One, though not the stupidest but of sufficient stupidity to get nowhere with, college-credentialed members of a certain self-defined "brain trust" has excoriated my mention of not only science reporting but actual scientific papers which show the most inmate link between the eating of meat, wild and raised for slaughter in captivity, and viral epidemic and pandemic diseases. No doubt he'd make the same objection if it were mentioned there is also a proven causal connection to bacterial infections, in the unlikely event that the big-brain of the "brain trust" could understand there is a difference. So many don't seem to, no matter if they've been to college or not.
I am told that that would be taken care of by a rigorous program of governmental regulation, problem solved, clean as a whistle, the bees knees. I suspect that the "brain truster" has never actually seen animal husbandry for the production of meat and eggs, I grew up around it, such a rigorous program as would prevent what happens in even the best run of such operations wouldn't prevent viral diseases from infecting a flock or herd and would not prevent such viruses mutating into forms which develop forms which spread like wildfire among animals kept in the high concentrations that economy of scale force under even the best practices. And, since such animal husbandry is done by human workers, some of those diseases will develop forms which will infect human beings through contact with the animals and once that happens, some of them will mutate into forms which will pass easily from human to human. That is guaranteed to happen no matter what level of government regulation is applied. There is no such a thing as virus free meat and eggs.
The claim that government regulation - he says I'd make Upton Sinclair turn over in his grave -would do the trick ignores several known facts about such regulation.
A. Such government regulation would have to be universal because the human population covers the Earth, there is no such scheme of universal government regulation. If anything the possibility of constructing such institutions is, today, far less plausibly achieved than it would have been in the 1950s when, by the way, it didn't happen, either. We can't even get a World Court going.
B. Such regulation would have to not only be consistently applied, universally, it would have to be matched with flawless surveillance of possible novel viral outbreaks which may or may not be sufficiently understood to mitigate their spread.
C. Such regulation would have to endure the changing fashions in politics, the attacks from financially and ideologically interested opponents, the corruption of politicians, judges, "justices" bureaucrats, and, most corruptible and influential, the media.
D. The fragility of depending on even modestly good governmental regulation is proven by its history in the United States. It has failed here, so often and increasingly as Republican-fascism and libertarianism and the malignant form of populism (most of that actually not populist but a mania created by the mass media) have attacked and weakened it. Regional agricultural interests have prevented effective regulation in many cases and have weakened, destroyed or caused the violation of them with the kind of impunity that money and media influence (money applied) insures.
The Food And Drug Act, the adoption of which is credited to Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, has hardly been a success as all of those forces of corruption I mentioned have influenced its implementation, from the start. Even the relatively simple matter of testing drugs for their safety and efficacy has been spotty, at best. This recent story about and around the attempt to get Thalidomide approved for sale in the United States (it was largely the work of one doctor who prevented its approval to begin with) is a good illustration as to the vulnerabilities of regulation where there were few of the regional interests which any regulation of agriculture would certainly be vulnerable to.
No, there is no regulating us out of the hard fact that as long as people eat wild animals and animals kept by small-holders and factory farms to be eaten, the human population is going to be vulnerable to epidemic and pandemic diseases of the kind that Covid-19-20, SARS, H1N1, Lassar Fever, very likely Ebola and HIV, etc. have been. There are certainly other means of transmission of serious viral diseases from animals, the CDC and other analyses of Lassar Fever mentions rats urinating on grain that is badly stored even when the rats are not caught and eaten, as they are.
I recall reading that one of the suspected means of introduction was through the cultural habit of peasants, while they were practicing slash and burn cultivation, to catch the rats that fled the fires to eat them and that when they were caught the rats urinated on the people catching them. There is no guarantee that some big game trophy hunter like the international twit of the decade, Donald Trump jr. won't introduce a terrible disease into the human population by a similar means. That he is one of the major assholes of the world and the peasants in that story are certainly not assholes makes no difference to viruses. Preventing Lassar Fever will, certainly, require that such rat to human transmission is stopped and one of the means of doing that is by them not being eaten.
If this were not important I would not be answering it.
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I will add, just for fun, that Upton Sinclair was not only a firm believer in telepathy, he carried out some interesting experiments in it with his wife that he published in his book Mental Radio, which got some positive attention, even from his friend Einstein. I looked it up at Wikipedia, which article carries some clear lies about the book, though I'm not interested in going into that except to dope slap the "brain truster". Martin Gardner also lied about the book, as he lied about so much.
Update: Proving that the "brain-trusters" are the same species of asshole as Donald Trump jr. and Trump himself, the ass who made this necessary is now making Thalidomide jokes.
Education fell to pieces in the 1960s, apparently. TV was the main cause, it makes people stupid and callous. And those are the "lefties" who are supposed to be better than that.
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