If egg prices surge this winter, one of the main drivers will likely be H5N1, or bird flu.
Since 2022, it’s decimated the US poultry industry, resulting in the deaths of over 160 million egg-laying hens.
And when there are fewer hens, there are fewer eggs, which leads to shortages and price hikes. This happened in early 2023 when avian flu was circulating: Egg prices increased by 65 percent compared to a few months prior, and in 2025, it happened again, reaching a national average of more than $6 per dozen. (There’s also some evidence, per a Justice Department investigation, that suggests major egg companies may have colluded to raise prices, too.)
We have the tools to slow the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) without such high mortality, though; the United States has several effective bird flu vaccines, and egg (and turkey) producers want to use them on their birds.
Last year, it seemed like they soon might be able to. In early 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would begin formulating a plan for potential vaccination by engaging with trade partners, state veterinarians, farmers, and other stakeholders. But according to reporting in Politico last week, that plan is now stalled. Why? Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his anti-vaccine agenda appear partly to blame.
US Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins “pulled back on an internal USDA strategy for vaccinating poultry and egg-laying hens,” according to Politico, because she was “concerned about whether it would clash with [RFK Jr.’s] anti-vaccine views.” The pause, according to the story, “went against the counsel of expert agency staff.”
The USDA didn’t respond to detailed questions for this story. “USDA has been fully committed to providing the most robust response to battling HPAI,” a spokesperson wrote over email.
Kennedy oversees the Food and Drug Administration, which has some jurisdiction over what happens on farms, though the USDA manages disease outbreaks. But he and his “Make America Healthy Again” movement apparently have enough political influence to sway how the agriculture department manages this multiyear outbreak — the largest in US history. It is risky for the birds, and consumers, and could mean that we’re going to continue to fight this devastating disease without perhaps the most effective tool to slow it down.
Why we don’t vaccinate poultry birds
Just as influenza circulates in humans, H5N1 is also largely seasonal; around this time of year as ducks and geese migrate south for the winter, they shed the virus near farms. And once it infects one bird in a packed poultry barn, it quickly tears through the flock.
When birds die from the bird flu, it’s an excruciating death. However, most birds don’t die from the disease itself but rather from efforts to stop its spread. Per federal regulations, as soon as H5N1 is detected in a barn, poultry producers must cull every bird, and that culling is brutal. The predominant method entails producers sealing off the vents, which causes temperatures to rise and slowly subject the birds to death via heatstroke.
Many turkey and egg producers do want to vaccinate their birds (tens of millions of turkeys have also died due to H5N1 and resulting culling since 2022), and there are several vaccines that the USDA has deemed safe and effective. But the agency won’t allow egg and turkey producers to use them because doing so could hurt the chicken meat industry.
Chickens raised for meat, known as broiler chickens, are much less likely to become infected with the virus, and the US industry exports 13.9 percent of what it produces, valued at $6.2 billion last year. And as I wrote last year:
Most of the countries that import American chicken meat would pause those imports if any farmed birds in the US are vaccinated, even if no chickens raised for meat are vaccinated. The reason behind these blanket bans stems from importing countries’ concerns around the so-called “DIVA” problem, which is short for “differentiating infected from vaccinated animals.” It represents the challenge of identifying whether a poultry bird is infected with bird flu or simply has avian influenza antibodies from vaccination.
In other words, the chicken meat industry has little to gain from vaccination and a lot to lose. It’s also bigger and more politically powerful than the turkey and egg sectors (two of the largest chicken meat companies — Pilgrim’s Pride and Mountaire — happen to be major Trump donors).
Experts say that these trade problems can be solved by increasing disease surveillance and testing. In 2023, French duck farmers began vaccinating birds against H5N1. The US and Canada restricted imports for over a year, but partially lifted the restrictions after they were assured they didn’t pose a biosecurity risk.
Now, on top of resistance from the chicken meat industry, there’s Kennedy’s anti-vaccine influence.
I asked Carol Cardona, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine and a proponent of vaccinating poultry birds, what she made of the Trump administration’s about-face on its vaccine plan.
She quoted the historian John Barry: “When you mix politics and science, you get politics.”
The US is losing the war on bird flu, and vaccines could help
Given the chicken meat industry’s outsized influence on the vaccination debate, Kennedy’s position may not exert the largest push here. But it certainly hasn’t helped speed the rollout of vaccines, adding one more barrier to what many poultry veterinarians and infectious disease experts say is common sense.
HHS didn’t respond to a list of questions for this story about Kennedy’s opposition to vaccinating poultry birds. “Decisions about vaccine development and deployment must be guided by rigorous science, including evidence of safety, effectiveness against circulating strains, and the implications for animal and human health,” a spokesperson wrote, though didn’t outline any concerns over safety or effectiveness and didn’t respond to follow-up questions.
“With migratory bird season here, our goals and policy have not changed: detecting, controlling, and containing HPAI in consultation with partners across the country continues each day,” a USDA spokesperson wrote to Vox.
The control and containment largely amounts to culling birds when H5N1 is detected on farms, and paying farms to improve their biosecurity by compensating them for things like repairs, rodent control, handwashing stations, and wild bird repellents.
But according to Cardona, this just isn’t working. “When biosecurity breaks over and over and over again, you have to say to yourself, there’s something wrong with the system,” Cardona told me. She said a vaccination plan should focus on the most valuable and vulnerable species — egg-laying hens and turkeys used for breeding — and in the northern half of the US, where infection rates are much higher.
With vaccination, Cardona said, “we reduce the amount of virus in the environment, and so by doing that, we reduce the number of other species that get infected. We simply reduce, reduce, reduce.”
Vaccination wouldn’t be cheap, and it could affect chicken meat exports. But chicken meat producers are “not the only stakeholders,” Cardona said, adding that regulators ought to look at the full damage that the bird flu has wrought.
There’s the rise in cost to consumers who buy eggs, and the billions of taxpayer dollars spent to compensate farmers for the culled birds. Then there’s the human toll: 72 people in the US have contracted the virus since 2024, and nearly all were poultry and dairy workers; two died. (While the odds remain low, many scientists also fear bird flu could spark the next human pandemic.)
For decades, bird flu mostly just infected birds. But the toll on wildlife since 2021 has been immense, including mass die-offs of sea lions in Peru and seal pups on Antarctic islands. In 2024, the virus was first detected in dairy cattle and has now affected nearly 1,200 herds; one study of an Ohio dairy found that each infected cow cost the farmer about $950 in lost profits.
Finally, there’s the moral cost of slowly, painfully killing hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens and turkeys.
But as Cardona pointed out, bird flu, like politics, is seasonal. The Biden administration, arguably, slow-walked vaccine development and deployment until the Trump administration inherited the issue.
If egg prices do rise this winter, it likely won’t happen until well after midterms, meaning neither party will pay much of a political price for higher food costs. The costs of bird flu, instead, will be paid by consumers, vulnerable farmworkers, and most of all, the birds themselves.