Of Birds and Bugs

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado today. We’ve got two completely unrelated topics I’m going to weave together into a little story. The first is here in the United States. It has to do with the bird flu epidemic that has been raging through U.S. agriculture for the better part of three years now. It’s now gotten to a point where it’s just as bad as the really bad one we had back in 2015. 

If you remember that far back. Egg prices have more than doubled. They’ve gone up by like 40% just this year. And there’s no reason to expect that to go down at all. Considering how much inflation was a part of Joe Biden’s defeat, relevant topic. Trump, of course, said on his first day he’d put things in place to fix it overnight. 

That’s not how it works. So let me explain what’s going on. With the first phases of what the Trump administration proposed, and then we’re we’re actually going to go. So, the chicken industry is a split between boiler chickens, which are the ones that you like, buy pre-cooked at the store, chicken parts or whatever. And then layers and the layers, of course, make the eggs two different functional species. 

The bird flu situation is affecting the layers, not the broilers. 

Now, among that these chickens because you know, they’re laying eggs have to be kept in a relatively confined place in order to generate the eggs in sufficient density so they can be harvested, safely, effectively, and above all, from a biosecurity point of view, cleanly, however, birds are filthy, filthy creatures. 

They are the rats of the sky. And if you have any interaction between them and the outside world, they interact with wild birds and bird flu is a wild thing, and it is endemic in every bird species on the planet. And so any sort of interaction risks getting the bird flu from the wild species into the domesticated species that are laying the eggs. 

And that’s really the core of the problem here. Also, the turnaround time from first infection to death is typically less than 72 hours, with only about 48 hours between first symptoms and death. So if you become aware that the chickens in your enclosure that just even a few of them are sick on Monday, you’re going to have the majority of your chickens either diseased or dead, by Wednesday. 

So when, Brook Rollins, who is the new agricultural secretary, who has no experience in agriculture whatsoever, I’d be surprised if she owns a pair of boots. She may have never set foot in Iowa before. Not sure about that one. Anyway, her policy background is very limited. She’s a highly ideological person. She serves as an advisor to the Texas governor Abbott. 

And basically the sum total of her, recommendations to him is that, other jurisdictions, not the state, other jurisdictions shouldn’t raise taxes. It’s not that I really disagree with that statement, but that’s not a lot to hang your hat on if you’re going to be agricultural secretary, when that is the most scientific of the various, agencies we have. 

The way it works in the U.S government is you’ve got three tiers, at your top, you got your political appointees. Those come and go with every administration down below. You’ve got people who are technically, political appointees, and the president does have the authority to remove them at a whim, but they’re generally staffed with people who know what they’re doing with a lot of experience in the industry or the sector or whatever. 

It happens to be. A lot of scientists, a lot of logisticians. And usually these people are allowed to go from administration to administration because they’re largely apolitical jobs. And there’s nowhere where that is more true than the USDA. However, they have all gotten caught up at USDA, just like in every other, agency. 

And those are people have all been purged. So the people who know how to make the trains run and keep the birds alive, they’re gone. Rollins comes in, she inherits this bird flu epidemic, and she casts around for ideas. And the first thing that comes out of her head, because it was her first briefing, was the biggest issue going in agriculture right now is let’s improve biosecurity. 

Let’s improve medication of the birds. And let’s, do mass vaccination of the birds. Now, the surface, none of those sound like dumb ideas, but they’re very, they’re very freshman mistakes for number one. The vaccine. Yes. A vaccine for bird flu does exist, but it’s not through full trials. 

It’s never been tested out in a commercial flock. So that’d be kind of a question. Also would cost about a dollar per bird and it has to be injected manually. Now, I don’t know if you guys have ever gone chasing chick chickens, but your typical bird operation in the lane industry in the United States has 3 million of them. 

