Bird flu is sweeping through egg-laying chickens in the United States at an unprecedented rate. So far in 2025, 30 million layers, as they’re known, have been culled, close to the 38 million killed throughout all of last year: Nearly 10 percent of the country’s annual number of egg-layers have been wiped out. But one of the big questions, as egg prices become a potent political football, is this: Are these shocking infection rates and cull tallies to blame for skyrocketing prices? Or is something else going on?
Last month, Democratic lawmakers including Elizabeth Warren, James McGovern, and Cory Booker cast doubt on the idea that highly pathogenic avian influenza, known as HAPI, alone was to blame for soaring egg prices, writing in a letter to the Trump administration that “egg producers and grocery stores may leverage the current avian flu outbreak as an opportunity to further constrain supply or hike up egg prices to increase profits.” In the past few days, multiple outlets have reported that the U.S. Department of Justice is now opening an investigation into egg producers’ practices.
Trump administration officials have, meanwhile, offered puzzling and sometimes contradictory insights. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, recently said that health agencies will not recommend poultry vaccines. (This recommendation would typically come through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, over which Kennedy has no jurisdiction.) “We’ve in fact said, at the USDA, that they should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds and preserve the birds that are immune to it,” Kennedy said on Fox News recently. Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture, suggested that consumers concerned about egg prices could try their hand at backyard poultry farming.
Few people seem to doubt that bird flu is playing some role in current prices. Food economists say we’re currently seeing a classic example of what happens when an inelastic product, or something that people typically buy no matter the price, becomes scarce and retailers begin bidding against each other to keep their shelves full. “I’m going to bid more than Aldi or Trader Joe’s is going to bid, because I have to buy those eggs,” is the way Jada Thompson, an associate professor in agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas, described the mindset.
It’s also clear that some egg producers have been devastated by the culls. “I wouldn’t be surprised that some companies go out of business,” Rocio Crespo, a professor in poultry health and management at NC State University, told me. Smaller producers who have lost their entire flocks aren’t able to benefit from high prices right now.
But the producers still able to sell eggs are experiencing a boom. Cal-Maine Foods, the largest egg producer in the country—and the only one publishing financial information, because it’s publicly traded—reported in January that net sales nearly doubled in a year, jumping up to $954.7 million in the quarter ending November 30, from $523.2 million at the same time the previous year. And that was months ago, before prices went this high.
Warren and her fellow lawmakers are skeptical for a reason: In December 2023, an Illinois jury found five major egg companies—Cal-Maine, United Egg Producers, United States Egg Marketers, and Rose Acre Farms—liable for millions in damages after engaging in price gouging, where the producers intentionally created the conditions of scarcity by killing hens early or exporting more eggs to other countries in order to drive up prices.
A Food and Water Watch report released last Wednesday found that retail egg prices even in places without bird flu outbreaks more than doubled between January 2022 and January 2023. The Southeast region only reported its first case this past January, and raised more eggs in recent years than before the outbreak began, yet still saw the same rise in prices as the rest of the country.
Even at the national level, the idea that bird flu has constrained supply, the report suggested, doesn’t quite fit: “From April to December 2023, national retail inventories of eggs exceeded the five-year average by as much as 12.8 percent. Nevertheless, average egg prices exceeded the five-year average in each month as well.” In 2023, for example, despite having no bird flu outbreaks, Cal-Maine’s egg prices soared by more than 700 percent, and the company awarded dividends to shareholders totaling $250 million—a 40-fold increase from 2022. (Cal-Maine did not respond to media inquiries by press time.)
Still, other experts say, that’s hardly proof that something sketchy is going on. In order to know whether companies are engaging in anything underhanded, “you’re going to need a whole bunch of proprietary data, which I’m going to guess you don’t have—if you do, please send my way,” Thompson told me. Otherwise, “nobody will be able to tell you that answer,” she said. “I can’t tell you that there’s no additional margins being taken somewhere, but I can tell you that HPAI is having—probably a very large portion of this is going to be related to supply.” And “unless the government is setting the price, prices are going to be set by market forces,” she added.
Scarcity is far and away the clearest reason for current price hikes, David Ortega, a food economist and professor at Michigan State University, told me. “When you have less supply of eggs and demand is relatively inelastic, then you can expect a pretty significant increase in the price.” He cautioned against making a “one-to-one” comparison, expecting egg prices to rise only by about 10 percent because that’s how far egg inventory has dropped. “That’s the crux of the question: Why are prices 125% up if supplies are only down 7 [percent], right?” Thompson said.
