What if a new H5N1 wave culls US laying hens?
A fresh D1.1 H5N1 wave culling tens of millions of US layers re-spikes egg prices — the clean trade is long eggs and a food-CPI pop; the entire crude-collapse/gold-bid cascade is wildly mis-mapped (a poultry cull doesn't crater oil demand). Rhymes exactly with the Apr-2025 H5N1 wave that drove record US egg prices near $8/dozen. Transmission: domestic protein substitution and breakfast-food margins (Cal-Maine benefits). Forward: barn biosecurity has improved, so repopulation is faster than 2022 — spikes are sharp but shorter-lived.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A fresh D1.1-driven H5N1 wave forces culling of tens of millions more US laying hens beyond prior years, re-spiking egg prices. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Food inflation ▲ · Pandemic shock ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.