Avian flu has ravaged American poultry, just not in Virginia. Here’s why.

My favorite scene in the mostly accurate HBO miniseries “Chernobyl” comes when the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev dispatches an unenthusiastic lower-level Kremlin bureaucrat to investigate the accident. That dull-witted apparatchik, Boris Shcherbina, is forced to take along a scientist, Valery Legasov, who desperately tries to explain to him how nuclear energy works and how he should be on the lookout for graphite, because that would indicate an alarming breach of the reactor’s nuclear core. Shcherbina makes it clear he has little interest in such annoying details and resents the scientist’s very presence.

At the nuclear plant, Shcherbina is greeted by fawning plant managers, who assure the visitor from Moscow that everything is under control. Shcherbina notices some black rock-like material on the ground and asks what it is. Oh, the managers said, that’s simply burnt concrete flung out during the explosion. 

Shcherbina glowers. “That’s where you made your mistake,” he tells them. He used to manage a concrete factory, and while he may know nothing about nuclear reactors, he knows that’s not how concrete burns. It is exactly like the dangerous graphite that the scientist had tried to warn about because, in fact, that’s what it is. At that point, everything the plant managers have to say is suspect, and Legasov’s dire scientific warnings about an impending catastrophe are now taken more seriously. 

I feel a bit like Shcherbina when it comes to U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s response to the avian flu, when he says maybe the government should simply let it run through poultry flocks and see which birds survive. That’s where he’s made his mistake. I may not be a scientist, but I did grow up on a chicken farm while he did not. Granted, I was on the child labor end of the operation back in my youth in Rockingham County, not the business end, but I do remember a few things. One of those is that when chickens start dying, they die in horrific numbers. 

That’s why even in those quaint days, whenever a field representative of the poultry company showed up to inspect the flock he wore rubber boots that had to be washed after each visit: Even decades before the avian flu arrived, you didn’t want to track any kind of disease from one farm to another because that could put the people one farm over out of business. Back then, that kind of hygiene was just considered common sense. Today we have a fancy word for this: biosecurity.

Here’s why this matters to those who aren’t farmers or poultry company workers: Do you like eggs? Do you like your egg prices low? If you answered “yes” to both questions, then this matters.

Egg prices factored into last year’s presidential election, although their rise then, and their recent fall, have had little to do with either Joe Biden or Donald Trump and everything to do with basic economics. Specifically, supply and demand. Prices went up because supply went down. Now, supply is up, so prices are coming down.

The reason supply was down was that the avian flu was running rampant in many places and the standard practice is that if an infected bird is found, then the whole flock is slaughtered — because a) they’d die anyway and b) the goal is to stop the spread as quickly as you can. The avian flu outbreak seems to be ebbing: The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports 2.1 million cases in March, down from 12.64 million in February and 23.19 million in January. Fewer outbreaks mean fewer flocks slaughtered, and therefore more chickens to lay eggs. However, it takes time to rebound from all the previous culling — 20 million chickens alone in the last quarter of 2024. That’s led the United States to do something it previously didn’t have to do: We’ve increased our egg imports. Our main source of imported eggs, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity: Canada. The same Canada that Trump has now slapped tariffs on, so all those imported eggs will now cost more. Why does Canada have eggs? Its poultry farms are smaller, further apart, and, because of the weather, better insulated. That means it’s harder to track the virus from one farm to another and when it does infect a flock, fewer chickens have to be killed.

This isn’t about tariffs or agribusiness, though — this is about the avian flu and how we got into an egg shortage in the first place, and how we get out of it. Or, perhaps, how we don’t get out of it.

Kennedy has questioned the accepted way of combating the virus. “We’ve in fact said to [the U.S. Department of Agriculture] that they should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds and preserve the birds that are immune to it,” Kennedy told an interviewer last month. Veterinary scientists have been aghast at this — the mortality rate for infected chickens is nearly 100%. They ask: Why give the virus more time and space to take hold, possibly mutate and kill even more birds? If you want to drive up egg prices again, that would be the way. Furthermore, Kennedy’s suggestion defies economic realities: What restaurant chains or groceries would want to buy chicken from farms that can’t be guaranteed flu-free? What countries would allow American poultry to be imported if that’s our biosecurity strategy? 

The United States exports about 16% of its chicken, to the tune of $4.5 billion worth. Our top three markets for poultry exports: China, Mexico and Canada, three countries with which we have a trade deficit that so concerns Trump. One way to close that gap is to sell more poultry to those countries, not less. Making our product suspect for disease will not help sales.

