Meat industry calls report “disservice” to the nation as it was one of many industries learning how to deal with COVID.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released a new staff report claiming meatpacking companies engaged Trump administration political appointees in an aggressive campaign to force workers to remain in processing plants with high risk of coronavirus transmission. However, the North American Meat Institute states the committee cherry picked data to “support a narrative that is completely unrepresentative of the early days of an unprecedented national emergency.”
The staff report revealed that last year, the Select Subcommittee found that during the first year of the pandemic, infections and deaths among workers for five of the largest meatpacking companies – Tyson Foods, Inc., JBS USA Holdings, Inc., Smithfield Foods, Cargill, Inc., and National Beef Packing Company LLC – were significantly higher than previously estimated, with over 59,000 workers for these companies being infected with the coronavirus and at least 269 dying.
The report adds that internal meatpacking industry documents reviewed by the subcommittee “now illustrate that despite awareness of the high risks of coronavirus spread in their plants, meatpacking companies engaged in a concerted effort with Trump administration political officials to insulate themselves from coronavirus-related oversight, to force workers to continue working in dangerous conditions, and to shield themselves from legal liability for any resulting worker illness or death.”
As of early May 2020, coronavirus cases in meatpacking-dependent rural counties rose to be nearly ten times the number of cases in non meatpacking-dependent counties with analogous socioeconomic demographics. A USDA analysis estimated that, by the end of May 2020, counties with high proportions of meatpacking workers accounted for about half of the top 25 and eight of the top ten rural counties with the highest infection rates.