Recent price spikes in the egg market reflected recurring shortages, well in excess of the normal fluctuations when eggs climb every winter. The accumulated inflation during the previous Biden administration (the COVID surge in money supply) suggests that shell eggs, like so many other food commodities, were disrupted. Year-to-year comparisons show poultry and eggs to have been more seriously affected than many others. 

Why did inflation in the price of eggs outstrip that of other food sectors?

With the latest bird-flu pandemic came severe shortfalls in the number of eggs produced from an industry dominated by a comparatively few major players. Its modern structure contrasts sharply with those of decades earlier, when the family farm put fresh eggs on the breakfast table.

Total bird-flu casualties at commercial poultry operations in the US now number more than 160 million dead birds, chickens and turkeys combined.

Today eggs are a highly concentrated agronomic business and no longer a collection of independent farmers. The leading egg producer controls more than twice the number of laying hens than its closest two competitors.

Admittedly, large-scale egg production, combining modern genetics and the availability of feed at affordable costs, has given the US consumer one of the best bargains in all nutrition—the incredible, edible egg.

The reason for current egg shortages are the recurring outbreaks of debilitating and deadly avian influenza infections (H5N1 virus) in domestic flocks, propagated at large by bird migration.

Why should this be so in the age of veterinary miracles? Where are the vaccines?

The brief answer, missed by news media, is that there already is one. Vaccination for the H5N1 virus has been in practice in Mexico, China and European countries for several years.

The US Department of Agriculture just announced it is beginning a program to develop a bird flu vaccine. When one is already available from the pharmaceutical industry?

Why does our domestic industry resist adopting already demonstrated methods?

The ancient Romans had a saying: “Qui bono?” or “Who benefits?”

The industry responds that vaccination is not economic—despite the fact Europeans have adopted it with apparent success. Eggs are now cheaper overseas.

Producers say their poultry meat would be excluded overseas because of residual antibodies in vaccinated fowl.

But the objection glosses over the fact that egg-laying hens are not the source of exported meat. That product consists of broilers raised from fast-growing hybrid crosses.

Meat sector chickens would not require vaccination of rapidly maturing birds.

Leghorns and Rhode-island reds are the preferred varieties of egg-layers and the primary group destined for H5N1 vaccination, avoiding complications with foreign laws.

Laying hens, at the end of their productive lives, will continue to wind up in cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup marketed right here in the United States.

The egg industry is justifiably concerned with operating costs and it fears vaccinating each individual chick.

But that appears unnecessary.

The management of the virus responsible for New Castle disease in poultry is not done with subcutaneous vaccinations. The vaccine is administered in the drinking water or by spraying an aerosol into enclosures housing the flocks. The birds vaccinate themselves. NC vaccine has been around more than 90 years.

A perverse incentive is the arrangement whereby the USDA compensates egg producers with a $17 per bird bounty to for losses when an operation undergoes culling.

A better way, and in the end far less costly, would be to require vaccination of newly hatched pullets destined for commercial egg production.

The avian flu is re-transmitted back and forth between domestic poultry and migrating ducks and geese infecting local wild birds. Prevention measures (involving the most scrupulous efforts to isolate domestic flocks) too often prove inadequate. The recent H5N1 outbreaks began three years ago, following the first in 2016 that subsided six years ago.

An egg-laying operation in the Czech Republic was stricken in 2024 following a bird flu outbreak at a duck pond a mile upwind. Airborne virus (not via wild birds) was concluded to be the most likely path of transmission penetrating the well-isolated facility. Air-locks and filtered exhaust systems, similar to NASA protocol, would be needed to rigorously exclude pathogens, at enormous added cost.

But serious public health concerns continue to grow after reports of the virus infecting several dozen poultry and dairy workers in the US. Experts fear that it may mutate into a more virulent strain spreading directly from human to human. That eventuality might trigger another world-wide episode similar to the recent COVID pandemic.

In the near-term, consumers will continue to pay what heretofore have been incomprehensibly high retail prices for their eggs. They have not yet come down to generally affordable levels prior to this writing and remain at price multiples of what they had been only a few years ago.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash.