Has your duck gotten its flu shot yet?

A few weeks ago, I got my jab. Double jab, actually: next round of covid, annual flu.

What I did not get was vaccination against avian flu. That's because humans rarely get avian flu, and the humans who do come down with it have generally been up close and personal with birds. So avian flu vaccination? Strictly for the birds.

And among the birds it's for are the 64 million ducks of France. So France has embarked on a major campaign to get its extensive population of canards squared away. The initiative:

...aims to prevent the spread of a deadly variant of avian influenza that has forced French farmers to cull more than 30 million birds in the past three years, contributing to a downturn in the production of foie gras. (Source: NY Times)

64 million is an awful lot of ducks. It's almost the equivalent of France's human population. In contrast, the US has a bit over 30 million ducks, for a ratio of humans to ducks of over 10:1.

“A real glimmer of hope,” Éric Dumas, a duck farmer and the president of France’s foie gras federation, said in a statement after the agriculture minister, Marc Fesneau, visited his farm near Bordeaux to inaugurate the campaign.

The French government will be picking up most of the$80M euro ($84 USD) tab for the vaccination. That's beaucoup de sous, but:

That is a fraction of the more than a €1 billion the government paid in 2021 and 2022 to compensate farmers who had been required to cull their birds, according to a recent French parliamentary report.

I'm happy that the ducks will stay healthy, but I have mixed feelings about foie gras. (I'm no gastronome, but I will confess to having eaten it on occasion. I just don't love-love it, and don't tend to seek it out.):

Foie gras is the term for the liver of a duck or goose that has been fattened by forced feeding. For many the dish is a hallmark of French gastronomy; others say that the way it is produced constitutes torture and animal cruelty.

So, it's a pretty nasty business. (Side note: I associate foie gras with geese, not ducks, but there's greater than an order of magnitude more foie gras ducks than there are foie gras geese in France.)

One downside of the vaccination program - other than the fact that someone's (make that a lot of someones) is going to have to go to all these farms and inoculate 64 million ducks - is that, because the French ducks will be vaccinated, they won't be exportable to the U.S. Our Agriculture Department fears that symptoms of avian flu will be hidden as "vaccinated poultry may not show signs of bird flu, thus masking whether the virus is circulating."

But on the upside, there are concerns that, if it's not wiped out, "bird flu could mutate into a version that can be transmitted to humans." So by all means, vaccinate those ducks.

And it sounds like the US - even though we have nowhere near as many ducks as France does - might want to get on the vaccination stick here, too. 

But this would probably just bring even more anti-vaxxers out of the woodwork. 

Bonne chance to France!