This article was first published in ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning research writing hall. Subscribe to The Big Story newsletter for stories like this in your inbox.
Last June, when much of its staff was already inflamed with COVID-19 and several others were killed, Kenneth Sullivan, the chief executive of Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest red meat producer, sent a harsh letter to two U.S. senators who had filed an investigation into meat-packing plant outbreaks and industry warnings of a nearby food shortage.
Frankly and sincerely, Sullivan rebuked critics for suggesting that Smithfield had acted too slowly to prevent the disease from spreading between his staff and surrounding communities. These “revisionist historians,” he wrote, refused to be “linked to reality” by claiming that meatpackers can simply have spaced personnel, slow down processing chains, or store masks.
“What no one has anticipated, and never happened in our lives, is the situation we are experiencing today,” Sullivan wrote. “In other words, our collection facilities, which are the key hub of the source chain, may be threatened en masse by a global pandemic that threatens our ability to produce food.”
Sullivan’s sentiment was echoed in meat-packing companies across the country: how can anyone be ready for COVID-19?
But a ProPublica investigation found that for more than a dozen years, critical corporations such as meat packers have been warned that a pandemic is coming. With prescience, infectious disease experts and emergency planners had modeled scenarios in which a highly contagious virus would cause widespread absenteeism in processing plants, leading to food shortages and possible closures. Experts had continually suggested to companies and government agencies to prepare for precisely what Smithfield’s CEO now claims to be unrealistic.
“It was an absolute crisis for food processors, and it wasn’t necessary,” said John Hoffman, who developed emergency plans for the food and agriculture sector at the George W. Bush Administration’s Department of Homeland Security. “There are things that may have simply happened in a pandemic that would have been new, yet they were more or less as the plan for the pandemic suggested.
Instead, the industry has expressed confidence in its ability to manage a pandemic and, when asked to plan, has relied on a wait-and-see approach, as recorded and interviewed.
“The result is this: the world is in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic,” Keira Lombardo, Smithfield’s executive vice president of corporate affairs and compliance, said in a statement. “We challenge you to call anyone anywhere in the world who is fully COVID-19 ready.”
Nearly 15 years ago, the White House convened leaders in the food and agriculture industry, as well as leaders from other industries, in check-in with government officials to expand a plan to the country’s essential facilities in the event of a pandemic.
Bush’s management warned corporations that up to 40% of their staff could be absent due to illness, quarantine or fear. Social estrangement would be in production plants, he said, even if it affected advertising operations. And government models have shown that such absenteeism would halve food production.
Industries identify their critical staff and services now, DHS urged, and corporations work with their local public fitness agencies to prepare before a pandemic occurs.
Even in this case, the organization that runs the food industry underestimated the threat and told the President’s Infrastructure Advisory Board in 2007 that it had made the decision that there were “few or no critical food and agricultural facilities” that would justify prioritizing a vaccine in the event of a pandemic.
When and if a pandemic occurred, according to its report, the industry may rely on “American ingenuity” to “adapt and continue to function.”
In the following years, according to the archives, government agencies and experts tried to involve the meat industry in drawing up plans. The Industry Trade Association published a style of plan for a pandemic that predicted that “the transmission of disease from one painter to another” would threaten operations. The Department of Labor says corporations with “high-density paint environments” buy enough mask to supply each painter with two masks a day for 120 days. For a giant meat packing plant like Smithfield’s in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with 3,600 paintrs, that meant having 864,000 masks on hand.
By contrast, much of the industry’s attention has been the progression of detailed protocols to prevent diseases in poultry and livestock, which are likely to be a threat.
“We were more prepared for animal pandemic disorders than for human pandemics,” said a former meat industry executive.
In 2015, a federal report noted that the food and agriculture sector was not yet aware of the maximum critical amenities to sustain a disaster, let alone a pandemic, and had “no comprehensive plan” to do so. Several former corporate meatpacking executives told ProPublica that they had not undertaken any pandemic development plans other than reviewing the general recommendations for the flu season in the years leading up to 2020.
