Editor’s Note: We believe the “bird flu” is a manufactured crisis intended to allow the powers-that-be a path to introduce new pathogens into the food supply, reduce and control protein production, or both. The article below offers conclusions that we don’t necessarily believe, but it’s important for everyone to be aware of the narrative that’s being spread. I encourage everyone to read through the article to gain an understanding of the agenda being laid out before us.
(The Epoch Times)—With highly pathogenic avian influenza driving up egg prices in the United States to unprecedented heights, government officials are beginning to consider the use of vaccines to combat the illness.
The decision is complex because vaccination would instantly cut off more than half of the United States’ poultry exports due to trade provisions that forbid vaccination.
Even before any vaccine is approved, government officials are talking to international partners to soften the blow on the U.S. chicken export business in the eventuality that the United States deploys a vaccine.
Bird flu and the culling measures taken to attempt to stop its spread have wiped out 166 million birds in the United States since the current outbreak began in February 2022. This has driven up egg prices and triggered isolated shortages around the nation.
Over the past decade, the United States has faced two large outbreaks of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu. The first outbreak, which occurred over the winter of 2014–15, hit the egg and turkey industries hard but was halted through the culling of sick birds, movement controls, and strict biosecurity measures.
The current bird flu outbreak has continued almost nonstop since February 2022 and the old strategy has so far failed to break the tide of the infection. As a result, both producers and regulators are considering a vaccine as a solution, even though it could cause extensive damage to the lucrative chicken export business.
Vaccination on the Table
The crisis has drawn the attention of the White House. During an address to a joint session of Congress on March 4, President Donald Trump said the price of eggs was “out of control” and called on his Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, to “do a good job” of handling the issue.
Rollins announced the first step in carrying out that objective on Feb. 26. Along with committing as much as $1 billion to fight bird flu and drive down egg prices, Rollins announced the USDA will be taking the extraordinary step of exploring “vaccines, therapeutics, and other innovative solutions to minimize depopulation of egg-laying chickens.”
Using a vaccine is a tricky subject in the poultry world because of the significant potential international trade impacts.
Greg Tyler, the president and CEO of the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council, told The Epoch Times that if the United States started vaccinating today, as much as $3 billion worth of the country’s $5.8 billion poultry export market could be instantly closed off.
A senior USDA official who spoke with The Epoch Times confirmed that the agency considers vaccination an option to fight bird flu but it hasn’t made any final decisions and won’t rush to make any.
Rollins, the official said, understands the complexity of the issue and will consult with all parties in state governments, the agriculture industry, and the international trade community before making any decision.
The official said Rollins understands that vaccination is not the only solution to the country’s bird flu problem and may well not be the best possible solution. Logistically, the official said, vaccinating birds would be difficult as the technology does not yet exist for a dose to be administered without physically injecting birds.
The USDA has not yet approved any bird flu vaccine for use in the United States.
Tyler said he’s aware of a governmental effort to present a vaccination plan to the U.S.’s major trading partners to solicit each country’s feedback and, therefore, minimize trade impacts. Previously, he said, government officials were rushing to vaccination as a “quick fix” to drop egg prices. Still, he said the education offered by the poultry industry and elected officials from states with a significant poultry industry led to a more measured approach surrounding vaccination.
Ultimately, Tyler said the U.S. poultry industry wants to move ahead with vaccination if it helps the domestic egg industry, but a solution that doesn’t interfere with the massive U.S. export business needs to be found.
Risks and Rewards
The scale of the outbreak and the prevalence of potential disease vectors demonstrate that vaccination may well be in the future for the U.S. egg industry.
In a previous interview, Carol Cardona, a professor in the Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Minnesota, said bird flu is on the precipice of becoming endemic among wild bird populations in North America. Wild birds are considered the primary transmitter of the disease. However, Cardona said that recent research shows bird flu is now present in mammalian populations, including cats and dogs.
As the disease continues to spread to other species and mutate, Cardona predicted that vaccination may be “the next step” in combating the disease as new infections and culls are occurring at a much faster rate than the industry can replace productive birds.
The egg industry, in particular, is pushing for a vaccine rollout.
In testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry on Feb. 26, Tony Wesner, CEO of Indiana-based egg producer Rose Acre Farms, spoke at length about the egg industry’s trials during the past three years and its priorities going forward.
Wesner told the committee that the previous 2014-2015 outbreak was defeated by stamping out or culling infected flocks and strict isolation measures because the virus was primarily spread from one farm to another in so-called lateral transmission. This time around, wild birds and other vectors are circumventing biosecurity measures.
Wesner, speaking on behalf of a national egg farmers alliance called the United Egg Producers, recommended the United States adopt an “aggressive, forward-looking strategy for vaccination.”
Specifically, the egg industry would like to see the USDA stockpile bird flu vaccines, research delivery methods other than injection, establish a plan that would minimize risk to the U.S. export market, and begin field trials as soon as possible on an isolated layer flock located in Hawaii.
