RFK Jr's freaky 'let bird flu rip' suggestion could trigger another pandemic. Here's what he said

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the United States, made a weird suggestion back in March that bird flu should be allowed to run rampant in chickens and the infected birds should not be culled. However, this strange idea can trigger another pandemic, a study has warned. Kennedy and Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture, proposed that letting bird flu "rip" through poultry would help "identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it." The H5N1 virus is highly pathogenic and doing so can prove highly dangerous. The research was published in the journal Science on July 3. Kennedy made the spooky suggestion on March 11 while talking to Fox News.

Disease X: Can bird flu trigger the next pandemic?

The paper has been compiled by a group of virologists, veterinarians and health security experts. The team argues that what Kennedy wants to do could trigger another pandemic in the coming years. They state that if the virus is allowed to run unabated, it could mutate, become stronger and even spill over to humans. This would be the perfect recipe for the next pandemic. Scientists have long raised concerns about Disease X, another pandemic that could take over the world. While there has not been clarity on what it would be, experts argue that bird flu has the makings of a pandemic if it continues to spread and grow. Also Read: What is Orupouche virus that infected 23,000 people in 2023?

Live Science quoted first-author Erin Sorrell, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, as saying, "Essentially, the longer you allow a virus that has shown to be effective in infecting multiple hosts survive in an environment, the greater the chance you give it to spread, to mutate, and to try its luck at adaptation." She added that in the worst-case scenario, "the virus adapts and expands its host range to become transmissible in humans … Now we have a pandemic." According to current regulations on bird flu, farmers need to cull the infected birds to contain the spread of the disease, for which the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) compensates them. Also Read: Human deaths from animal-to-human diseases to multiply 12 times by 2050: Study

Kennedy wanted to observe infected ostriches on Canadian farm

Experts have been left concerned after Kennedy's suggestion. The HHS secretary and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, had also asked the owners of a Canadian ostrich farm where bird flu was detected to observe them to gather "significant scientific knowledge" about the birds. Notably, H5N1 bird flu was detected in 398 ostriches of the farm in December 2024 and January this year. In a letter written to the head of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and posted on X by Kennedy, he wrote that the ostriches may have already acquired some "downstream immunity" to the virus. Oz even offered to relocate the birds to his Florida ranch.

Sorrell does not agree with this method, and said, "Poultry infected with H5 shed a tremendous amount of virus. If effective controls designed to mitigate the quantity of viral shedding and known transmission pathways are removed, the exposure risk for other animals and humans on site and on neighbouring farms will increase, and the opportunity for H5 to evolve to be a more effective poultry pathogen increases."