Prepare to face the murder chickens

In the average James Bond film, the supervillain plotting to take over the world has a scheme that will inevitably involve the death of some percentage of the population before he ascends the throne. Maybe it’s a nuclear bomb, maybe it’s a killer satellite, maybe it’s a killer satellite with a nuclear bomb. There have been a lot of killer satellites in these movies.

But Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Robert Kennedy Jr. are scheming to kill us all with a much more grounded plot: murder chickens. They’re backing that up with germ warfare delivered through milk and vegetables. And if that doesn’t get you, there’s always bird flu waiting in the wings (yes, pun intended).

On Thursday, the Agriculture Department announced it was rolling back plans to test for salmonella contamination in raw poultry. This follows an earlier announcement that tests on frozen poultry products were being suspended for at least six months. Or, as a Trump spokesman might say, free unlimited bacteria is now included with every purchase!

Contaminated food leads to “125,000 salmonella infections from chicken and 43,000 from turkey each year.” Most of those infections result in fever, nausea, and days of combo vomiting and diarrhea that make victims wish they were dead. Only around 420 actually die.

Lack of testing means there’s nowhere for these numbers to go but up. However, poultry doesn’t have to carry the entire weight of eliminating the common folk on its tiny feathered shoulders. Cows can also join in the deadly fun.

On Tuesday, the DOGE-devastated FDA announced it was halting quality tests on milk and other dairy products.

The disruption comes after the Department of Health and Human Services cut 10,000 jobs across agencies earlier in April, including the FDA, as well as sister agencies like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

Those laid off include the scientists and researchers tracking H5N1 "bird flu" in both poultry and dairy cattle. Which makes the regime’s non-handling of this issue much more efficient.

An example of the new and improved process was on display earlier this month when Trump made it clear food producers who shipped contaminated products to the public had nothing to fear from his depleted government following an outbreak of a particularly nasty strain of E. coli.

Ominously, the kids who got it became incredibly sick, incredibly fast. From bloody diarrhea and severe stomach cramping to dehydration and vomiting, the illness the epidemiologist had on her hands was, as she put it, "really scary."

"This type of situation we’ve never seen before," [St. Louis County senior epidemiologist] Brzozowski said.

But don’t be surprised when we see it again. Under the guidance of whale necromonger Kennedy, the FDA has opted out of holding the large agricultural company behind the outbreak responsible, leaving victims’ families to sue on their own. The message to producers that they are free from the burden of meeting food safety standards has been delivered.

Kennedy likely regards this as a test to winnow out the weak. Trump may believe that a lifetime of Filet-o-fish and ketchup steak has made him immune to any lightning bolt the gods can throw. Elon Musk is apparently safe so long as he can get clean pineapple. Which he eats on pizza. Figures.

But Americans don’t even have to eat to get their chance at picking up homegrown high-quality pathogens. Just breathing is enough.

The measles surge in Texas is already the largest outbreak in at least 25 years. Over 625 people have so far been diagnosed with the disease, with fresh cases still appearing at a rate of about 6 per day. Not only have cases spread to New Mexico, but one group of Texans visiting relatives in Montana managed to carry the disease to that state.

Large as this outbreak may seem, it's insignificant compared to what might be coming. Thanks to the disinformation spread by Kennedy, Trump, Musk, and others on the right, the U.S. is on the brink of seeing the return of endemic measles and even the possible return of endemic polio.

A study in the latest issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association details how current childhood vaccination rates would result in an estimated 851,300 cases of measles over the next 25 years. If the rate of vaccination declines by another 10%, the result could be 11.1 million cases of measles over the same period.

And things could be much, much worse.

Under a 50% decline in childhood vaccination in the US, the simulation model predicted 51.2 million measles cases over a 25-year period, 9.9 million rubella cases, 4.3 million poliomyelitis cases, 197 diphtheria cases, 10.3 million hospitalizations, and 159 200 deaths.

If Musk is seriously interested in raising the birth rate in the United States, this could be one way to do it. Of course, it would come with one other aspect of the “good old days.”