But when inventory drops by any amount, bidding can go much higher. And because of decontamination needs and the fact that it takes egg-layers between four and five months to reach maturity, bird flu can take egg facilities offline for about six months. Chickens raised for meat, on the other hand, are usually slaughtered around eight weeks of age. That’s why there have been fewer shortages driving up chicken prices, Ortega said.
But, he said, “the egg industry has some dominant players, and I think that plays a role here. If you’re an egg producer that hasn’t had an outbreak in one of your facilities, you’re not incurring costs—so you are benefiting from those higher egg prices.”
Perhaps the bigger problem is that some companies may not be investing profits from the current crisis in the precautions that would slow bird flu’s spread and reduce egg-price instability in the future. Cal-Maine just paid out big dividends to shareholders this month. Yet those profits do not seem to be going back into efforts to flu-proof their operations, like building smaller facilities and hiring more dedicated workers who don’t go from chicken house to chicken house potentially spreading the virus—measures that would make outbreaks hurt a lot less. Instead, they seem to be expanding bigger facilities. Egg-laying facilities can house a million chickens or more, which can create the perfect conditions for bird flu to spread—and mutate. “When everything is good, everything goes great and perfect, but when there is a problem, it’s a disaster,” Crespo said.
H5N1 actually started on poultry farms in both 1959 and 1996, and intensive food animal production drives outbreaks forward. Wild birds and other intermediary animals are the spark, but farms can be the tinder.
“Obviously, the data for biosecurity is very broken,” Crespo said. Right now, we’re pretty good at diagnosing the virus and culling all chickens in order to stop the spread—but we haven’t yet figured out how to prevent outbreaks in the first place. Farmers know how to reduce some risks—keeping birds contained inside, rather than roaming outside, helps; so does washing equipment like trucks that go between farms. “But there are still some things we don’t understand fully of this virus.… We don’t have the whole picture.”
Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, agreed. “I don’t think we have a very clear sense of what is driving the spread of this virus,” she said. Are rodents, including mice and rats, helping to spread bird flu when they get into the feed or facilities? Is the virus being spread by poultry workers? Right now, there are too many unanswered questions.
And that matters when it comes to biocontainment, or measures to stop the virus’s spread, Nuzzo said: “If we’re going to be spending money, wouldn’t it be nice to know where we can best apply those resources to mitigate future costs?” In other words, she said, “how many billions are we going to keep throwing after this virus without trying to figure out a way to take this virus off the table as a public health and agricultural threat?”
One option for safeguarding farms against future outbreaks would be to break them up—creating smaller operations that make outbreaks less devastating. Farms could also employ more workers and invest in more equipment. “Rather than have one supervisor, I need five supervisors; rather than have one tractor, I may need to buy five tractors … so the people and the machines and everything don’t just cross-contaminate each other.” That’s an expensive proposition that could eat into the margins of smaller producers—but for companies making the big bucks right now, it would be a worthwhile investment to keep eggs on our tables.
Another option is vaccines. There are approved vaccines for use in poultry, and countries like China have used them for years. “I understand why they don’t want to use vaccines. I get it. It’s expensive. It’s going to be a hard issue for trade,” Nuzzo said, because eggs from vaccinated chickens usually can’t be exported. But at this point, the benefits might outweigh the downsides, she said.
Vaccines—for poultry and for people—are “one of the critical areas that could help you be in a position to be prepared and to intervene in time before it goes from an epidemic outbreak to a pandemic,” said Christopher Heaney, associate professor of environmental health, epidemiology, and international health at the Johns Hopkins University. “Even at the highest levels of biosecurity, you’re still going to have a challenge managing vermin and rodents,” Heaney said. “The idea of biosecurity alone preventing this from evolving, and creating a barrier between external wild animal populations and the internal environment, is just a challenging one to be able to put all of our confidence and faith in.”
This means that even if producers do it right, egg prices could stay high, because adding vaccines and producing eggs in smaller operations with more workers and equipment all costs money. “The solution is not going to give us a cheaper option for the eggs,” Crespo said. But she encouraged consumers to think of it a different way: “Why does the egg have to be so inexpensive when it is such a great source of protein?”
These are pressing problems that will only grow in urgency as the outbreak does. “This virus is not going to go away. This will become a recurring hazard and a recurring challenge for consumers unless we figure out a way to sustainably deal with this virus,” Nuzzo said. “Otherwise, we’re going to continue to throw billions of dollars at this problem with no sustainable solution in sight.”
