Report Distorts Truth About Worker Safety During Pandemic, Meat Institute Says

At the height of the pandemic, the meat processing industry worked closely with political appointees in the Trump administration to "stave off health restrictions and keep slaughterhouses open even as COVID-19 spread rapidly among workers," a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis’ partisan report said Thursday.

The North American Meat Institute (Meat Institute) says this report distorts the truth about the meat and poultry industry’s work to protect employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“The Meat Institute and its member companies voluntarily provided hundreds of thousands of pages to the Committee. The report ignores the rigorous and comprehensive measures companies enacted to protect employees and support their critical infrastructure workers," says Julie Anna Potts, president and CEO of the Meat Institute. 

Like many industries, the meat and poultry industry was challenged by the pandemic in the spring of 2020, Potts explains.

"As more became known about the spread of the virus, the meat industry spent billions of dollars to reverse the pandemic’s trajectory, protecting meat and poultry workers while keeping food on Americans’ tables and our farm economy working," Potts says in a news release.

But the report said meat companies pushed to keep their plants open even though they knew workers were at high risk of catching the virus, the Associated Press (AP) reports. The lobbying led to health and labor officials watering down their recommendations for the industry and culminated in an executive order President Donald Trump issued in the spring of 2020 designating meat plants as critical infrastructure needing to remain open.

“The House Select Committee has done the nation a disservice," Potts says. "The Committee could have tried to learn what the industry did to stop the spread of COVID among meat and poultry workers, reducing positive cases associated with the industry while cases were surging across the country. Instead, the Committee uses 20/20 hindsight and cherry picks data to support a narrative that is completely unrepresentative of the early days of an unprecedented national emergency.”

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