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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

Related to profiting off pandemics, or rather by causing them: pack animals by the thousand to breed viruses and put them near other species closely packed to promote virus mutations -- aka factory farming.

Presto, save money and promote viral mutations that can jump to humans. And they'll keep doing so as long as it's legal. In other words, expect bigger pandemics or legislate.

Here's a video on what few are working on but if we don't stop, we'll see more pandemics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ppXSABYLY.

My short podcast episode on it: https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...

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I find his statement that there were no pandemics before domestication of animals and therefore domesticated animals must be the source of pandemics quite bold and it seems to me that it is more backed by wishful thinking or political agenda than by actual science.

Anyways, it seems that this time the source was bats, and I am not aware of any domesticated bats.

The video also covered encroaching on wildlife territory causing epidemics and pandemics such as ebola. He seems to have recorded it during a bird flu pandemic so focused on that type.

Never thought I’d see Dr Gregor on HN! This is an amazing presentation. Humans never learn though and so we’ll be back to our old ways, blaming others and going “back to regular life,” when it’s regular life they got us to this pandemic in the first place.

Sadly, the irony of people reacting to the pandemic by buying tons of factory farmed meat is buried under its deadly effect.

Somehow the media has focused so much on the here and now -- important as ventilators and distancing are -- that it hasn't tackled the ongoing and increasing causes that enabled us to predict pandemics like this decades ago.

. . . and more to come if we don't stop breeding viruses by saving a few cents per pound on meat (and encroaching into wildlife territory).

Well, for all it's ills this virus didn't arise due to and likely would never have arisen if the zoonotic reservoir was farmed instead of captured.

Completely and utterly false. Zoonotic diseases have been spreading heavily over the past few decades precisely in close proximity (factory) farming, and will continue to spread in the future in the horrible conditions we keep stressed out, sick animals.

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