The washing does to something; eggs have a protective layer on the outside. Washing them removes it. With this layer, an egg cannot be invaded by bacteria after it's been laid.

Vaccinating the chickens and keeping the eggs unwashed is basically as much natural protection as you can get from nature, washing them means you have to protect the egg yourself a lot more, otherwise salmonella and other bacteria can infect it.

I'm sorry, but that is just not factually correct.

> With this layer, an egg cannot be invaded by bacteria after it's been laid.

They spray mineral oil, which works just as well. This layer the chicken leaves is just some oil, not magic. You do NOT need to refrigerate washed eggs in the US. You just don't.

Try it if you don't believe me. Take some eggs and leave them out for 2 months - they'll be just fine.

> washing them means you have to protect the egg yourself a lot more, otherwise salmonella and other bacteria can infect it.

See this is not factual either. Salmonella infects the eggs before they are laid, not after. That's why vaccinating the chickens works.

And as I said above, there is no additional protection needed with washed eggs.

Refrigerating eggs in the US is SOLELY to keep salmonella from multiplying inside the eggs. Despite what this article says it is NOT about washing the eggs which is simply done because they have unsightly feces on them, that's all.

This is genuinely incredible to me - with all the problems the US (among others) has with using broad-spectrum treatments to improve animal growth, we can't be bothered to vaccinate them?

Costs money!

Is the vaccine patented?

If not, someone ought to be able to make a big spinning needle-wheel to vaccinate chicks at a rate of 10 per second from a big bucket of vaccine.

If there's a patent, you can bet it'll be billed at a couple of dollars per dose, which is totally infeasable when 1 cent per chick can be the profit margin.

The vaccine costs $0.01 per chicken. And no, that's not a typo. Labor is a bit more, but not much - it's done in bulk by spraying it.

Buy some here: https://www.valleyvet.com/ct_detail.html?pgguid=FBE23AC3-EB6...

$41.40 for 5,000 doses.

Actually still sounds quite expensive... Like that's more than the cost of the drinking water or electricity for lighting for the whole life of the chicken...

But that's not how you do cost benefit analysis. If the cost to vaccinate a chicken is one or even several cents per chicken, then you're calculating the price offset based on the total yield of that chicken, i.e. the eggs that chicken produces.

Production chickens have a one day laying cycle, so you get about an egg a day, for about a year before production drops off to less than that. So that's 5 cents on a minimum of 350 eggs (more if the chicken is kept despite production drop-off), which would be a staggeringly irrelevant price increase per egg if vaccination would be legislated into being a mandatory practice.

Which it should be.

Years ago.