On the other hand, an increase in childhood vaccination rates of just 5% could cut the number of measles cases to fewer than 6,000 over the next 25 years. This seems like the kind of result that’s possible if the HHS secretary were in Texas, encouraging vaccination rather than spreading lies about the nonexistent connection between vaccines and autism and making an ultra-disturbing list of autistic Americans.

Of course, there's still the looming threat of bird flu. Why has that threat stopped appearing in the news? See paragraph 8 above. The people who were tracking the movement of this flu in wild birds, domestic poultry, and cattle herds are largely gone. The news is sparse because the information is not available.

However, a new study in Science tracks how H5N1 made the leap from birds into mammals, and how it now seems to be evolving in a way that makes mammal-to-mammal transmission more likely.

High-pathogenicity avian influenza subtype H5N1 is now present throughout the US, and possibly beyond. More cattle infections elevate the risk of the virus evolving the capacity to transmit between humans, potentially with high fatality rates. ... Evolution within cattle, assessed using deep-sequencing data, has detected low-frequency sequence variants that had previously been associated with mammalian adaptation and transmission efficiency.

Those adaptations move bird flu much closer to becoming people flu that can be transmitted person-to-person while still delivering those "high fatality rates." Thanks to Trump, Musk, and Kennedy, that threat is getting barely a fraction of the attention it deserves, and preparation for an outbreak of human-transmissible H5N1 is essentially nonexistent.

On the surface, this might seem like a small thing compared to the drama unfolding over tariffs, immigration, the firings of inspectors general and whatever new, egregious thing Elon Musk is doing without congressional approval. But this report matters. The H5N1 bird flu virus has been on the warpath since 2022, infecting chickens, cows, wild birds and now pigs, ducks, cats and several other animals.

This virus is versatile. This virus is mutating. And it is surely infecting more people than we think.

The CDC, FDA, NIH and other agencies are a small part of the government. So small that, despite the enormous cuts Musk's DOGE team made in these areas, and the additional reductions made by Kennedy, overall government spending is higher than in 2024 and still rising.

All of these things: food safety programs, childhood vaccination programs, and research on emerging diseases are cheap defenses against threats that can be hugely expensive in both dollars and lives. But these areas have long been the subject of right-wing conspiracy theories now embraced by the unholy trinity of Trump, Musk, and Kennedy.

The door is wide open. Maybe we'll survive the murder chickens, spoiled milk, and E. coli salads. Maybe the current measles outbreak will burn out before it spreads across the nation. Maybe we'll get extremely lucky when it comes to H5N1 flu.

But you shouldn't bet on it.

• Be increasingly vigilant about the sources of your family's food. Be careful in preparing your meals and don't take chances on undercooked meats or suspicious contents, even if you've gotten away with it in the past. Be aware that the government may not be as attentive to E. coli and other contaminants as you've come to expect.
• Be proactive in updating your vaccinations—including checking on whether you, as an adult, would be well-advised to get an update of some of those vaccines you may have received as a child. Seasonal flu vaccines may be helpful in limiting the spread of bird flu. So do that.
• Consider what preparations you might make to deal with a possible outbreak of bird flu or another emerging disease. This doesn't mean prepping for a year underground, or buying all the toilet paper in your local Costco. It means thinking of what might be required if there is an extended disruption of the kind seen during the initial year of the COVID-19 pandemic. There's no reason to panic. So don't. But do consider what steps you might take if there is a need.

All this is, sadly enough, just one part of the disruptions that Trump is causing as he attempts to replace democracy with irrational autocratic rule. Store shelves are likely to be bare in the coming weeks, not because of some disease outbreak, but because the flow of many materials into the country has already dropped to a trickle that's to Trump's tariff-induced chaos. Meanwhile, upholding freedom of speech, freedom of association, and the right to due process under the law is going to continue to be a fight.

Get some sleep when you can. Take time to wash your hands now and then. And watch out for those chickens.