Early April marked six months since French authorities, along with the country’s poultry sector, embarked on an ambitious effort to vaccinate every commercially-raised duck on the mainland against highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). The decision made it a global pioneer; although HPAI vaccines had been used in non-exporting countries to protect food security, no major exporter has done so, and the world has been closely watching the experiment. As an industry representative told Feedinfo last year, “We’re a bit like the guinea pigs of the world… everyone’s looking to see what happens in France.”
Halfway through the one-year campaign, how is it going? To quote Dr. Jocelyn Marguerie, poultry veterinarian and president of the poultry commission of the SNGTV, a national body representing veterinarians who work in the animal production industry which serves as an interlocutor for the government and has helped inform the strategy and operational deployment of the vaccination campaign, “We can say, on the whole, that we’ve had a splendid collective success.”
As per the numbers released by the Ministry of Agriculture in early April, more than 26 million ducks had received a dose of the vaccine, and over 21 million had received a second dose; meanwhile, the veterinarian adds, some 1.7 million have received 3 doses. According to Dr. Marguerie, coverage has been total. “100% of commercial ducks being raised in France have received the necessary vaccines… there has not been a commercially-raised duck in France that has not received it once it was old enough.”
Back before the campaign began, though, the Ministry of Agriculture had been anticipating the vaccination of some 64 million birds; doesn’t the discrepancy signal that there has been a delay somewhere? No, he says; instead, it comes from the difficulty of accurately projecting how quickly the flocks would be re-built after the devastation of the previous year. “The sector gave its projections for the number of ducks which would be produced, but it was not obvious to know how many ducks the market would absorb, because we had just come off of a truly catastrophic bird flu epidemic that killed 90% of the flock, and we also had the COVID-19 years which had significantly changed consumption habits… in the end, the market today is weaker than we had expected, than we had hoped…all the ducks which should have been vaccinated have been vaccinated, but there are fewer ducks than we were counting on.”
HPAI falls dramatically
Consequently, the experience with HPAI this year has been vastly different: a mere ten cases between August 2023 and March 2024, compared to over 300 over the same period between August 2022 and March 2023 and over a thousand cases during a major wave in spring of 2022.
“The results are there, because we know that the virus is present; we’ve seen some cases in wild birds, and our European neighbours are still affected,” says Dr. Marguerie.
Indeed, while it is true that HPAI is less intense in much of Europe this year, likely because of dynamics in wild birds, Dr. Marguerie firmly maintains that the evidence shows the vaccination campaign has made a significant difference in turning the tide in France. “There has clearly been a fall in other European countries, but not at all at the level of the drop seen in France… among the five countries that were the most affected (by HPAI) in autumn & winter of 2022-2023 and autumn & winter 2023-2024, four remain among the most affected countries; there was only one which fell off of that list, and it was France.”
Costs and savings, tangible and intangible
Of course, there have been costs; even with the state taking on 85% of the estimated €100 million that has been spent on the campaign, the sector has still had to bear millions of euros in new health expenses, not easy even under rosier economic circumstances. Nonetheless, he points out, “we have to remember that the wave of HPAI in spring 2022 cost France more than €1 billion… so yes, it has a cost, but the disease is even more costly.”
It is also true that the decision has had some impacts on the ability of French poultry producers to export their products; at least six countries have closed or suspended access to their markets while risk analyses are conducted, including important destinations like Japan, the US, and Canada. Again, though, while the pain caused by these actions must not be minimised, there is another side to this story; the success in keeping outbreaks to a bare minimum has meant that the poultry industry has been much freer to export its products than it was in years when cases numbered in the hundreds or thousands.
Meanwhile, there has also been an important psychological benefit to this new strategy among the country’s veterinarians, who had spent several demoralising years responding regularly to reports of dead birds with little to offer in response but the culling of neighbouring flocks. “It’s true that for veterinarians, this has meant much personal investment, required much energy, but it’s so much more rewarding, so much more exciting, to work on prevention than on depopulation… we are very satisfied by this reorientation towards vaccination.”
Mobilisation of the whole industry
The impressively smooth success so far is to the credit of just about everyone involved in the campaign.
First, Dr. Marguerie acknowledges the veterinary pharmaceutical industry, specifically Boehringer Ingelheim, who supplied the doses for the first half of the campaign, with no production or stock issues. “The vaccine was available; that’s a first success.”
Next, he notes the significant work of the veterinary corps, who have had the responsibility of supervising the vaccination, including ordering, receiving, prescribing, and getting the vaccine to the farms, auditing the vaccination done to certify the results. They are also on-site for the immense job of post-vaccine surveillance, which includes monthly swabs and blood samples in order to verify the absence of any silently-circulating HPAI. This high-quality surveillance has, he insists, been critical to persuading some trade partners to keep their borders open to French poultry products.
He adds that the effort would also not have been possible without the vaccination companies, staffed not by veterinarians but by technicians specifically trained in the act of vaccination. Indeed, there had been worries in the planning stages of the vaccine campaign about whether the lack of trained personnel might prove to be a bottleneck in the roll-out of a mass vaccination campaign, but in the end, this did not prove to be the case.
Finally, there were the farmers, who cooperated with and indeed embraced the new project. “They accepted the vaccination, they accepted the changes that would be required to their other vaccine protocols in order to combine them as much as possible with this vaccine [and optimise the process]… we can even signal that among the breeders, for whom HPAI vaccination is not an obligation but is optional, there were many who took it up.”
Going forward
The second half of the 2023-2024 campaign will see some changes, as France adds a second vaccine option to its line-up. Made by Ceva, this new technology will provide the opportunity to test new strategies, Dr. Marguerie explains, such as vaccination at the hatchery.
And beyond that? As far as Dr. Marguerie understands, there is no question about the fact that the vaccination campaign will be renewed for another year in October 2024 (and indeed communications from the French Ministry of Agriculture say that they are working on designing that campaign). Naturally, the details may yet evolve over the next six months; other than the fact that vaccination will remain targeted at ducks, he hesitates to offer any indication of how the strategy might change.
Still, he says, for him, it is clear that the vaccination has been a success, at least on the animal health front. “We have demonstrated that vaccination is a complementary tool to everything we were already doing on biosecurity and surveillance, a complementary tool to optimise the prevention and the fight against HPAI without comprising on the efficacy of the global struggle…
“We are evolving, and probably the period of massive depopulation events, where we were obliged to go collect the dead, kill birds by the millions or by the tens of millions to fight against this virus, I think that this period is nearly behind us. And that it is also expected of us, by the wider society, to offer more robust solutions to fighting HPAI, and that vaccination is an important element in our arsenal for doing that.”
