Experts and federal agencies repeatedly urged meatpackers to prepare for a potential future pandemic as far back as the Bush administration, yet none of the major packers had stocked personal protective equipment or trained personnel on pandemic response before the novel coronavirus began to spread in 2020, an investigation from ProPublica found.
“For more than a dozen years, critical businesses like meatpackers have been warned that a pandemic was coming,” write Michael Grabell and Bernice Yeung. “With eerie prescience, infectious disease experts and emergency planners had modeled scenarios in which a highly contagious virus would cause rampant absenteeism at processing plants, leading to food shortages and potential closures.”
The industry failed to prepare for the possibility. “Instead, the industry repeatedly expressed confidence in its ability to handle a pandemic, and when asked to plan, relied on a wait-and-see approach, records and interviews show,” the authors write.
As of August 20, more than 41,000 meatpacking workers had contracted Covid-19 at 474 facilities across the country, according to a count kept by FERN. At least 193 workers have died.
“Failing to follow the national guidance developed 15 years ago led to the breakdown at the meatpacking plants,” the authors write, paraphrasing an expert who advises the Department of Homeland Security on the food and agriculture sector. “The government deserves the lion’s share of blame because it didn’t follow the pandemic plan, he said, and failed to provide leadership to the industry. ‘When government didn’t step up,’ [the expert] said, ‘the companies were left to their own devices.’ ”
The full investigation can be found here.