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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Unvaccinated people die, unvaccinated poultry is an existential risk to the ag industry. Different incentives making the palatability of solutions malleable when pushed through mental models and belief systems, like making sausage.

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Actually, the last I checked, this vaccine will be bad for the industry. It prevents exports, which will lead to a supply glut.

So, in addition to the hit from culling chickens last year, paying for the vaccine, the big producers will see their income tank way more on average than if they just culled a few states worth of chickens and then sold the remaining at market rates.

On the other hand, this action should lower the price of eggs in the US, and makes it less likely that Trump will have to deal with pro-vaccine folks that don’t want their loved ones to needlessly die. I’m guessing they don’t want to distract their propaganda machine by making it explain that everything is great again, and your personal experience with flu deaths is an outlier.

Also, it will help further isolate the US economy, which should reduce the economic shock if Trump follows through with his plan to launch a four front invasion of Canada, Greenland, Panama and Gaza.

I’m hoping the “they did it so less people will die” theory is correct, to be clear.

If it’s that big of a risk that poultry industry will die, shouldn’t we also be concerned about the fact that the birds in the wild will also die off? Wouldn’t that threaten the broader economy much more?

The wild is where these diseases tend to originate. But the distribution of populations over thousands of square miles ensures some groups will avoid even the most virulent strains.

The risk and impact to domesticated flocks is increased due to the sheer density of modern poultry operations.

Not just density but also lack of genetic diversity, as seen in other agri sectors like honey production.

Or even plants. Most infamous example are bananas, virtually all banana that you can buy in a supermarket will have the exact same DNA.

High density agricultural facilities provide perfect conditions for producing novel diseases. You have a bunch of stressed animals living right on top of each other, and each one ends up testing out large number of minor variations of the disease until they breed one that’s good enough to escape containment.

>unvaccinated poultry is an existential risk to the ag industry

The number of chickens killed by bird flu is miniscule compared to the amount that have been culled by hyperventilation bureaucrats. Chickens have survived thousands of years without being rendered extinct by a virus, that's not going to suddenly change, because that's how evolutionary dynamics work.

There's a difference between going extinct and having enough of a mass die-off to temporarily but significantly impact our economy and food supply. I think any regulatory policy would be trying to avoid the latter more than the former.

Chickens have survived for thousands of years, but not in quantities and conditions that we cultivate them in today to feed ourselves.

I'd be careful with that - in the past there were no "mega-chicken-factories" that you'd find nowadays. So you can't quite compare spread of viruses in chicken today with the last "thousands of years" without very large asterisks

Edit: stetrain phrased it better :)

Pandemics became a thing among humans when we moved into cities because the increase in population density meant the disease could spread faster than the population’s immunity could build. Chickens in the wild (insofar as “wild chicken” is a meaningful concept) indeed may not succumb to a pandemic, chickens in a factory farm spread disease rapidly amongst themselves.

Factory farms have been around for almost a century and that hasn't happened. Nothing's changed now, there's absolutely no empirical evidence that such a thing is happening.

> Factory farms have been around for almost a century

So around the same time as the Spanish flu pandemic?

you cannot be serious. disease among husbanded animal populations has been a problem since mankind began keeping animals. before vaccines, the only options available were cleanliness, inoculation, and culling, to include killing entire herds when even a single individual was found to carry a disease.

https://ourworldindata.org/how-rinderpest-was-eradicated

Apart from all the chicken that did go extinct...

If you think about it, veterinarians are a evolutionary adaptation as well!

Population density matters for disease spread, and population density of animals in any agricultural settings will be orders of magnitude higher than in natural state.

There might be more chickens in one mega-farm than there used to be in the wild in their original homeland in Southeast Asia.

I don't they're doing it because they're worried about chickens dying out so that's a strange counter

> hyperventilation bureaucrats

If they didn’t cull our poultry industry—as a whole—would be ineligible for export to most countries.

Maybe you shoulf ask a poultry farmer for an informed opinion. If you do, link to it here.

Currently you're just parroting conspiratorial disinformation.

I did a web search for you (it's not difficult, you should try it one day) and this came up:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crm7d2yv878o

> Chickens have survived thousands of years without being rendered extinct by a virus

Sure, in an environment that’s completely different from an industrial farming operation.

Clearly you misunderstood GP. Bird flu in a farm mean at worst 5% death rate for them, so clearly death isn't why GP talked about the danger for big ag.

In my country, if any factory farm is hit by any virus, the meat is considered tainted and cannot be sold (wouldn't be bought by big retailers anyway) until the virus is cleared.

For poultry it can means 3 months of throwing eggs away. It's more economical to kill all the chickens and start from scratch. If the contamination reach your neighbours, they will do the same thing (so you want to do it early, and radically).

You clearly have never heard of Marek’s disease:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek's_disease

Current strains are hitting 100% mortality rates in unvaccinated chickens, and it can spread over a mile on the wind. Wild turkeys are asymptomatic carriers.

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