren’t pharmaceutical company CEOs with profitable Defense Department contracts to inject American soldiers with experimental vaccines which correlate 100 percent with debilitating chronic illness, as if it means "they're lying and this isn't a real vaccine and it doesn't work", but what "leaky" means is highly technical. The Marek's vaccine preserves chickens from the symptoms of the disease (we hope) but doesn't prevent them from becoming infected and contagious. Instead of a sterilizing vaccine which effectively wipes out the disease (as was achieved in the U.S. with the original polio vaccine), the leaky Marek's vaccine resulted in mutated strains of Marek's which are now extremely deadly, perhaps because, in the words of Harvard Medical School graduate Michael Crichton, "life finds a way" -- and the Marek's vaccine doesn't kill the Marek's virus, it just shoves it under the featherbed. This has been known for well over a decade (see, for example, Gimeno 2008 in “Vaccine”, Witter 1998 in “Poultry Science”, Boodhoo et. al. 2016 in “Veterinary Research”) which is one reason why many previously highly-respected but, now that they disagree with industry-captured government agencies and people with a journalism degree, obviously incompetent, epidemiologists and virologists have been trying to spread the misinformation that widespread use of a leaky vaccine in humans might be a bad idea. We should obviously listen to television news anchors, who can read a teleprompter, and government bureaucrats, who can sometimes, and not to the top scientists in the field, who in speaking out and thus losing very lucrative grants and contracts from the drug companies and government agencies they criticize are clearly just self-interested and don’t understand the science.

You may be wondering if leaky vaccines given to people could result in a potentially dangerous disease mutation as with Marek's in chickens. The answer to that is, of course, absolutely not -- and if it does, rest assured pharmaceutical companies will come up with new vaccines to sell. So there's nothing to be concerned about. This was just a boring history lesson and any comparison to recent events is entirely unintended.

Natural immunity? What’s that?

Of course the alternative to treating a marginally dangerous illness with widespread use of non-sterilizing, “leaky” vaccines which directly cause viral mutations that greatly increase mortality, assuming the leaky vaccines even work, is to focus instead on overall population health of the flock (such as plenty of fresh air, exercise, and a natural diet), offer extra care to those which become ill, and allow the population to develop natural immunity to the virus over time, since natural immunity to even a mild strain is apparently effective against all variants. Officially, this practice doesn’t work, however, as widespread empirical observations to the contrary don’t count as data since they don’t take place in industry-funded labs. If you think that’s clearly wrong, and that to pursue as the only possible solution a schedule of constant vaccinations which are proven to make the disease more dangerous over time is criminally insane and everyone involved in such an obviously corrupt fiasco should be locked up, you don’t know what you’re talking about and you should stop spreading misinformation.

Our meat chickens are vaccinated against Marek's. We like our local family-run hatchery, and since they have to vaccinate for the larger commercial growers, they don't have any feasible means of vaccinating only some of the eggs but not others. It's too bad farmers didn't make a better decision about using a known "leaky" vaccine fifty years ago, or about believing the pharmaceutical sales representatives and the government regulators who rubber-stamped their recommendations.

Follow “the science”

In order to be better informed, we should clearly listen to talking heads on TV. Reading actual peer-reviewed published research is foolish. Simple, common-sense solutions which don’t require expensive and potentially dangerous chemicals are obviously not the answer to any of our problems. When deciding which “experts” are most credible, we should always give credence to those who are paid the most by corporate industry, and not to those who sacrifice lucrative paychecks in order to speak out. Speaking out is best done with the tongue thrust sideways into the inside of the cheek.