New York Times gift articles

Sounds like a speedrun strat for one of those pandemic games (e.g. Plague Inc.): allow infection to spread across a huge body of test subjects (chickens) with minimal consequences to your final target (humanity) to maximize mutation opportunities (DNA points) that can be spent on acquiring properties of the perfect bioweapon: airborne, long incubation period, long asymptomatic communicative period, and lethal. Then, make the pathogen's last mutation the ability to infect humans instead of the test subjects, wiping humanity out before they can spin up bioengineering labs to research and develop a cure.