OAN Staff Abril Elfi
5:37 PM – Monday, February 17, 2025
A New Jersey pharmaceutical company has received a “conditional license” from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for its bird flu vaccine for chickens.
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The USDA, along with the Center for Veterinary Biologics (CVB), has granted Zoetis a license for a vaccine that targets the “H5N2 subtype of avian influenza in chickens.”
According to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), over 150 million birds in the United States have been affected by highly pathogenic avian influenza since February 2022.
“When a new strain of HPAI was identified in the U.S. in early 2022, our scientists immediately began work to update our previous avian influenza vaccine,” according to Mahesh Kumar, Ph.D., senior vice president, global biologics research and development at Zoetis.
Kumar noted that the company began producing avian flu vaccinations in 2001 and 2002 in response to outbreaks in Southeast Asian flocks.
Zoetis was also granted a conditional license in 2016 for its H5N1 vaccine, which helped “protect California condors,” according to the company.
The latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) claims that there has been a total of 68 cases of human bird flu in the U.S.
Additionally, a Zoetis spokesperson told Fox News that the vaccine is not yet commercially available.
“The decision to vaccinate commercial poultry flocks rests solely with national regulatory authorities in consultation with their local poultry sector,” the spokesperson said.
The CEO and president of the biotechnology company Centivax, Jacob Glanville, explained that the vaccine will be intended for veterinary use on bird flocks.
“This is extremely good news, as vaccination of our animal populations is the best method of suppressing the H5N1 global outbreak and protecting the economic interest of farmers,” he told Fox News Digital.
“So far, our method has been culling, or killing, all animals in a farm. This clearly hasn’t worked well enough and has been terribly disruptive to farmers’ businesses and the food supply,” he went on. “Now, we need the same for cows and cats.”
Nevertheless, Glanville also warned that one of the limitations of the vaccine is that it is “heavily mismatched” to the circulating strain.
“This could result in immune escape and of survival but perpetuation of transmission.”
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