The White House is considering a massive rollout of an avian flu vaccine for US chickens amid a record outbreak, according to reports.
About 60 million birds in the US and 200 million worldwide have been culled in the past year to prevent the spread of the H5N1 strain, which has driven chicken and egg prices up since early 2022.
It is feared that the virus could jump to humans if it develops dangerous mutations while the infection rate is sky-high and the virus has already been detected in other mammals such as minks, sea lions and foxes.
White House officials have said so New York Times that President Joe Biden is open to the idea of rolling out an avian flu vaccine for the nation’s birds. It’s unclear how many birds would be targeted — about 10 billion chickens are produced annually in America alone solely for meat.
The White House is considering rolling out a vaccine to the country’s chicken population, hoping to spike the billions of birds produced in the US each year to curb the spread of the H5N1 avian flu
Last month, a young girl in Prey Veng, Cambodia, died of bird flu. Her infection was not from the same strain circulating much of the world, but it did raise the alarm among many international health officials+
Fears over the bird flu outbreak peaked last month, when an 11-year-old girl in Cambodia died of bird flu and her father also tested positive.
Both were found to have an older clade of H5N1 that was not responsible for the current global outbreak and they were both believed to have been infected by a bird.
But the cases highlight the danger of a zoonotic spillover.
However, vaccinating the tens of millions of domestic poultry in the US could take years and raise other concerns.
The rollout could affect trade and even make it more difficult to determine which birds are infected, experts fear.
The USDA has not disclosed details of the recordings it would use in testing, although a few are in development.
At the Pirbright Institute in the UK, scientists are developing an improved injection that tags flu virus proteins with a marker that makes them easier to capture by antigen-presenting cells (APCs).
This generates faster and stronger immune responses against the bird flu strain compared to the inactivated virus vaccine that is the current standard.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine are working on an avian flu vaccine that uses tiny particles even smaller than the width of a human hair to deliver immunity by sending pathogen-like signals to cells.
If an updated injection proves effective, that would open the door to USDA approval, followed by a thorough vaccination campaign trying to reach the affected commercial poultry industry.
While injections have been used in the past to ward off avian flu, the USDA has not approved one for what is considered “highly pathogenic” avian flu.
Avian flu of the ‘low pathogenicity’ category is not uncommon in wild birds and usually produces little or no sign of infection.
A vaccine already exists against fowl pox, a viral infection that leads to lesions on the skin of birds, which many domestic fowl already get.
Flu vaccines are also already being given to birds in China, Egypt, Mongolia and Vietnam – areas where strains of the virus are endemic in the poultry population.
But it’s unclear if those shots would be effective against the circulating H5N1 strain.
Even so, vaccinating domestic birds in the US is an undertaking that could take years. Nearly 10 billion chickens are produced in America each year just for meat.
This figure excludes turkeys and other domestic birds and chickens produced for other purposes.
Dr. Carol Cardona, an avian health expert at the University of Minnesota, told the Times that individual facilities with more than 5 million birds would take more than two years to get the job done.
Some industry leaders are also resisting a vaccine rollout for the birds.
While it may save the lives of some animals, it also opens the door to potential problems.
If the vaccine only prevents birds from developing symptoms of infection, but not the virus itself, it could make it even more difficult for farmers to identify infected flocks.
This could allow the virus to spread even further, now undetected by humans, causing more damage to both the poultry population and increasing the likelihood of the virus spreading to humans.
The vaccine rollout also opens the door to restrictions on the import and export of birds based on their sting status.
“While vaccination may initially seem attractive as a simple solution to a widespread and troublesome problem, it is neither a solution nor an easy one,” Tom Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council, told the Times.
While controlling chicken and egg prices is important to officials, their biggest concern is the fear of the virus jumping to humans.
World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency still considers the risk of bird flu for humans to be low. “But we can’t count on it staying that way, and we need to prepare for any change in the status quo,” he said earlier this month.
Fewer than 900 cases of the H5N1 virus have ever been recorded in humans, and almost all are the result of animal-to-human transmission.
This happens when the virus, usually from bird droppings, saliva, or another fluid, gets into someone’s mouth, nose, eyes, or an open wound.
Experts warn that zoonotic transmission of viruses from animals to humans is only on the rise due to a variety of factors, including deforestation, urbanization, illegal wildlife trade, livestock farming and the continued use of wet food markets
In rare cases, such as during a small outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997, the virus has spread from person to person.
While the virus is believed to be constantly circulating among wild birds, the huge increase in cases among domestic birds has alarmed experts.
Because domesticated birds often interact with humans, the risks of an overflow event are significantly higher.
Experts warn that the virus is adapting to cause outbreaks in other mammals, increasing the risk of it spreading to humans.
In October, an outbreak of bird flu ravaged a population of 52,000 minks on a farm in Spain.
Some bugs were initially infected by eating meat from birds that died while infected.
There were also signs of the flu spreading from mink to mink, which is unusual for a mammalian population and indicates a change in the virus.
In Peru, 716 sea lions have died of bird flu in recent weeks. Local officials are concerned that the virus has also spread among the animals – which are also mammals.
There are no treatments specifically designed for people infected with bird flu, let alone H5N1. Those who become ill are treated with regular antiviral drugs such as Zanamivir and Peramivir.
In the event of an outbreak, the US has a stockpile of vaccines designed to prevent infection with H5N1.
It is sold under the name Audenz and will be approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2021 for people six months and older. It is a two-dose vaccine.