If you winced at the egg aisle in 2025, the next few months could feel familiar. A new national analysis of the bird flu fight argues that the federal government's reluctance to vaccinate poultry, driven by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vaccine views, could push egg prices up again this winter. The university flagged the piece because one of its featured experts is Carol Cardona, a professor in UMN's College of Veterinary Medicine.
The timing comes down to migration. H5N1 moves with the seasons: as migratory ducks and geese head south for the winter, they pass near farms. Once the virus gets into a poultry barn, it spreads fast and the whole flock has to be culled. Since 2022, bird flu has killed more than 160 million egg-laying hens in the U.S. Prices jumped 65% in early 2023 compared with the months before, and in 2025 the national average topped $6 a dozen.
Vaccines are the obvious tool, but they've run into politics. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins reportedly pulled back on an internal USDA strategy for vaccinating poultry and egg-laying hens because she was concerned it would clash with Kennedy's anti-vaccine views. That reversal went against recommendations from the agency's own expert staff.
There's also a real trade obstacle. The U.S. chicken meat industry exports 13.9% of what it produces, a business worth $6.2 billion last year. Most importing countries ban all American poultry if any U.S. farmed birds are vaccinated, even when the meat chickens themselves aren't, because it's hard to tell vaccinated birds from infected ones. France started vaccinating ducks against H5N1 in 2023, and the U.S. and Canada restricted imports for more than a year before partly lifting the restrictions.
Cardona argues that the current approach of biosecurity and mass culling has failed too many times to keep relying on it alone. "When biosecurity breaks over and over and over again, you have to say to yourself, there's something wrong with the system," she said. She supports targeted vaccination of egg-layers and breeding turkeys in northern regions where infection rates are higher, with the goal to "reduce, reduce, reduce" the amount of virus in the environment. That's relevant here, since Minnesota leads the nation in turkey production. She also quoted historian John Barry: "When you mix politics and science, you get politics."
Eggs aren't the only cost. Since 2024, 72 people in the U.S. have caught bird flu, almost all of them poultry or dairy workers, and 2 have died. Nearly 1,200 dairy herds have been affected. One Ohio study estimated that each infected cow cost farmers about $950 in lost profits.
