Bird Flu update after Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt comments on culls as cause of egg price increase

The fact checkers at Politifact have not been fired yet, it seems. We are up to 153 million birds cruelly culled in the US since 2022.

Leavitt: “The U.S. has an egg shortage because the “Biden administration and the Department of Agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens.”

President Donald Trump promised to lower prices for groceries, including eggs. But one crack in his plan is that egg prices haven’t fallen since he took office Jan. 20.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in her first on-camera news briefing Jan. 28, blamed that on former President Joe Biden’s "inflationary policies."

Leavitt said the Biden administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture "directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore a lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage."

Leavitt’s statement is partially accurate about the culling of millions of chickens, but she omitted important details and context about why that happened.

• First, the chickens were killed to prevent the spread of the highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu.

• Second, it has been long-standing USDA policy to cull an entire flock of birds once bird flu has been detected, including during Trump’s first administration. [While it may have been USG policy to cull chickens during Trump’s administration, and there were many culls during the Obama administration in 2015 when a bird flu scare was being drummed up, there was no significant amount of bird flu in domestic flocks during Trump’s first administration—not until 2022—Nass]

White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly referred PolitiFact back to Leavitt’s news briefing comments.

Egg prices rose under Biden — from $1.60 per dozen in February 2021 to $4.10 in December 2024 (his first and last full months in office), Bureau of Labor Statistics data show. The Agriculture Department’s January food price outlook said egg prices could rise about 20% more this year.

Last time I looked, about a month ago, there had been 123 million culls. But it looks like there were 30 million more as the Biden administration prepared to leave.

It is funny that CDC says the cows caught bird flu from birds in the Texas panhandle. There are no outbreaks in domestic flocks in the panhandle.

The big news today is that a herd of cows has come down with the same strain of bird flu, presumably from wild birds, associated with a death in a Louisiana person several weeks ago, and associated with severe illness in a 13 year old girl in Canada, who recovered. These are the first cows to have this strain. How did they get it? Is a wild bird strain likely to spread between cows? So far, neither of the two people spread it to anyone else.

Or has someone decided it is time to start a more dangerous bird flu pandemic in cows and throw a wrench into President Trump’s plans already? Cows with the mild strain (mild in humans) have been found in 16 states, but rarely have chickens or cows been found with it anywhere else.

This site tells you how much the Department of Agriculture has paid to reimburse farmers for bird culls, totaling over a billion dollars since 2022. Hopefully the Trump administration will improve its bird flu policies.