Vaccine skeptics are coming for your feta cheese

ATHENS — Greek farmers are begging for vaccines to save their flocks from sheep pox, and Brussels is offering them for free. But the Athens government doesn’t want them, preferring to cull infected animals.

That’s all very bad news for feta cheese fans.

Sheep pox is so infectious that global farming regulations require whole herds to be slaughtered immediately after even a single case is detected. Since the first case emerged in a northern region of Greece in 2024, authorities have culled more than 470,000 sheep and goats and closed some 2,500 farms nationwide.

The country’s livestock breeding industry is now on the verge of collapse — endangering the trademark white cheese, into which producers pour 80 percent of the country’s sheep and goat milk.

“If there is no immediate response, feta cheese will become a luxury item,” said Vaso Fasoula, a sheep farmer in Greece’s agricultural heartland of Thessaly, who has confined her 2,500 sheep to protect them from the contagion.

An alternative to all this killing: vaccines, available free from Brussels.

“Vaccination is the only additional measure that can stop the occurrence of new outbreaks, limit further spread to the rest of Greece and reduce the number of animals to be killed,” wrote Animal Welfare Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi to Athens last year.

Yet the government has repeatedly rejected this option, citing the steep financial consequences and damage to exports. That refusal to embrace wide-scale prevention measures has infuriated farmers and is fueling further tensions with Brussels over an agriculture subsidy scandal — all while putting one of Greece’s most famous exports at risk.

Farmers and livestock breeders have been blocking national highways all over the country for the last 40 days in one of the biggest mobilizations the country has experienced in recent years. Mass vaccination is among their demands, and they have said they won’t leave the roadblocks until the vaccination campaign starts.

Behind the government’s refusal to vaccinate, critics allege, are not only misguided priorities but also a corruption cover-up.

Anti-vax

Sheep pox vaccines would be free, but they would nonetheless come at a high cost.

Greek Agriculture Minister Konstantinos Tsiaras said a nationwide vaccine initiative would see Greece classified as a country where sheep pox is endemic. That could jeopardize exports, given the desperation of other countries to keep the bug beyond their borders.

“Our scientists are clear,” Tsiaras said in October. “They do not recommend vaccination. Farmers are in a difficult position, but we cannot do anything other than follow the scientific guidance.”

While a sheep pox declaration means restrictions on exporting animals — the virus can live in wool for up to six months — shipments of treated milk products like feta cheese would be less affected.

Τhe trademark salty, white, crumbly delight — a protected designation of origin within the EU — is a major economic driver. Greece produces over 97,000 tons of feta annually, more than two-thirds of which is exported. The country netted a record €785 million from feta sales in 2024.

Livestock breeders say the price of feta cheese has already increased significantly and will rise even further in the spring when the shortage becomes apparent. (The feta cheese currently on the market has been produced from milk from previous months.)

Yet the government is standing firm against livestock jabs.

“There is no approved vaccine in Greece,” said Charalampos Billinis, rector at the University of Thessaly and a member of the government’s national scientific committee for the management and control of sheep pox. “And there is no approved vaccine in the European Union.”

That’s true — but it doesn’t mean there’s no safe, effective inoculation against sheep pox.

Because the disease has not circulated in the EU for decades, manufacturers have not asked the European Medicines Agency to greenlight a vaccine.

“This is a standard situation for animal diseases not usually present in the EU,” a Commission spokesperson said in an email. “No manufacturer has economic interest in obtaining marketing authorisation as they do not expect specific diseases to spread.”

That’s why EU legislation offers a path for member countries to use vaccines that are approved in other parts of the world when animal diseases re-appear in the bloc, the spokesperson said. Plenty of doses of just such vaccines are available in EU stockpiles, and Brussels is urging Greece to repeat its success from the 1980s, when it used the vaccine to shut down a sheep pox outbreak.

“Experience, science and veterinary expertise further support the need to revert to vaccination in Greece now,” Várhelyi wrote to the government in October in a letter seen by POLITICO.

That’s where a fundamental disagreement arises. As Billinis argued, exposing the animals to the virus via the vaccine would increase positive testing rates, further prolonging trade restrictions, when the virus can still be contained in other ways.

Farmers don’t buy it.

“This disease is not leaving Greece; it has come to stay and without the vaccine, it will not go away,” said George Terzakis, president of a local livestock association in Thessaly.

He’s among the breeders who allege the government’s vaccine skepticism isn’t so much about science as their desire to hide the full implications of a snowballing farm scandal.

The European Public Prosecutor’s Office is pursuing dozens of cases in which Greeks allegedly received agricultural funds from the EU for pastureland they did not own or lease, or for animals they did not own, depriving legitimate farmers and livestock breeders of the funds they deserved. POLITICO first reported on the scheme in February.

“If our animals were vaccinated, the number of doses used would reveal the country’s real animal population,” Terzakis said. “Everything is being done because of the scandal.”

When asked about the allegation, government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis said Athens had “faithfully followed European directives, which are the result of all the recommendations that, at the end of the day, led to specific decisions.”

Floods and plagues

As the infection spreads, families who have lived with their sheep and goats for generations are watching them vanish in a day, buried in large pits — many times on their land.

Some have turned to illegal vaccination. The government estimates that one million illegal doses have been used, distorting epidemiological data.

The broader region of Thessaly, which produces a quarter of the country’s food, was hit by devastating floods in 2023, followed the next year by an outbreak of sheep and goat plague and then sheep pox.

“The disease spread like wildfire. We didn’t have any time to react,” said Dimitris Papaziakas, a breeder from a village close to Larissa city in central Greece and president of an association of livestock farmers affected by smallpox and plague. In mid-November he had to watch his 350 sheep be culled and then buried outside his sheep pen.

“I cannot recall that day without starting to cry all over again,” he said.

In one village, Koulouri, only one out of 10 units remains operational. Fasoula, the sheep farmer who penned her 2,500 sheep in May, is still keeping the infection at bay in nearby Amfithea. She constantly disinfects the cars and everything else on the farm, hoping for the best. But she’s concerned about how the animals were buried along the banks of a river.

“If there is another flood, everything that has been buried will come to the surface.”