So you have to pick up a chicken, inject it, carry it to another bio, secure facility to drop off, do that 3 million times. Well, folks, from the point that a bird gets the ability to generate eggs to the point that you retire because it can’t anymore is only 18 months, so basically they’d be retiring faster than you could immunize them. Second medication. There is none. Bird flu triggers total organ failure in under 72 hours. So that just kind of goes out the window. And then there’s just improved biosecurity. That’s like I hate to point out the obvious, but if your life savings is involved in a bird laying operation, your biosecurity is the damn best you know how to do because there isn’t a medication and there isn’t a vaccine. 

Oh, one more thing on the vaccine. It’s a live virus. Vaccine? Like most vaccine, this is not an MRI, and this is not one of the more advanced ones. It doesn’t leave any biological components in your body. And, you know, you vaccine skeptics, you can suck it. But it does leave, virus residue in your system, which means that that bird will then, at the end of its life, test positive when you’re testing it for bird flu, if you want to export it. 

So you can’t export it either. So it’s a dollar on the front end. It’s administration costs, it’s transport costs. And then on the back end you can’t get it’s money to money from your retired birds. Anyway, the churn in this system just means that if you detect bird flu, you just have to kill everything in that enclosure. 

And from the point that you introduce a new chick to an enclosure, to the point that it’s laying eggs, that’s only six months, you can’t catch up with that with immunization anyway, despite the fact that the Trump administration has purged everyone who knows these things from the top tier of USDA, Brooke Rollins, despite her faults, isn’t stupid. And so she went out and spoke with people who knew things in the industry, and she realized that the medication and the, immunization angles of her original idea weren’t feasible. 

And so she backed away from something that would have just cost the industry a huge amount of money and probably reduced the number of laying eggs, which would have driven inflation higher. Crazy idea. She’s still working on biosecurity, which I don’t think is going to go anywhere, but she was told by Trump to get this under control, she had to announce something. 

She realized that everything it could be done was being done. She announced something that was $1 billion, which, you know, in the world of Trump, world is, not a lot of money. And it’s going to provide a little financial support for, the ranchers and the farmers so that maybe, maybe, maybe they can bring some more facilities online. 

It’ll have no real impact on inflation or legal aid numbers. This is someone who is out of her depth and is trying to become more schooled on the topic, and is doing the best she can. It’s a degree of incompetence that I can live with that story one. Story two is happening over in Congo where we have a new disease. 

It looks like hemorrhagic fever. Whether it’s the Crimean Congo version or Ebola, we don’t know. In fact, the people who have had it tested negative for both of those. It’s something new. Apparently, it’s already infected over 400 people. It’s already killed over 50 people. It seems to burn out in 2 to 4 days, which is a really fast time to kill people, especially if the mortality rate continues to be over 12%. 

It seems to be so far. Now, normally this is where Department of Health and Human Services would come in. Normally this is where a group that’s called the Epidemic Intelligence service would rush over there, help set up quarantines, get some tests done and find out what we’re dealing with. But RFK Jr, who was our new HHS secretary, gutted the Epidemic Intelligence Service on his first day. 

And he doesn’t like the medical industry and he doesn’t like vaccines. And so the IHS is basically running on two out of its four wheels right now and doesn’t have the capacity to participate. The second organization we rely on is the World Health Organization. But one of the first things the Trump administration was several contacts with the W.H.O.. 

So as regards this new disease variant, we in the United States are in the complete dark, and we are relying on other countries to come up with information and choose to share it out of the goodness of their own hearts. Brooke Rollins is someone who’s in over her head and is trying to learn. RFK Jr is a waste of skin. 

When you look at people either in health or in agriculture, they have a very low tolerance for bullshit. Because if you screw up the health system or if you screw up the food supply chain, people die. But now we have two different examples, two polls, if you will, of what can happen based on the core intelligence and the personality of the person you put in charge. 

Competence would be nice, experience would be nice. That would be amazing in both of these sectors. But we’re seeing one approach that involves learning on the job and one approach that involves pushing your own preconceived notions that are based on no facts whatsoever down the throats of everybody. One of these is not a disaster. The other one very well is likely to become one.