Close-up on a beautiful brown chicken at a poultry farm - agriculture industry concepts

In an interview with Fox News this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr proposed a novel fix to the nation’s bird flu epidemic: Let the virus spread.

“They should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flocks so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it,” Kennedy said of poultry farmers and federal authorities.

It is the nation’s agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, who has authority over the nation’s poultry management, not Kennedy. But Rollins appears to be in agreement with her counterpart at HHS. As The New York Times noted, she floated the idea of a pilot program that would allow the disease to ravage a flock, while extra layers of protection contained the spread within a certain perimeter. The surviving birds could then be studied.

But there are reasons that scientists recommend immediately culling infected flocks, and letting the virus run rampant could have dire consequences.

The bird flu, H5N1, has a near 100% fatality rate in chickens and turkeys, and has already killed millions of wild birds.

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