The United Food and Trade Workers’ Union, which represents staff guilty of most beef and red meat production in the United States, said it was also excluded from the circuit.
“While packers have been making many plans for this pandemic, I haven’t noticed,” said Mark Lauritsen, director of food processing, packaging and manufacturing at yourCC.
ProPublica contacted 8 of the largest meat and poultry corporations and none answered express questions about their plans to deal with the pandemic before COVID-19. Some, such as Smithfield, JBS and Perdue Farms, have described in indistinct terms a variety of contingency plans. Tyson and Cargill had plans in the past, but they didn’t need to tell if they were up-to-date or tested. Hormel and National Beef did not answer questions, and Sanderson Farms did not answer calls or emails.
For example, when COVID-19 outbreaks erupted in factories in March, meat-packing companies were left on their guards off, struggling to install key protections, such as plexiglass barriers among staff running back and forth, and to locate enough masks, causing staff to be left alone. . The Tyson factory in Waterloo, Iowa, to wear old T-shirts and masks to cover his face.
The lack of business readiness temporarily hit the small rural public fitness agencies, which found the front line of some of the world’s most intense hot spots. Hospitals on the east coast of Virginia in the upper plains of Colorado have been inundated by poor fitness personnel and members of the family circle, raising fears that some doctors will run out of fans.
In the absence of many workers, some factories have suspended production. Supermarkets such as Kroger and Costco limited the amount of meat consumers can buy. Hundreds of Wendy’s fast food restaurants ran out of burgers. Farmers slaughtered millions of chickens and pigs. And the costs of beef, poultry and red meat have skyrocketed, just as millions of others have lost their jobs.
The meat industry’s struggles have been compounded by President Donald Trump’s rejection of the virus, the slow and poorly coordinated response of his administration, and the replacement of the directorate of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Federal industry oversight agencies have done little to help. The Ministry of Labour had pandemic rules for the companies it created in 2007. But it did not include the updated rules for COVID-19 until the week of March, after cases began to appear in the workplace and did not include express rules. . meat packers until the end of April.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture kept its monitoring of human pandemics quiet by making plans in recent years and the plants did not prepare for the early days of COVID-19, emergency planners and former federal officials said.
It was not until the end of April, after 5,000 employees became inflamed and dozens of them died that most primary meat processors implemented policies that had been demanded for more than a decade earlier. Today, more than 39,000 meat and poultry employees have tested positive for COVID-19, and at least 170 have died, ProPublica found.
For example, when Smithfield and Tyson sounded the alarm that the national chain of meat sources was at risk, it was no surprise to many infectious disease experts and emergency planners across the country.
They predicted I would do it for years.
“I’ve heard it a thousand times in the last six months: “La laa!, we were surprised all,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. I’ve been writing precisely what’s happening today for 20 years.”
In 2004, a strain of avian influenza passed from birds to humans, and dozens of others in Asia became ill and even died from the disease. For policymakers and infectious disease experts, this was a sign of concern that the global epidemic was approaching. Pandemics have a global priority, and in November 2005, the White House published a national strategy against an influenza pandemic.
Over the next few years, the development of federal plans for a pandemic has been urgent. In the spring of 2006, the federal government issued a 233-page implementation plan describing how the government would do everything from human and animal health to public protection from an outbreak. And he trusted bankruptcy to safeguard 17 elements of the country’s critical infrastructure, add dams, power lines and food supplies.
The plan had in mind an influenza epidemic, however much of the thinking was applicable to COVID-19, emergency planners said. He assumed that there would be asymptomatic carriers and that vaccines and antivirals would not be available without delay. He also advised contagion measures such as social remoteness, increased sanitation and common hand washing.
Schools and some businesses may want to close the blunt transmission. Meanwhile, key corporations had to plan tactics to manage their operations while restricting the spread of the disease and preparing to make 40% of their workers available.
DHS has published an 84-page consultant for these corporations on how to prepare for a pandemic and what to expect from the government in the event of an outbreak. He asked them to think, for example, about how to establish a committed means of transport for workers, how to stagger breaks, and how to modify workspaces in offices and factories to allow social estrangement.
