A vegan world wouldn’t keep diseases like COVID-19 from infecting humans
Turning everyone vegan to prevent zoonotic diseases is nonsensical. (Pexels/)While the precise origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 is still murky epidemiologists are at least sure it came from animals. This connection has triggered a number of internet folks to draw connections between animal consumption and the arrival of COVID-19 and other zoonotic disease outbreaks. They include vegan influencer Earthling Ed, whose real name is Ed Winters. In an interview with USA Today, Winters, said “if we weren’t using animals for food we wouldn’t have created situations where many of these diseases, including the latest coronavirus, were passed to humans.” But that claim and ones like it fail to consider the complicated dynamics of human and animal relationships: Humans and animals will always closely coexist in one way or another. Cats and dogs live in our homes, we ride horses, pest species like mice and bed bugs invade...