(Bloomberg) -- Determined to avoid a repeat of the nation’sworst-ever avian-influenza outbreak, the U.S.Department of Agriculture is stockpiling up to 500 milliondoses of a new vaccine — but many in the $48 billion poultryindustry don’t want it.

While turkey farmers hit hard by the most-recent outbreaksupport the shots, chicken producers say vaccinating even a portionof their flocks would prompt foreign buyers to ban imports. Lastyear, commercial operations in 15 states were affected by thedisease, claiming 50 million birds mostly from egg-layingoperations and costing the industry $3.3 billion.

“As soon as you vaccinate any bird, you are telling the worldbird flu is endemic, and countries are going to stop buying fromus, some of them for years,” said Ashley Peterson, science andtechnology vice president for the National Chicken Council.

U.S. poultry producers remain on edge after 67 cases of thehighly contagious form of avian influenza were found in France. TheU.S. outbreak, which ended in June, led to record egg prices andimports and cut turkey supplies for the Thanksgiving holiday. Mostof the cases were in Minnesota, the biggest turkey-producing state,and Iowa, the biggest egg producer. Georgia, the top chicken-meatproducer, was unaffected.

To prevent a recurrence on American farms, producers are addingcar washes to keep the virus from spreading via vehicles andenclosing spaces to guard against airborne infection from wildbirds. But that’s not enough to deter U.S. investment inimmunizations.

48 million doses

The vaccine search began in March as government and industryrealized the scope of the problem. Harrisvaccines Inc. of Ames,Iowa, and Ceva Sante Animale SA of Libourne, France, receivedcontracts in October to produce vaccines. The initial orders for 48million doses from each company cost $12 million.

The U.S. government is preparing to deploy enough staff andother resources to handle about 500 infected flocks, more thandouble the number seen in 2015. Agency officials have also traveledto meet their counterparts in countries including China, Japan andSouth Korea to argue that measures the USDA might take shouldn’tlead to trade bans.

Since July, the USDA has tested more than 25,000 samples for thevirus in wild birds as part of its surveillance and biosecurityefforts, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement.While the USDA isn’t detailing how vaccines would be administeredin an outbreak, a September document from its Animal & PlantHealth Inspection Service said shots would only be given with theapproval of each state’s top veterinarian, and then only tocommercial poultry in areas where disease was spreadingrapidly.

Injury risk

Vaccinating flocks would create the impression in importingcountries that U.S. chicken and turkeys aren’t safe, increasing therisk of trade bans, said John Glisson, vice president of researchfor the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association in Tucker, Georgia.

Owners of egg-laying hens, which live longer than chickens andturkeys raised for their meat, oppose vaccine programs for anotherreason: They don’t want the hassle and cost of administeringbooster shots.

Unlike broiler chickens, which are raised for their meatand are slaughtered by eight weeks of age, or turkeys, which liveto 20 weeks, egg-laying chickens can live for two years. Repeatedlytaking aging birds out of their cages for booster shots “is quite atask in manpower and expense and risks injuring the birds,” Glissonsaid.

Avoiding conflict

Although not a single large-scale broiler operation wasaffected, the industry still took a trade hit, said Tom Super, aspokesman for the Washington-based National Chicken Council.Producers lost $910 million — 22% of exports — when 17countries including China, Russia and South Korea limited or shuttheir borders to U.S. birds.

“We’re already losing exports to bans put in place,” Super said.“A vaccine opens that wound up further.”

Opposition to the USDA’s plan isn’t unanimous. Turkey producerswant a vaccine, and trade concerns may be exaggerated, said JoelBrandenberger, president of the National Turkey Federation inWashington.

“The world recognizes that the science has changed and thatvaccines can be used effectively” to eradicate virus, he said.

To avoid conflicts in an outbreak, groups need to work out theirapproach to a vaccine sooner rather than later, and the governmentneeds to make potential trade impacts as clear as possible, saidLes Sims, a consultant with Asia Pacific Veterinary InformationService in Australia.

Otherwise “there will be strong resistance to its use by thosesectors otherwise unaffected” when flu hits its first farms, Simssaid. The vaccines themselves, he said, remain a viable option.“Hopefully you won’t need it, but better to have the optionavailable.”

--With assistance from Rudy Ruitenberg and Megan Durisin.

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