Humanities & Cultures

What does better preparedness look like? Diagnostic tests ready on day one. Universal healthcare (perhaps at state or local levels). Vaccine innovations and new drugs against the families of viruses that pose pandemic threats. In its final days, the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services awarded $590 million to mRNA biotech company Moderna to fast-track bird flu vaccines.

The thing about outbreak response policies is that they look somewhat like prevention when executed well. Aside from vaccines, it looks like paid sick leave for everyone, especially people who work with wild animals, livestock, and labs surveilling disease outbreaks; government access to farms and protections for whistleblowers.

Factory farming drives disease outbreaks by intensely confining animals that have a greater tendency to become infected, combined with incentives for farmers to keep sick and vulnerable animals alive with drugs. Researchers have called this “the infectious disease trap” and it applies to pandemic pathogens, too, according to Carlson.

“The majority of biomass, the majority of animal biomass on this planet is not wildlife anymore — it's livestock,” Carlson said. While it is possible to reduce meat consumption, factory farming likely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

To this end, labor unions are an underrecognized avenue for pandemic preparedness. After COVID-19 decimated meatpacking plants in 2020, unions negotiated protections with employers that continue today. By union protections, meat workers should have access to personal protective equipment like boots, sleeves, masks, and goggles as fears of bird flu plague farms, plants, and “live hangs,” according to Mark Lauritsen, international VP and director of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union’s Food Processing, Packing and Manufacturing division. (However, dairy workers have become infected by bird flu on farms where employers do not provide P.P.E., according to reporting by Amy Maxmen.)

Today, several major meatpacking companies offer up to 20 hours of paid sick leave — more than they did pre-COVID-19, thanks to union negotiations. Those negotiations provide 4 hours for every 400 hours worked in states without more required leave; the union “would like it to be more hours,” Lauritsen added.