I'm not an egg eater, but my wife is. When she puts eggs on the list for my LifeSource Natural Foods shopping, ideally the pasture-raised variety, I buy a dozen.
But today, for the first time I can remember, the shelves were completely bare in the egg section. I didn't look for eggs when I went to Trader Joe's, Natural Grocers, and Fred Meyer (there's four stops on my weekly grocery shopping expedition), so I don't know if any or all of those stores also were out.
LifeSource has a "Where are the eggs?" page on their web site. They offer three reasons.
(1) Avian influenza, or bird flu. A recent New York Times story says that 136 million birds have been infected or killed since bird flu came to the United States in 2022. And over 30 million chickens have been killed in the last three months to prevent the spread of bird flu.
(2) Ballot measures. California and Oregon require that only cage-free eggs can be sold in the state, with Oregon limiting this to producers with at least 3,000 egg laying hens. This decreases supply to some extent.
(3) Increasing demand for eggs. LifeSource says:
Eggs sales and demand have only continued to increase. This has helped smaller farms to increase their sales but has also put a strain on their ability to meet increasing demand due to increasing feed prices, staffing, space, and laws and regulations that come into play when farms increase in stock and size.
Of these three reasons, bird flu obviously is the key reason for the current shortage of eggs, since the other two reasons are long term, having been around for a while.
This worries me, because Donald Trump and his newly installed administration are notoriously bad at public health and science. I recall Trump complaining about Covid testing in 2020 when the pandemic was starting to take off, absurdly saying that if fewer tests were performed, there would be fewer cases.
No, there would be the same number of cases. We just wouldn't know about them.
So I'm concerned that Trump is going to try to put a happy face on communications by his administration about bird flu and egg shortages -- including not taking strong steps to kill infected chickens before the disease spreads further. Sure, that would create an even larger temporary egg shortage, but that would be better than bird flu decimating the entire American egg production.
Bird flu also can be contacted by humans. Currently the CDC reports that there have been 67 reported bird flu cases in the United States, including one death. Oregon has had one case. But viruses evolve to become more contagious. That's their superpower, mutations that enable viruses to spread more easily.
Fortunately, in the last days of the Biden administration the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded Moderna $590 million to continue developing a vaccine to protect humans against bird flu.
Unfortunately, Trump has nominated a vaccine-skeptic and generally deeply weird person, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Combine this with efforts by the Trump administration to undo contracts awarded by the Biden administration, and there's good reason to worry about how Trump and his merry band of science-deniers will handle bird flu outbreaks.
Ordinarily I rejoice at the incompetence of the Trump administration because this makes them less able to do radical stuff that harms the American people. But in the case of bird flu, and public health overall, I want them to be competent at handling emergencies, especially pandemics.
After Kennedy's cousin, Caroline Kennedy, called him a predator in a message she released today, hopefully this will help sway some Republican senators to vote against him. He sounds like someone who shouldn't be allowed to get anywhere near an important position in the Trump administration.
Caroline Kennedy has called her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a "predator" and "unqualified" to be the new U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary just hours before he was scheduled to appear for confirmation hearings in the Senate.
In a video posted to social media alongside a letter addressed to several lawmakers, Caroline Kennedy said she decided to speak out against her cousin because of the high-profile role he could assume in President Trump's administration, overseeing agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. She urged the Senate to reject his nomination.
"He lacks any relevant government, financial, management, or medical experience," she said. "His views on vaccines are dangerous and willfully misinformed."
NPR has reported that Kennedy has a history of attacking vaccines, including routine vaccinations for children.
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