CNN sez Waffle House to add 50 cents per egg.

[IsambardPrince]

CNN sez Waffle House to add 50 cents per egg.

Everything on the menu, almost, has eggs.

Bird flu went from being "a hoax to keep egg prices high" to people finding hundreds of dead ducks and eagles and geese littering Lake Michigan's shoreline.

It's amazing how it went from being "a hoax to make your grocery bill higher" to "well, stuff's expensive, suck it up" in only two weeks.

I could speculate as to why that might be, but I certainly don't want to violate the rules.

I'm certainly glad that the strategy of farmers not allowing USDA and State inspectors on their farm to test for the bird flu is working out splendidly for them. 

[mAtchew]

I am just happy Costco has kept their egg prices manageable. I am lucky (or unlucky?) enough that I am not near a Waffle House, as I have heard their food is quite good for what it is. It sucks that inflation seems to be lingering in every crack and crevice. 

[IsambardPrince]

---

@mAtchew wrote:

I am just happy Costco has kept their egg prices manageable. I am lucky (or unlucky?) enough that I am not near a Waffle House, as I have heard their food is quite good for what it is. It sucks that inflation seems to be lingering in every crack and crevice. 

---

I went to bake a cake and lost an egg down the sink and screamed "OUCH, my pocketbook!" last night.

This is just going to keep getting worse. Birds do not have the adaptive immune system that humans do, so the flu isn't just something they shake off or immunize against. It is 100% lethal and 100% contagious. Pretty much all you can do is euthanize them to try to put them out of their misery and avoid them coming into contact with more birds.

Maybe Costco, for now, keeps egg prices low to drive memberships. Selling them at a loss? But as we lose more and more birds I don't think this will be sustainable.

The flu can absolutely be lethal to humans too. Unfortunately, some US States are starting to put in anti-vaccination laws, and we see how well that works for them when we look at the weekly flu activity map and those States are all in purple.

[mAtchew]

---

@IsambardPrince wrote:

---

@mAtchew wrote:

I am just happy Costco has kept their egg prices manageable. I am lucky (or unlucky?) enough that I am not near a Waffle House, as I have heard their food is quite good for what it is. It sucks that inflation seems to be lingering in every crack and crevice. 

---

I went to bake a cake and lost an egg down the sink and screamed "OUCH, my pocketbook!" last night.

This is just going to keep getting worse. Birds do not have the adaptive immune system that humans do, so the flu isn't just something they shake off or immunize against. It is 100% lethal and 100% contagious. Pretty much all you can do is euthanize them to try to put them out of their misery and avoid them coming into contact with more birds.

Maybe Costco, for now, keeps egg prices low to drive memberships. Selling them at a loss? But as we lose more and more birds I don't think this will be sustainable.

---

I said the same thing the other day when I knocked over the bowl I was mixing eggs in and spilled about two eggs all over the counter 

I agree, unfortunately. I hope for everybody's sake that it gets under control sooner than later. I know eggs are a huge part of the majority of the country's grocery list.

[IsambardPrince]

He Who Shall Not Be Named (we'll just assume I was talking about Sauron here) appointed a crazy person to lead the agency that approves updated flu shots (for this purpose we'll assume I was talking about Saruman), which are getting safer and more effective all the time (especially now that there's no eggs, yes chicken eggs, involved in the process and less genetic drift). It may get to the point where I have to go to Canada to get my flu shot.

He Who Shall Not Be Named also said 75,000 Americans die each year from Fentanyl so there's a national emergency. About that many die of the flu, and half are preventable if we got everyone vaccinated.

The recombinant flu shots are actually quite potent. When I got one this flu season, I actually had to sit under the air conditioner for a few days, in October.

[FicoMike0]

I was at IHOP last week, they had a 6.99 special going. I like them better than waffle House anyway.

I'm sure the egg crisis will pass. I think I paid about $3.50 the last time I bought some at Kroger.

[IsambardPrince]

---

@FicoMike0 wrote:

I was at IHOP last week, they had a 6.99 special going. I like them better than waffle House anyway.

I'm sure the egg crisis will pass. I think I paid about $3.50 the last time I bought some at Kroger.

---

I paid $8.99 for a freaking dozen at Jewel last week. They got me for nearly $5 for some Tropicana Orange Juice, which they also lowered from 56 ounce to 48 ounce. This AmEx BCP is pulling its weight.

I wonder how long we have before AmEx sees average grocery bills getting worse and worse and decides to pull the plug, make the 6% less generous, or raises the AF, or lowers the grocery cap.

"In da panic, dey tried to pull da plug."

"SkyNet fights back..."

I really must remember to watch The Running Man, as I feel that more appropriately describes what's going on these days. Just replace Killian with Dr. Phil. He comes rushing out... "Who loves you? And who do you love!?"

$6 for a can of Cadre Cola, but it really hits the spot. My money is on Dynamo obviously. Dude shoots freaking lightning from his hands. How do you beat that?

"There they are this very minute, Whitman, Price, and Haddad. Basking under the Maui sun. Their debt to society paid in full!"

[IsambardPrince]

I just want to expand upon the irony here a bit of the old flu shots needing chicken eggs.

If H5N1 turned into a human pandemic, you would need about 900,000 eggs to ramp up enough of the vaccine production to cover the population of the United States most vulnerable to it (probably the very old, very young, people with weakened immune systems, and healthcare workers), that doesn't even cover you for folks just wanting to walk in and roll up their sleeve and do their part.

And you might be able to get 900,000 chicken eggs assuming the chickens themselves don't get sick and start dying and need to be slaughtered first.

But this is where the recombinant flu shots and the potential for the mRNA platforms to shine comes in. Both of these platforms, although different, can ramp up flu shot production to meet a possible species jump in H5N1 influenza relatively quickly (assuming the FDA doesn't get in the way and does treat it as an emergency). And the recombinant flu shots are more like the old "high dose" ones based off of chicken eggs (1940s tech), so there's about triple the antigen there, which should provide a relatively robuse immune response, and with minimal "genetic drift".

Part of the trouble we've been having out of chicken egg-incubated viral strains used in the vaccines is that part of the genetic code will "drift" and the result will be a flu strain used to make the vaccine that isn't exactly matching the strain we're trying to immunize against, and having to have a supply chain set up with varying amount of antigen content which depends on if the patient is elderly.

So the new seasonal flu shots, and the potential "bird flu pandemic" ones will save millions of chicken eggs for the supermarket. It pulls a huge customer out of the market for chicken eggs, so there's less of a "price war" going on at the supermarket.

I really hope we don't see H5N1 become more virulent and become capable of human to human spread, but there's just no telling. It's yet another problem out there and another reason not to eat game meat. If you go duck hunting, I guess what I'm saying is "watch out for odd ducks".

You'll know if you come across an infected bird if the infection has been going on long enough. It will appear to be in a stupor, potentially unable to fly correctly. We found eagles here in Illinois already, I've seen the videos, and they try to take off and then their wings stop flapping and they fall to the ground, and it's just terrible to watch.

I didn't intend to make any jokes because this isn't a good situation we've got unfolding, but in a bird flu, having a chicken and the egg problem involving a potential vaccine. Terribly ironic.

[Varsity_Lu]

---

@IsambardPrince wrote:

...but I certainly don't want to violate the rules.

---

You say something like this in almost all of your posts.  It's kind of a tell.

[crystal626]

It's hard to believe that eggs were less than $2 a dozen a few months ago and now you can't find them here under $9 at the normal grocery store. I'm glad we hardly ever bought them.