His idea is eugenics but for chickens. Just let it spread it through all the birds and the ones that get infected will die and the ones that are immune will survive and breed and the chicken race will be stronger for it.
That'd be great if the viruses weren't also using accelerated evolution to become far more adept at infecting targets. By allowing the virus to spread unchecked, the chickens become a brilliant breeding ground for the virus and we're more likely to just breed stronger viruses (quite likely to be less virulent to chickens so that they can spread further, but also far more likely to jump between species).
It's actually impressive that Trump managed to appoint the absolute worst possible person to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.
I know nothing about biology, I know that I know nothing, so if someone decided for whatever reason to appoint me to the position it would be fairly harmless because I would defer extremely heavily to people who actually know about this stuff.
If he had appointed someone with proper medical or biological training, that would be fine because they actually know about stuff and can make informed decisions.
RFK Jr. is the absolute worst person because he thinks he knows a lot about biology, but he actually knows nothing, and is largely informed by a lot of conspiratorial nonsense, meaning he has the potential to cause a lot of irreparable to the US healthcare system. He's not going to defer to actual expertise, he's going to defer to idiotic blog posts filled with anecdotes about how a friend of a friend of theirs got a vaccine and it was bad.
I cannot imagine that this attempt at chicken eugenics will work as intended. I suspect that if this were a good idea, it would have been tried already.
> Kennedy's proposal is also very unlikely to work the way he's claimed it would — the birds that provide eggs and meat on farms are descendants of separate breeding populations and do not breed themselves. So even if there were a population of resilient birds that survived H5N1 infection, that doesn't mean they're passing on their genetic traits to a subsequent generation.
In the spirit of HN I will only point out here this fact: RFK Jr's attack book on Fauci was extremely poorly produced. Specifically, the text rolled up to the top and bottom edges of the pages as well as the sides. As a bookseller this was a big red flag for me: either the book was poorly self-published, or no-one big (and sometimes reputable) wanted to publish it, and it looked like they were trying to save paper and ink. Also, it has an inordinate amount of footnotes which makes it very difficult to imagine a person following them all. I didn't read the book. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58063409-the-real-anthon... 4.49/5.0 on Goodreads with 8.5K reviews.
As an animal rights activist, this will do wonders for the movement. As chicken farms become unprofitable due to all the birds dying, prices will go up. This gives people like me an edge to talk about alternatives. We already do this with egg alternatives due to the increases in egg prices. Hopefully companies like JUST Egg can capitalize on this.
This is a dude who saw a a dead bear on the highway and decided for some reason to pick it up and put it in the back of his van. Then he realized that he'd forgotten he was supposed to have dinner in Manhattan, so he dumped the bear in Central Park. People that expect anything reasonable from someone like this are absolutely delusional. It's just going to be chaos.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 37.4 ms ] threadI know nothing about biology, I know that I know nothing, so if someone decided for whatever reason to appoint me to the position it would be fairly harmless because I would defer extremely heavily to people who actually know about this stuff.
If he had appointed someone with proper medical or biological training, that would be fine because they actually know about stuff and can make informed decisions.
RFK Jr. is the absolute worst person because he thinks he knows a lot about biology, but he actually knows nothing, and is largely informed by a lot of conspiratorial nonsense, meaning he has the potential to cause a lot of irreparable to the US healthcare system. He's not going to defer to actual expertise, he's going to defer to idiotic blog posts filled with anecdotes about how a friend of a friend of theirs got a vaccine and it was bad.
I cannot imagine that this attempt at chicken eugenics will work as intended. I suspect that if this were a good idea, it would have been tried already.
Seems like a rather devastating flaw.
[edit]: misspelled "imagine"
The midterms can’t come soon enough. That is our only hope of putting some real checks on this administration any time soon.
It risks the entire local US chicken / egg production industry. They'd have to re-onshore it.