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RFK's proposal to let bird flu spread through poultry

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins have expressed interest in letting H5N1 outbreaks spread unchecked through U.S. poultry farms. Health experts warn it could lead to a new pandemic.

You may like "Essentially, the longer you allow a virus that has shown to be effective in infecting multiple hosts survive in an environment, the greater the chance you give it to spread, to mutate, and to try its luck at adaptation," perspective first-author Erin Sorrell, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Live Science. "We believe significant scientific knowledge may be garnered from following the ostriches in a controlled environment," Kennedy wrote in a letter posted to the social platform X and addressed to the head of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which had ordered the cull. Allowing widespread infection of commercial flocks would kill billions of birds, drive poultry and egg prices up, as well as destabilize local economies and global trade through import restrictions imposed on U.S. products, the authors wrote.

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