Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, and Brooke Rollins, secretary of Agriculture, have floated the notion that instead of culling birds infected with the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus, farmers should let it spread through flocks. The idea is that by doing this, farmers can “identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it,” Kennedy told Fox News on March 11.
Ok, so where is this idea coming from ideologically? Are they trying to prove a point about their hands-off approach to COVID-19? Or is it just that they were always planning to do nothing, and they’re trying to rationalize it?
This is the same tired anti-vax/eugenics rhetoric. Let the flu infect the whole flock and then just let the ones that survive continue to breed making the species stronger.
This is information coming from someone who has absolutely zero medical experience, but thinks that doctors have been looking at this whole thing wrong for the last century.
But eugenics applied to animals is just selective breeding. Or in this specific case you might call it natural selection (gasp).
There’s nothing wrong with that in itself, but it does suggest the existence of evolution, which doesn’t align ideologically with the Republican party.
Except viruses don’t really work like that. You don’t breed immunity you breed the infected lives long enough to breed and/or pass on the virus. And it gives it time to jump species.
And resistance to one disease doesn’t mean resistance to all diseases or that the other qualities of those chickens (e.g. overall size, egg yield, temperament) are desirable. And as we’ve seen with COVID and other diseases like Polio the surviving chickens could also have a reduced quality of life after recovery.
And beyond that, all of these chickens are inbred genetic freaks and crimes against nature in the first place. There’s nothing natural in the selection that made them.
Probably cheap eggs is part of it. But yeah, the same type of dumbass was talking about getting everyone back to work - again, about the money and because they had a vision in their heads of 20-somethings all staying home and playing video games on the taxpayer dime, or not under the safe watchful eye of some mid-level manager in a cubicle farm or something. The work from home thing drove them crazzzzzzy(ier) - complaining about any sensible measures like social distancing, masks, and vaccines. The same type of dumbass was talking about how “everyone was going to get it” and that the “clot shot” was going to kill everyone and we should just all live our lives as normal.
I suspect a major part of the ideology is also the constant undercurrent in this country, and that’s general anti-intellectualism and hatred of real expertise and the actual experts that have it. So we have lots of people “doing their own research”, like Brainworms.
Ok, so where is this idea coming from ideologically? Are they trying to prove a point about their hands-off approach to COVID-19? Or is it just that they were always planning to do nothing, and they’re trying to rationalize it?
This is the same tired anti-vax/eugenics rhetoric. Let the flu infect the whole flock and then just let the ones that survive continue to breed making the species stronger.
This is information coming from someone who has absolutely zero medical experience, but thinks that doctors have been looking at this whole thing wrong for the last century.
But eugenics applied to animals is just selective breeding. Or in this specific case you might call it natural selection (gasp).
There’s nothing wrong with that in itself, but it does suggest the existence of evolution, which doesn’t align ideologically with the Republican party.
Except viruses don’t really work like that. You don’t breed immunity you breed the infected lives long enough to breed and/or pass on the virus. And it gives it time to jump species.
And resistance to one disease doesn’t mean resistance to all diseases or that the other qualities of those chickens (e.g. overall size, egg yield, temperament) are desirable. And as we’ve seen with COVID and other diseases like Polio the surviving chickens could also have a reduced quality of life after recovery.
And beyond that, all of these chickens are inbred genetic freaks and crimes against nature in the first place. There’s nothing natural in the selection that made them.
Probably cheap eggs is part of it. But yeah, the same type of dumbass was talking about getting everyone back to work - again, about the money and because they had a vision in their heads of 20-somethings all staying home and playing video games on the taxpayer dime, or not under the safe watchful eye of some mid-level manager in a cubicle farm or something. The work from home thing drove them crazzzzzzy(ier) - complaining about any sensible measures like social distancing, masks, and vaccines. The same type of dumbass was talking about how “everyone was going to get it” and that the “clot shot” was going to kill everyone and we should just all live our lives as normal.
I suspect a major part of the ideology is also the constant undercurrent in this country, and that’s general anti-intellectualism and hatred of real expertise and the actual experts that have it. So we have lots of people “doing their own research”, like Brainworms.
Given that culling diseased flocks is a mechanism to prevent all farms from being decimated, egg prices will probably skyrocket.