The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Of Birds and Bugs || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

There are two issues we'll be discussing today: Bird Flu and the new disease outbreak in Congo. These topics are unrelated, but there is a lesson to be learned in their comparison.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/of-birds-and-bugs

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we've got two completely unrelated topics that I'm going to weave together into a little story. The first is here in the United States. It has to do with the bird flu epidemic that has been raging through U.S. agriculture for the better part of three years now. It's now gotten to a point where it's just as bad as the really bad one we had back in 2015, if you remember that far back. Egg prices have more than doubled. They've gone up by like 40% just this year, and there's no reason to expect that to go down at all, considering how much inflation was a part of Joe Biden's defeat.

Feet, relevant topic. Trump, of course, said on his first day he put things into a place to fix it overnight. That's not how it works. So let me explain what's going on. What the first phase is what the Trump administration proposed, and then where we're actually going to go. So the chicken industry is a split between boiler chickens, which are the ones that you like buy pre-cooked at the store, chicken parts or whatever, and then layers. And the layers, of course, make the eggs. Two different functional species.

The bird flu situation is affecting the layers, not the broilers. Now, among that, these chickens, because, you know, they're laying eggs, have to be kept in a relatively confined place in order to generate the eggs in sufficient density so they can be harvested safely, effectively, and above all, from a biosecurity point of view, cleanly. However, birds are filthy, filthy creatures. They are the rats of the sky. And if you have any interaction between them and the outside world, they can interact with wild birds,

and bird flu is a wild thing, and it is endemic in every bird species. on the planet. And so any sort of interaction risks getting the bird flu from the wild species into the domesticated species that are laying the eggs. And that's really the core of the problem here. Also, the turnaround time from first infection to death is typically less than 72 hours, with only about 48 hours between first symptoms and death. So if you become aware that the chickens in your enclosure, that just even a few of them are sick on Monday, you're going to have the majority of your chickens either diseased or dead by Wednesday. So when Brooke Rawlins, who is the new agricultural secretary, her policy background is very limited. She's a highly ideological person. She served

as an advisor to the Texas Governor Abbott. And basically the sum total of her recommendations to him is that other jurisdictions, not the state, other jurisdictions shouldn't raise taxes. I thought I really disagree with that statement, but that's not a lot to hang your hat on if you're to be agricultural secretary when that is the most scientific of the various agencies we have. The way it works in the U.S. government is you've got three tiers. At your top, you've got your political appointees. Those come and go with every administration. Down below, you've got people who are technically political appointees, and the president does have the authority to remove them at a whim, but they're generally staffed with people who know what they're doing with a lot of experience

in the industry or the sector or whatever it happens to be, a lot of scientists, a lot of logisticians. And usually these people are allowed to go from administration to administration because they're largely apolitical jobs. And there's nowhere where that is more true than the USDA. However, they have all gotten caught up at USDA, just like in every other agency. And those people have all been purged. So the people who know how to make the trains run and keep the birds alive, they're gone. Rollins comes in. She inherits this bird flu epidemic.

And she casts around for ideas. and the first thing that comes out of her head, because it was her first briefing, was the biggest issue going in agriculture right now, is let's improve biosecurity, let's improve medication of the birds, and let's do mass vaccination of the birds. Now, on the surface, none of those sound like dumb ideas, but they're very, they're very freshman mistakes. For number one, the vaccine.

Yes, a vaccine for bird flu, dugs exist, but it's not through full trials, and it's never been tested out in a commercial flock. So that'd be kind of a question. also would cost about a dollar per bird, and it has to be injected manually. Now, I don't know if you guys have ever gone chasing chickens, but your typical bird operation in the laying industry in the United States has three million of them. So if to pick up a chicken, inject it, carry it to another biosecure facility to drop off. Do that three million times.

Well, folks, from the point that a bird gets the ability to generate eggs, to the point that you retire because it can't anymore, is only 18 months. So basically, they'd be retiring faster than you could immunize them. Second, medication. There is none. Bird flu triggers total organ failure in under 72 hours. So that just kind of goes out the window. And then there's just improved biosecurity.

Well, it's like, I hate to point out the obvious. But if your life savings is involved in a bird lane operation, your biosecurity is the damn best you know how to do because there isn't a medication and there isn't a vaccine. Oh, one more thing on the vaccine. It's a live virus vaccine, like most vaccine. This is not an MRI, and this is not one of the more advanced ones. It doesn't leave any biological components in your body. And you know, you vaccine skeptics, you can suck it.

But it does leave a virus residue in your system, which means that that bird will then at the end of its life test positive when you're testing it for bird flu if you want to export it. So it's a dollar on the front end, it's administration costs, its transport costs, and then on the back end, you can't get its money to money from your retired birds. Anyway, the churn in this system just means that if you detect bird flu, you just have to kill everything in that enclosure. And from the point that you introduce a new chick to an enclosure, to the point that it's laying eggs, that's only six months.

You can't catch up with that with immunization. Anyway, despite the fact that the Trump administration has purged everyone who knows these things from the top tier of USDA, Brooke Rawlins, despite her faults, isn't stupid. And so she went out and spoke with people who knew things in the industry, and she realized that the medication and the immunization angles of her original idea weren't feasible. And so she backed away from something that would have just cost the industry a huge amount of money and probably reduced the number of laying eggs, which was driven inflation higher. Crazy idea.

She's still working on biosecurity, which I don't think is going to go anywhere. but she was told by Trump to get this under control. She had to announce something. She realized that everything that could be done was being done. She announced something that was a billion dollars, which in the world of Trump world is not a lot of money. And it's going to provide a little financial support for the ranchers and the farmers so that maybe, maybe,

maybe they can bring some more facilities online. It'll have no real impact on inflation or glade numbers. This is someone who is out of her depth and is trying to become more schooled on the topic and is doing the best you can. It's a degree of incompetence that I can live with. That's story one. Story two is happening over in Congo, where we have a new disease that looks like hemorrhagic fever, whether it's the Crimean Congo version or Ebola, we don't know. In fact, the people who have had it tested negative for both of those. It's something new, apparently. It's already infected over 400 people.

It's already killed over 50 people. It seems to burn out in two to four days, which is a really fast time to kill people, especially if the mortality rate continues to be over 12% as it seems to be so far. Now, normally, this is where Department of Health and Human Services would come in. Normally, this is where a group that's called the Epidemic Intelligence Service would rush over there, help set up quarantines, get some tests done, and find out what we're dealing with. But RFK Jr., who is our new HHS Secretary, gutted the epidemic intelligence service on his first day, and he doesn't like the medical industry, and he doesn't like vaccines. And so the EIS is basically running on two out of its four wheels right now and doesn't have the capacity to participate.

The second organization we'd rely on is the World Health Organization. But one of the first things of Trump administration was sever all context with the WHO. So as regards to this new disease variant, we in the United States are in the complete dark, and we are relying on other countries to come up with information and choose to share it out of the goodness on their own hearts. Brooke Rollins is someone who's in over her head and is trying to learn. RFK Jr. is a waste of skin. When you look at people either in health or in agriculture, they have a very low tolerance for bullshit.

Because if you screw up the health system or if you screw up the food supply chain, people die. But now we have two different examples, two polls, if you will, of what can happen based on the core intelligence and the personality of the person you put in charge. Competence would be nice. Experience would be nice. That would be amazing in both of these sectors. But we're seeing one approach that involves learning on the job and one approach that involves pushing your own preconceived notions that are based on no facts whatsoever down the throats of everybody. One of these is not a disaster. The other one very well is likely to become one.