The Trump administration says it plans to roll out a new strategy against the bird flu.

There are few details, but officials say the plan is aimed at trying to minimize the slaughter of chickens when the disease strikes a flock,

and that's in order to bring rising egg prices down.

The administration's first moves have raised concerns, including what it says was an accidental

firing of several employees who work on bird flu. The USDA says it's rehiring them. More than

150 million poultry have been affected since 2022, and 58 people are confirmed to have been

sickened by it. One person has died. For more, let's bring in

epidemiologist, Caitlin Genelita, who writes the popular substack newsletter, your local epidemiologist.

Thanks for being with us. Thanks for having me. So let's talk about this new strategy the Trump

administration says it's considering, stressing vaccinations and tighter biosecurity,

what difference could that make? Yeah, so livestock vaccination actually has been a strategy that's

been seriously talked about for a while now. And like any policy decision, there's pros and

there's cons. One of the biggest is the trade implications, right? So many countries don't accept poultry that is vaccinated.

In fact, us in the United States don't accept poultry from other countries like Mexico because it has been vaccinated.

So trade implications.

The second is biosecurity, right?

If we start vaccinating all of our poultry, this increases the

probability of seeing asymptomatic spread among birds. I also know that medications have been mentioned.

However, these are far more risky than, for example, vaccinations because antivirals can lead to viral resistance.

And this actually happened in China when they dumped a ton of antivirals into chicken feed in the 2000s.

So these methods, they cost a lot of time.

They cost money.

...