The case for vaccinating chickens - by Matthew Yglesias
Egg prices soared in 2022, only to crash in 2023 and then pick up again across most of last year. These fluctuations, which are way out of line with historical norms, are not really “inflation” in a macroeconomic sense, but instead represent supply-side shocks to the poultry ecosystem due to the spread of H5N1 influenza among America’s chickens.
Last Friday, the state of Georgia announced its first case of H5N1 in a commercial poultry operation and has broadly suspended the state’s chicken industry as they do culling and testing of additional flocks. Georgia is responsible for nearly fifteen percent of America’s broiler chickens, plus about five percent of the eggs. We’re looking at potentially very large disruptions to an already turbulent industry.
I think we also need to acknowledge at this point that while the risks to human health from H5N1 appear to remain relatively modest, there’s no good news on the pathogen control front. It keeps spreading to more dairy herds, and we’re not in any meaningful sense on top of the situation. The good news is that we haven’t yet seen human-to-human transmission and also that while the virus is dangerous, it does not appear to be super-deadly.
