HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins have expressed interest in letting H5N1 outbreaks spread unchecked through U.S. poultry farms. Health experts warn it could lead to a new pandemic.
If the pressure is right, the virus should evolve to be less lethal. If the virus kills its host before infecting a new host, then that evolution is not advantageous. This is why low contact was a good tactic for COVID. Only the strains that were less lethal would continue and out complete the ones that kill people.
Unfortunately I doubt that he would mandate a good management of this. In a environment like barn chickens live in, the virus can transmit so regularly that the lethality is not a pressure for it.
Or doesn't realize that evolutionary pressure tends to kill the shit oudda anything that ain't up to snuff...bye bye poultry industry. Likely doesn't care tho. Seems like a steak every night kinda guy.
Imagine if it were a Prion problem instead. Think he'd be like FEED THE COWS MORE COW! THEY'LL TOUGH IT OUT!
Yeah, but it could take several generations of chickens until “resistant” evolves into being immune enough to not lose half the flock every time.
And in the mean time since human farmers will have to be tending to the chickens in some way, there always a risk of the virus jumping to humans.
Many departments in bad governments are named the opposite of what they do: department of defense, the department of public safety, the department of health…
I think it's part of a psuedo-religious death cult thing trying to force the apocalypse to happen. War and Death are easy. They're hard at work on Famine and Pestilence.
On one side, you have Americans that have deep-rooted anti-intellectualism. You see this as the myriad of anti-woke, anti-vax, anti-science attitudes. These ideas aren't grounded in anything useful or real, but leaders in the far-right find these attitudes useful in various ways for pushing their cause. I don't think there's an actual goal of promoting disease necessarily... it's more that the further right-wingers can push people into extreme points of view, the easier it is to keep them there. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of drivel in the anti-woke/anti-science sphere today became popular due to clickbait engagement, though, this movement has been promoted generally by the right wing for a long time.
I also wouldn't be surprised if there's some aspect of foreign influence going on as well. Russia has been working for decades at destabilizing the US. The spreading of disease here would definitely work towards that goal, so long as it doesn't generate a new pandemic that might bite them too.
But this guy in particular can't be fully human. Swims in sewage contaminated water, eats roadkill, has dead brainworm that's probably controlling his mind. He's also like one layer of skin away from being one of the nightmare things from "They Live."