In a statement, the United Egg Producers said it believes using a vaccine as part of a broad disease control strategy would significantly reduce the risk of viral circulation among commercial poultry flocks, reduce viral shedding that could infect other flocks and animals, and lower the overall economic shocks caused by the spread of bird flu.
The United States’s overall egg-laying flock, however, is dwarfed by its counterparts who were raised to be slaughtered for meat. According to data published by the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association about 9.4 billion so-called broiler chickens were slaughtered for meat in 2023. By comparison, in 2022, the United States had 308 million commercial laying hens in the field, according to the United Egg Producers.
Because the United States produces so much chicken meat—about 61 billion pounds in 2023—a significant amount is exported. American producers exported more than 7 billion pounds of chicken in 2023, according to the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association.
Tyler said many of the most important export destinations for that meat maintain provisions that would ban poultry imports from the United States if vaccination begins. These triggers are based on fears that the meat or live poultry imported as breeding stock would bring the disease into the receiving country.
In a statement released on Feb. 21, the National Chicken Council (NCC), an industry group representing chicken meat processors and packers, said the broiler industry does and will continue to oppose any vaccination plan that does not include “robust trade protections.”
“The industry least affected by bird flu stands to lose the most with a vaccination strategy without trade protections,” David Elrod, the NCC’s director of government affairs, said in the statement.
One notable test balloon has already been floated. In the recent past, France began vaccinating poultry against bird flu and was subsequently banned from most international trade, Tyler said. However, exports are starting to open up again for the European nation if it can prove to its trading partners that the product did not originate in a region where vaccination is occurring.
Tyler said that there is a growing realization in the global poultry industry that bird flu is a worldwide problem. With France out of the gate on vaccination, everyone is now looking for a bigger market to test targeted vaccination and so-called trade compartmentalization.
“They’re looking for someone to step out and say, ‘Okay, this is how it could be done,’” Tyler told The Epoch Times. “I think we may see more countries come forth with the interest of vaccinating once the U.S. starts a vaccination program.”
Human Health Questions
A senior USDA official told The Epoch Times that one key reason for maintaining the practice of culling—even in the face of real inflationary impacts—is the desire to prevent the virus from mutating and becoming a serious human health problem. If that were to happen, egg prices would be a minor problem by comparison.
Cardona said the global experience with bird flu over the past three decades, its high propensity to mutate, and current transmission among mammals all point toward the disease regularly infecting humans in the future. When that happens, public health authorities will need to ask themselves serious questions about mass vaccination to protect human health.
Dr. Robert Malone, a vaccine pioneer known for his skepticism of the U.S. public health establishment’s approach to COVID-19, said the bird flu virus is known for “drifts and shifts” in its genetics. Still, he isn’t yet concerned about the human health risk presented by bird flu.
Rather, he told The Epoch Times, he is worried that a “leaky” mRNA vaccine administered to birds en masse will speed up the creation of a vaccine-resistant variant of bird flu. Just like U.S. trading partners, he is also concerned that vaccination can mask the presence of the virus.
“Farm workers will be exposed to infected flocks that aren’t showing disease as prominently,” Malone said. “If the virus does jump into humans, then it’s already evolved to escape immune surveillance to some extent. Those are not good things.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Contrary to what BigAg profiteer-spokesmen are saying, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins stated on March 6 that vaccines are ‘off the Table’ at this point.
This report should have provided our USDA’s point-of-view on these mRNA vaccines.
Source: Breitbart article on March 6, 2025
166M birds haven’t died from the bird flu. I have read about the government forcing the chickens to be killed when testing shows that they don’t have “bird flu”, (kill them or we’ll fine you out of business).
Why does this ‘virus’ stop at the borders of Mexico and Canada? I never heard of a virus stopped by international borders. Producers may be advocting for a ‘vaccine’, in order to keep our government from murdering their chickens, but I have no doubt that the pharmaceutical industry wants to get their mRNA ‘vaccine’ into the food supply.
Another ” conspiracy ” by right-wingers! But, most likely very true!!
I don’t want to raise backyard chickens. It’s a big responsibility, giving those chickens a reasonable quality of life. Weather, seasons, vacations, predators…
Not easy.
That being said, chicken is a major source of protein at our house. If they vaccinated the chickens with a mRNA vaccine, then those birds would immediately be rendered dangerous to consume. I would hope that the “organic” chickens wouldn’t be poisoned as well, but there’s no doubt that chicken would instantly become much more expensive.
No one in the egg producing industry wants another effing regulation, this article is utter bullsht. Not a single chicken has been culled in Mexico or Canada since this scam started. It’s just another sideways attempt to poison the US populace- like putting fluoride in the tap water for the last 75 years to lower iqs across the board.
Why is nobody talking about the fact that the US killed a million plus chickens because of the “bird-flu” yet Mexico and Canada didn’t kill a single chicken for “bird-flu”.
Is the border wall better at stopping virus’s than illegals?