Podcast and video: Animal mRNA vaccines under fire; Too many antibiotics in agriculture? Does ‘Big Ag’ control the global seed market?

• Kill the Messenger: mRNA-based livestock vaccines are under attack by vaccine skeptics. Here’s why their rejectionism is misplaced — and dangerous
  
  

Agricultural animals get sick just like humans do. To reduce the risk of infection and its potentially deadly effects, vaccines are administered to protect the chickens, cows and pigs we depend on for food. While this seems uncontroversial, some of the same critics who opposed COVID-19 vaccination are now sounding the alarm over mRNA-based vaccines for livestock. The new shots, skeptics claim, are a stealth means of immunizing vaccine-hesitant people against SARS-CoV-2. Is there any truth to this allegation?

• Does conventional livestock farming use drugs at ‘unnecessarily high levels’, endangering human health, as activist critics claim?

When vaccines aren’t an option, livestock are treated with drugs to bring them back to health. Although treating sick animals is necessary and perfectly ethical, some allege that farmers use medicines, antibiotics included, to make their animals grow faster. In reality, these drugs are tightly regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and prescribed by veterinarians.