Professor Delci Winders, Director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at VLGS shares her thoughts in USA Today's: "The next pandemic could spring from the US meat supply, new report finds."

The article includes:

The report led by Harvard Law School and NYU's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection highlights several areas of vulnerability, including commercial farms where millions of livestock come into close contact with each other and their handlers; the wild animal trade in which animals are imported with few or no health checks; and the fur trade in which minks and other animals are bred for their coats, with little safety oversight.

"So much of this is hidden from public view," Winders said. "There's so much we don't know because we're not monitoring."

Winders said she's concerned about how much money the government spends subsidizing and protecting industries she believes put the American public at risk. She hopes Congress will take advantage of this year's reenactment of the Farm Bill to limit subsidies and impose new safety regulations on animal industries.

"Don't we see the writing on the wall?" Winders asked. "Scientists are telling us there's a looming threat of a zoonotic outbreak that could make COVID look like a cakewalk, and we're still just ignoring it, even after what we've gone through over the last couple of years."