USDA’s New Leader Gets it All Wrong on Bird Flu and Prop 12

A “new plan” from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins will continue a disastrous “stamp out” strategy that has resulted already in killing of 166 million birds in America

Newly confirmed U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins got it wrong in her announcement yesterday about the Trump Administration’s plan to reset the national response to the H5N1, or “bird flu,” epidemic.

Rollins appears content to continue the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “stamp out” strategy that has killed more than 166 million birds — mostly by shockingly inhumane means, such as “ventilation shutdown” — since the H5N1 outbreak started three years ago.

Here are the topline outcomes of the USDA’s response so far: 130 million dead laying hens for farmers, soaring egg prices for consumers, a slow build in human infections and the first human death from H5N1. Despite a need for a reset by her agency, Agriculture Secretary Rollins has punted on the essential strategy: delivering a working vaccine already in use by other major agricultural nations to birds used in commercial food production.

Rollins is genuflecting to the demands of the trade association representing the broiler (meat birds) industry. Because of its parochial concern with its $7 billion dark check meat export business, the National Chicken Council is opposing a vaccination strategy in the United States, even though that strategy is in place from China to France and Mexico and appears to be a key factor in limiting the spread of disease and death in birds.

The USDA is managing bird flu like it’s a foreign animal disease. It is not. It’s been in the United States for three years and has infected 468 species. It is here, and it is here to say. It has to be managed, and we cannot kill our way out of this crisis.

The truth is, with nearly every country in the world experiencing bird flu, the United States can negotiate trade agreements to keep U.S. broiler bird exports flowing. Our domestic response to the bird flu crisis should not continue to be hampered by a no-vaccination veto imposed by one sector of American agriculture.

To add insult to this failure to implement the central feature of an effective bird flu response, Rollins then called for the overturning of Prop 12 in California — a key goal of the so-called EATS Act introduced by some farm-state lawmakers in Congress. Prop 12 is an immensely popular and sound law that bans the sale of eggs that come from hens jam-packed in cages — a circumstance that stresses and crowds the birds and creates ripe conditions for disease transmission, including bird flu.

Animal Wellness Action has been pushing for a transition away from extreme cage confinement of animals in American agriculture. And momentum for that change has been playing out. Today, more than 40 percent of egg production is cage-free. (And even a higher percentage of sows in the pig industry are out of gestation crates.) We need a cage-free and crate-free future in agriculture.

Overturning Prop 12 seeks to turn the clock back and restore inhumane, virally unsafe, immobilizing animal housing methods. But let’s be clear about a second effect: it will also destroy the livelihoods of hundreds of major egg producers who have collectively invested billions in more extensive housing systems.

There is no evidence that higher welfare cage free hens are more susceptible to bird flu than caged hens. In fact, so far in 2025, USDA culling has removed 1 in every 12 conventionally caged hens but just 1 in 17 non-organic cage-free hens.

Pushing the EATS Act is not a constructive solution against bird flu, but a plan of dissolution for a massive portion of the American egg industry.

And Prop 12 has not contributed in any manner to this crisis. For Rollins, her invoking of Prop 12 is a diversionary tactic — a way to throw rhetorical red meat to an extreme segment of the animal agriculture lobby that doesn’t like the trend of policy making to establish welfare standards for animals used in food production.

When it comes to bird flu, it is USDA’s failed, expensive, and counterproductive “stamping out” strategy that is the problem. Not Prop 12.

“It is astonishing to me that Secretary Rollins is talking about ‘exploration of a vaccine and therapeutics’ when what’s needed is on-the-ground implementation of vaccination,” said Dr. Jim Keen, DVM, PhD, the director veterinary sciences for the Center for a Humane Economy. “There is no need, and no time, for further R&D on poultry bird flu vaccines as excellent H5 vaccines are readily commercially available.”.

Agricultural veterinarians with Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy are calling for a constructive plan to:

• Start to vaccinate poultry and reduce mass killing of laying hens and turkeys that are shrinking food supplies and driving up prices
• Develop herd immunity rather than herd and flock annihilation
• Halt the movement of millions of fighting birds, a well-documented viral superspreader. And demand USDA provide greater transparency on the role of backyard cockfighting flocks in spreading the avian diseases.

Make no mistake, the H5N1 crisis is an animal welfare calamity. Secretary Rollins’s announcement was eagerly awaited, but ill-informed and even dishonest on some levels.

Take a moment to write to your two U.S. Senators and your U.S. Representative to oppose the EATS Act that amounts to an attack on states’ rights and would restore inhumane and dangerous forms of extreme confinement.