In the spring of 2007, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued provisional rules that deserve to wear a mask during a pandemic if they were in a busy area.
In 2009, the Department of Labor issued rules that encouraged corporations to buy masks if their workers worked hard together. But Smithfield, JBS and Perdue told ProPublica that they had not purchased masks before the coronavirus. Tyson stated that he had purchased more non-public protective equipment, or PPE, to equip reaction groups to the 2015 avian influenza outbreak, but that for COVID-19, “it would not meet the wishes of a single plant for a day.”
Instead, when epidemics began, JBS distributed hoods to its staff in Greeley, Colorado. Tyson rented a shipping plane to China to get masks.
“If we had really learned the classes and accumulated, we could have been in a better place, yet it’s an economic commitment that corporations that operate with narrow margins might not need to assume,” said David Acheson, Food Director. emergency reaction to the FDA of the Bush administration.
As the country’s pandemic planning, DHS hired researchers from the Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories to design what could happen as an outbreak. Researchers presented simulations showing a maximum absence rate of 28% and noted that if the rate remained above 10% for several weeks, it would halve food production. About 40% of companies would “stop operating due to an inadequate work point,” the researchers said.
“Most importantly, if enough other people are absent from the paints on those plants for long enough, food disturbances may occur,” said Mark Ehlen, a Sandia research scientist who painted the study.
The prediction was strangely accurate. Documents received through ProPublica through public records legislation show that from North Carolina to Kansas and Nebraska, meat-packing plants experienced up to 50% absenteeism in processing chains, resulting in a 40% drop in the slaughter of farm animals and more than a portion of red meat production through the end of April. Trump then invoked the Defense Production Act to help keep factories running, putting pressure on national and local fitness agencies to abandon their recommendations to temporarily shut them down to the disease.
From the early days of planning for a pandemic, the federal government was aware of business participation, as the vast majority of critical infrastructure is personally owned and operated through the personal sector. In 2006, Michael Leavitt, then HHS secretary, took his message to the road.
“Our message was very clear: a pandemic is coming, and if you think the federal government will come to rescue you, you will tragically be wrong,” Leavitt said in an interview. “Not because we have neither the will nor the portfolio, but because a pandemic is different from any other type of emergency and requires a planning ethic throughout society: states, government, schools, hospitals, families and businesses.”
DHS had already created an organization for commercial homeowners and CEOs to communicate with government officials about crisis preparedness and response. The Critical Infrastructure Association Advisory Council has discussed threats such as hurricanes and cybersecurity, however, pandemic influenza was planned in 2007.
In the agri-food sector of the commune, most of the paintings go to Clay Detlefsen, who paints for an association of the dairy industry. Detlefsen created a pandemic plan in 2006 for the dairy industry, which it adapted for the food and agriculture sector in 2007. The North American Meat Institute published it soon after.
That year, a White House infrastructure advisory organization reported that a must-have staff deserves priority for a vaccine in the event of an outbreak. The agricultural and food representatives segment lacked details. Although portions of the industry, such as meat packaging, are deeply consolidated, he said the large number of essential corporations turned it into a pandemic.”
Professional associations reiterated the message after the election of President Barack Obama, when the USDA combined them for a table exercise called “Grippe for Thought II.” The situation envisaged an epidemic that would lead to a shortage of food protection inspectors, which would force some plants to be closed.
Caroline Smith DeWaal, who attended training as director of food protection at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said when she asked about possible food shortages, she recalls being told, “Don’t worry, other parts of the country will supply food.”
When emergency planner Regina Phelps looked around in 2007, she was concerned that, despite the warnings, many corporations were not moving fast enough to prepare for a pandemic or, worse, complacent. Phelps had been advising crises for multinational corporations since 1982, and his task was to think about the worst-case scenarios and translate government instructions for businesses.
Maybe, Phelps thought, if I could make them feel the consequences of a pandemic, they’d do something. He convinced Roche, the manufacturer of Tamiflu, to sponsor a series of table trainings for executives from other sectors.
