Despite a decline in egg prices this week from their recent high of more than $8 per dozen, scientists remain concerned about how to fight the ongoing avian flu, also known as H5N1.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is tasked with finding alternatives that avoid the risk of food poisoning or sickening Americans.
Recently, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested letting the virus proliferate and identifying hens that show immunity to the flu.
However, infections that kill more birds result in fewer egg-laying hens producing eggs. For that reason, the hens are culled to prevent the spread. Yet some experts say that won’t work.
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the egg-laying hen population already has a weaker immune system, so the number that could be immune would be low. And that, in turn, wouldn’t solve the problem of avoiding a surge in egg prices, if the flu were to surge again — which it could if spring migratory patterns provide a new opportunity for infection in the coming months.
In the past, the bird flu has burned itself out, but this strain has been particularly persistent, Gottlieb said.
He spoke at STAT’s Breakthrough East conference Thursday and noted that it’s important to keep egg prices down, as “the egg market trades a lot like the oil market, where the last barrel of oil is what determines the price.”
Read more: $6 eggs and other inflation pain points: Here’s where prices are rising
Instead, the US should consider vaccinating egg-laying hens — a strategy employed overseas but not in the US despite the fact that the vaccines are made by US companies. Another option is to break breeder eggs and pasteurize them and then sell them under brands like Egg Beaters, Gottlieb said.
Breeder eggs are ones that are kept under warm temperatures to hatch, and the chicks are sent to farms, including overseas. If they don’t hatch, they are considered unsafe to use as eggs in whole because they might contain salmonella, but if captured, put in refrigerators quickly enough, and sold as broken eggs, that could help reduce the shortage in the market.
“If you can get a couple of incremental millions of eggs onto the market, you’re going to get a big price reduction. And so this may be one way to get more supply into the market,” Gottlieb said.
Anjalee Khemlani is the senior health reporter at Yahoo Finance, covering all things pharma, insurance, care services, digital health, PBMs, and health policy and politics. That includes GLP-1s, of course. Follow Anjalee on social media platforms X, LinkedIn, and Bluesky @AnjKhem.