Chickens and Government Eggheads
A French general, François de Charette, once famously observed that “omelets are not made without breaking eggs.” If that is true, hard-pressed American consumers unable to afford eggs may wonder: What omelet is being made, and by whom?
The official reason for the current soaring egg prices, unprecedented in our nation’s history, is an outbreak of avian influenza. This allegedly dread disease is not only a veritable reaper’s scythe for poultry flocks, it also (if fedgov pandemic panjandrums are to be believed) may end up begetting the next supervirus in humans.
As is usual with government narratives, the reality falls far short of the rhetoric. For one thing, avian influenza has been known to science since the 19th century, and has yet to mutate into a contagion lethal to humans. For another, the practice of wholesale, government-mandated culls of egg-laying chickens has only been around for a couple of decades — yet the scope and lethality of avian influenza outbreaks have risen dramatically in that same period. In the outbreak of 2014-2015, an unprecedented 50 million egg-laying chickens and turkeys died or were culled, a record that lasted less than a decade. The current outbreak has already seen the death or culling of 130 million birds — roughly 10 percent of the entire U.S. poultry flock!
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