Thank you for writing this comprehensive proposal. I agree with your conclusion it’s not a case of if but when and we should be improving our pandemic planning now.
Industrial animal agriculture creates conditions where pathogens can evolve and spread rapidly between densely housed animals, potentially creating new zoonotic diseases that can jump to humans. This factor alone raises the likelihood of future pandemics and strengthens the case for robust early detection systems.
The comparison to fire protection spending provides a compelling perspective. It’s striking that New Zealand spent nearly 3 times more on fire protection than pandemic preparedness, despite COVID-19 costing the country roughly 50 times more than annual fire damage. This kind of data-driven comparison makes a strong case for increasing pandemic surveillance investment.
I hope you’re able to get this information to MoH!
Great post, clear and insightful! I really appreciate how you’ve presented this perspective on the cultivated meat debate.
Your point about the substitution effect and that this may not replace conventional meat but instead compete with other alternative proteins is striking and not something I had considered before. I had assumed that meat-eaters would be more likely to embrace cultivated meat, but your argument that hybrid products might not attract them, given the reception to things like the Beyond or Impossible Burgers, is compelling.
I love that you’re asking such critical questions and admire how you’ve kept the post concise while still offering constructive recommendations for the EA movement.
My hope is that cultivated meat will enable us to replace animal products for companion animals, but I realise looking at your information on scale and cost I’m being pretty optimistic on that. Do you feel that will be a viable option at some point in the future?
Also, I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t know the reference to Omelas so thank you for introducing me to that story.
Thanks again for such a thought-provoking and well-balanced post!