This is more than just some theoretical matter in Virginia; poultry is a major part of our economy, particularly in the Shenandoah Valley. 

Virginia is the nation’s ninth-biggest producer of broiler chickens. (Those are the kind we eat.)

We’re the nation’s sixth-biggest producer of turkeys. (This is why there are turkey statues in Rockingham County and why Harrisonburg’s summer college league baseball team is called the Harrisonburg Turks.)

And we’re the nation’s 25th-biggest producer of eggs. (Most of our chickens are for eating.)

Some more reasons why this matters: The state’s poultry industry employs about 17,500 people directly and generates about 37,500 more jobs indirectly, according to a 2021 study by the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association. 

Virginia has largely been immune to the latest round of the avian flu and would like to stay that way. A 2002 outbreak hit 197 farms in the Shenandoah Valley. Some 4.7 million birds were culled, a polite way of saying killed. Economic impact: $130 million lost.

So far this round, there have just been three reported cases in Virginia: one at a commercial poultry operation in Accomack County, a second involving two birds at the Metro Richmond Zoo and, last week, a third in a fox in Loudoun County. The flu is obviously out there, but except for that Accomack County case, Virginia farmers have been able to keep it at bay. Farmers elsewhere, particularly in the Upper Midwest, have not been so lucky. Hobey Baughan, president of the Virginia Poultry Federation, says those farms have the misfortune to be under major bird flyways — aerial interstate highways for disease. 

Virginia farmers also have another advantage, he says: experience. “We learned a huge lesson from 2002,” he says. “Some farmers would hole up on their farms and not go out, not to church or to the store.” They took biosecurity seriously. Out of that 2002 outbreak came the Virginia Poultry Disease Task Force, a partnership of both industry officials and state experts. The group meets every quarter to review procedures for combating avian diseases of all kinds. This is one of those things that government does that most people never know about but benefit from every time they go to the grocery store. 

This is why Kennedy’s suggestion that we just let the bird flu run wild for a while is so counter to what both science and business say. “That’s just not reality,” Baughan says. “The primary way to prevent it is biosecurity.”

We live in such a politicized environment that I should point out that farmers in general — but especially Virginia’s poultry farmers — are some of the most conservative people around. The Shenandoah Valley counties where the poultry industry is concentrated — primarily Rockingham, Augusta, Page and Shenandoah counties — were politically red long before we started color-coding our political maps. The only thing left-wing on a chicken farm is usually on the bird itself. 

Fortunately, Kennedy is not in charge of the Agriculture Department, so his advice remains just that, advice. Still, it’s bizarre to hear such a prominent official spout such nonsense. However, the recent round of layoffs in Kennedy’s department includes scientists in the Food and Drug Administration who have been involved in combating the avian flu, according to The Washington Post.

I understand much of what Trump is trying to do. Whether he’s gone about it the right way is debatable, but his goals make sense.

He’s imposed tariffs because he wants to see Americans buy more American-made goods as a way to boost American manufacturing. Tariffs are a blunt-force instrument to remake the world’s economic system, but his desire to rebuild America’s manufacturing base is not wrong.

He’s reduced the federal workforce because he thinks the federal government is too big. He may be doing it in a ham-handed, thoughtless way, but many Americans agree with his basic premise.

However, I do not understand what he’s doing in purging those who are working on avian flu or other diseases. That seems akin to reducing the size of the military despite foreign threats. In this case, we’re not just facing the threat of an invasion, we’ve already been invaded — by a virus — but we’re undoing our defenses, not building them up. 

If you want your egg prices low, then we need to produce more eggs, which means we need more chickens — live, healthy ones. One of the first things that sick chickens do is stop laying. I know this because one of the things I had to do when I got home from school every day was go gather eggs and count them. These were pre-computerized days, so we kept a pencil hanging from a thread in the chicken house so that we could record the daily egg production on an official form thumbtacked to the wall. Any little dip was a cause for alarm that some infection was taking hold. Our main worry then was coccidiosis, an intestinal parasite that was spread through bird droppings — the same bird droppings that I had to stomp through as I made my late-afternoon rounds. That’s why just outside the poultry house was a spigot where we had to wash up. I didn’t know what biosecurity was when I was in fourth grade, but I sure understood how to practice it. I never thought those lessons then would be of any use to me, but now I guess they are. 

Just like that character in “Chernobyl” who knew just enough to understand that when the plant managers assured him the black rocks scattered across the ground were harmless chunks of concrete, they were making a fatal mistake.