Suggested citation (web): Kaimakamis.com/Insights “The EFSA Report on Sheep and Goat Pox: What It Is, What It Offers, and What It Leaves Unanswered”.
On 4 February, EFSA published its report on sheep and goat pox in Greece and Bulgaria. Almost immediately, the document began circulating in public discussion as a “scientific paper.” The label is inaccurate, and the distinction matters.
The EFSA publication is a Scientific / Technical Report. It has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, carries no impact factor, and has not undergone the independent peer-review process that governs academic publication. It was evaluated institutionally, in accordance with EFSA’s procedures, with the explicit purpose of supporting regulatory and policy decisions.
This does not diminish its scientific value. The epidemiological analysis, the EURL data on vaccine strains (RM-65, Romania, Bakırköy), the bibliographic documentation, and the spatiotemporal treatment of clusters all constitute serious technical work. As a scientific report, the document generates knowledge.
But precisely because it is not a paper but a policy-relevant report, it must be judged by the standards of what it claims to be an instrument for organising difficult choices. And here its real limitations emerge.
The report does not cost anything; it is recommended. It does not estimate the economic burden of vaccinating million animals across tens of thousands of holdings. It does not examine the operational cost of post-vaccination surveillance in an environment where DIVA vaccines do not exist. It does not answer the question that lies at the heart of every policy decision. What is the total cost, and who bears it?
The trade consequences are absent. Vaccination without the ability to distinguish infected from vaccinated animals directly compromises disease-free status and, by extension, the export of high-value products, above all, Feta PDO. The report does not analyse this dimension. It offers no exit strategy, no scenario for the recovery of disease- free status. For a country whose protected designation of origin products depend on recognised health status, this is not a secondary gap. It is a structural one.
The critical trade-offs are not mapped. Vaccination or stamping-out. National or regional approach. Short-term epidemiological de-escalation or long-term risk management strategy. All are presented as curves and scenarios, not as choices with costs, benefits, and political consequences. A report that aspires to inform policy must do more than model outcomes; it must make the architecture of the decision visible.
The Greek case is acknowledged as problematic, yet treated by analogy. The report itself concedes that its models could not be fully applied to Greece due to geographic complexity. It nevertheless draws recommendations by comparing it with countries of entirely different scales and structures. It does not assess Greece’s administrative capacity for implementation, nor does it account for the cost of transitioning away from an already active stamping-out strategy, a strategy with its own institutional momentum, operational infrastructure, and logic of disease control.
The deeper issue, however, is one of scope. The report’s approach remains unidimensionally epidemiological. A decision that affects millions of animals, tens of thousands of farms, and an industry worth billions cannot rest on virology and mathematical modelling alone. It requires agricultural economics, legal analysis, and administrative feasibility assessment, trade strategy, and an understanding of producer behaviour, the responses, resistances, and adaptations that determine whether any policy actually works once it reaches the field.
Epidemiology is a necessary condition. It is not sufficient.
When a technical report is used as the basis for policy without costing, trade-off analysis, or an assessment of implementation capacity, it does not facilitate a difficult political choice. It displaces it.
And in the end, the consequences are not borne by EFSA, nor by a mathematical model.
They are borne by people, by farmers, and by the productive structures on which livelihoods depend…