I wonder how necessary these mass culls actually are. The "one chicken tests positive -> kill a million chickens" response is strongly reminiscent of the foot-a

I wonder how necessary these mass culls actually are. The "one chicken tests positive -> kill a million chickens" response is strongly reminiscent of the foot-and-mouth culls that wrecked British agriculture around the turn of the millennium. I read a lot of papers from that time at the start of COVID because it was Neil Ferguson's epidemiologists at Imperial who drove those culls and who were driving lockdowns. What came through clearly in the retrospectives is that actual farmers and vets thought the approach was madness. It was far too aggressive and traditional approaches to managing animal disease were viewed as working fine for far lower cost. The mass culls became government policy not because of any clear improvement in outcomes - in fact there was strong evidence they had no effect - but because civil servants were highly impressed by professors and mathematics of all kinds, and they were empowered by draconian agricultural health laws to do pretty much whatever they wanted without requiring robust justifications. Problems included: • By the time the cull was underway numbers were already in decline. • In one area of the UK the local government didn't have the resources to organize a cull so it just didn't happen, yet the case curve looked the same there as elsewhere. • According to vets the models that were driving the culls implemented simulations of a "wholly theoretical armageddon virus" [1] that bore no resemblance to the actual foot-and-mouth pathogen. For example they assumed that animals don't have immune systems and so once infected an animal would continue to be infectious forever until culled. • Models were built on garbage-tier datasets, with problems like farms having coordinates in the middle of the sea. • A sample of FaM was collected and stored at a government lab, which due to budgetary incompetence then leaked through a rusting drain and escaped into the wild again. This time the government left it alone, perhaps out of embarrassment at having been the cause, and farmers were able to quickly suppress the second outbreak using their own choice of traditional methods. The idea that you have to kill a million chickens in response to a single case seems unlikely to be a solution arrived at by farmers themselves. Maybe it is, but it sounds a lot like the kind of runaway response that in the past was invented by civil servants and academics who might well have never even been on a farm. I wrote a literature review of the FaM epidemic back in 2020. One of the most striking aspects of academic epidemiology is that they never learn any lessons by cultural design, so it's unlikely anything has changed: https://blog.plan99.net/is-epidemiology-useful-a4ec54e59569 https://blog.plan99.net/is-epidemiology-useful-a4ec54e59569 [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51683518_Destructive_tension_Mathematics_versus_experience_-_The_progress_and_control_of_the_2001_foot_and_mouth_disease_epidemic_in_Great_Britain https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51683518_Destructiv...