Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man whose brain was partially eaten by a worm and who once admitted to keeping jars full of roadkill in his freezer, is begging the Canadian government to spare the lives of 400 ostriches who may have been exposed to bird flu. Kennedy, who also happens to be in charge of America’s federal health policy, believes those ostriches could help scientists “better understand the virus.”
The ostriches in question are at the heart of a legal battle in Ottawa, where federal judges are now deciding whether birds belonging to Universal Ostrich Farms, an animal reserve in British Columbia, should be destroyed or allowed to live. An outbreak at the farm in December resulted in the deaths of 69 birds, and, while hundreds of ostriches remain at the farm, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has mandated that those birds be culled to protect the region from a broader outbreak. The farm owners have maintained that this would be unnecessary and amounts to government overreach, The Globe and Mail reports. Kennedy, as well as a gaggle of MAGA influencers and other Trump officials, have repeatedly stepped in to ask that the lives of the sick birds be spared.
“The Secretary has urged Canada not to kill the ostriches but to do further testing to try to better understand the virus,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which Kennedy runs, told Politico. Earlier this year, Kennedy also apparently told Canadian officials that “significant scientific knowledge may be garnered from following the ostriches in a controlled environment.”
The whole let-bird-flu-run-wild thing has been a longstanding obsession with Kennedy. Earlier this year, the HHS czar suggested that U.S. farms with infected fowl “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 and other like-minded individuals believe that the birds that survive viruses like avian flu may have powerful antibodies that are worth studying, and that could be used to develop protections against future outbreaks. However, many science and health professionals have warned that by letting viruses spread, the government would merely be clearing the way for a broader pandemic and additional (and unnecessary) deaths.
Thankfully, Kennedy doesn’t have the power to determine bird policy in the U.S. As head of the Department of Health and Human Services, he is only responsible for human health, not bird health (the Department of Agriculture is in charge of that), nor is he capable of making any decisions for the government of Canada. Instead, he has continued to use his public platform to advocate for the controversial notion of allowing viruses to spread.
Kennedy has a number of allies in his mission to save the birds. The U.S.’s administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Mehmet Oz (also known by his TV personality, Dr. Oz) has offered to let the birds stay at his 900-acre ranch in Florida. “We’re sticking our necks out for the birds,” Oz told the New York Post in May. “The Canadians should stop putting their heads in the sand,” he continued, offering another tortured bird metaphor.
Kennedy’s plea for an executioner’s stay is sorta funny, given that the HHS director seems to have never met an animal he wasn’t comfortable slaughtering—or whose corpse he wasn’t interested in desecrating. In addition to Kennedy’s admission that he once committed the chef d’oeuvre of public littering by dumping a bear cub corpse in Central Park, his daughter remembers fondly an incident in which he used a chainsaw to cut the head off of a beached whale. His cousin also claims he used to put baby chicks and mice into a blender to feed his hawks. He has denied eating a dog during a 2010 trip to Korea.
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