Rumors have been circulating about mRNA vaccines in livestock. Fact-checkers have been scoffing, but what’s really going on? Could we be eating animals that have been treated with mRNA? How do we know what’s in the meat at our grocery store?
PORK: Yes, it’s probably been treated with mRNA.
Unfortunately, if you’ve been eating pork from the grocery stores, even organic pork, it’s probably been treated with mRNA because pork producers have been using mRNA products since 2018. Merck’s SEQUIVITY platform is used with different sequences of various porcine diseases, including swine flu, to get immune responses in pigs.
Interestingly enough, sow mortality rates have increased slightly, from 11.1% in 2017 to 12.6% in 2021. However, raising animals in large quantities is very complex; increased mortality could be linked to countless factors, and many producers admit they don’t have enough qualified employees to pay optimal attention to animals. The only certainty here is, new pharmaceutical products have not been a magic bullet for the pork industry’s problems.
I guess we, as a society, don’t have enough money for more agricultural and veterinary workers so that hog farmers can optimally monitor the pigs that will become our food. And yet, it’s still full steam ahead with ever-more-complicated bioengineering solutions. A few months ago, GenVax Technologies, a startup that wants to bring self-amplifying mRNA (saRNA) technologies to animal health, received $6.5 million to begin producing vaccines 100% specific to African Swine Fever variants that may be circulating in pork herds. There always seems to be enough money for mRNA.
Sound familiar?
If this sounds similar to a product widely used on humans the past few years, that’s because it is. As in human mRNA treatments, Merck claims that the RNA can’t replicate itself and only lasts a short time in the animals’ bodies. They also say that animals do not shed any RNA particles. Given the wide range of findings in humans after mRNA treatments, however, I think the public has reason to be skeptical.
Now, my first thought when I heard about this was disbelief. Ed Dowd’s Cause Unknown gives very detailed evidence of increasing death rates from the past two years; I couldn’t imagine anyone responsible for livestock trying out a product with so much potential to negatively affect profit margins.