While many food companies, besides Smithfield and Tyson, declined their invitation, Phelps said, some of the nation’s largest meat buyers have agreed. In February 2008, at the Michelangelo Hotel in midtown Manhattan, executives from PepsiCo, Sysco, Nestlé, Food Lion, Compass Group and Target discussed how a pandemic would spread in the food industry.
A pandemic would last much longer than other types of mistakes and all the structure sites, Phelps warned. An appointment with the local public fitness service would be imperative because “by invoking the public fitness law, you can control the fate of your organization,” he wrote in a detailed report after the event.
At one point, verbal exchange became the highest critical question faced by the meat industry in COVID-19: how would staff “move away” from a food processing chain?
“They couldn’t really find a transparent and comfortable answer,” Phelps recalled in an interview. “The answer would be, “Well, this would actually have an effect on the production.” “Well, I don’t know. In fact, we had to see how bad it was.”
Without the ability to distance yourself socially, Phelps wrote, having a mask can make the difference between being open or closed. “One player expressed the concern of many,” the report notes, “when he said, “What scares me is that we’re not going to have enough antivirals or masks when we want them if we don’t get them now. “
When he hit COVID-19, Phelps said, it was those corporations that had prepared, especially monetary institutions, that not only had masks, but could give them to hospitals that needed them.
“All the things that happened, we all predicted,” he says. “People just can’t, this is going to happen to them.”
The first genuine opportunity to control this pandemic and make plans quickly came in 2009 with H1N1 influenza, also known as swine flu, which originated in central Mexico.
Some meat processors have been encouraged through their pandemic processing plans and taken precautions at their facilities. According to press reports, ConAgra distributed masks to the staff of his popcorn and ketchup factory in Mexico and sent a doctor there. Cargill has limited itself to its operations in Mexico and has asked local managers to review their crisis control plans to find out how they can continue their operations in the event of an outbreak.
Meanwhile, Tyson stated in his 2009 Sustainability Report that some of his workers had contracted the H1N1 virus, but that he had explained to workers how they and their families themselves.
At a webinar in September, as the government prepared for a momentary wave, the USDA’s food inspection and protection branch suggested that the meat industry remain vigilant. In conclusion, Perfecto Santiago, a USDA official, issued a poignant warning about complacency.
“Because the pandemic is benign,” he said, “we could have a tendency to put the pandemic plan somewhere where it probably accumulates some pieces of dust. Don’t stay in the routine. Let’s go over the plan. Let’s update and review them. “
But in the years that followed, Santiago’s caution remained largely ignored.
“There’s nothing worse than having a crisis when it’s not that bad,” Phelps said, “because other people think, “We don’t want to do any of this.” We did the right thing.”
Between 2000 and 2009, Phelps said, writing about 500 business pandemic plans. Between 2010 and 2019, it was reduced to about 20.
The food and agricultural industry had also become less concerned with the DHS Critical Infrastructure Council at a time when H1N1 was coming and going. Detlefsen said that while there was interest in participating in the organization after 9/11, power and industry participation faded over time. The diversity of industries, from farms and meat processors to restaurants and grocery retailers, has hampered discussions about priorities, he said. Many outdoor corporations that Washington considered threats were theoretical and unlikely.
A meat industry executive described the meetings as “another of the activities in favor of the arrangements.”
“I settle for the truth and I don’t blame anyone,” said Detlefsen, who remained as the council’s volunteer co-chair for nearly two decades, while others withdrew. “Everyone has their demanding situations and priorities.”
A list of clubs from 2010 showed that the organization had amassed partnerships and that no meat packaging company was listed.
“We haven’t had that many CEOs,” said R. James Caverly, who led DHS’s public-private partnership on critical infrastructure from 2003 to 2013. “A professional association, at the end of the day, can’t lead other people to do anything and don’t make investment decisions.”
After the H1N1 flu, he added, “making plans for a pandemic meant there was an e-book somewhere on the shelf, and other more pressing problems took precedence.”
The contribution of the food and agriculture sector in 2010 to the National Infrastructure Protection Plan only reports a pandemic twice in passing. The focus has been on animal diseases, foodborne diseases and intentional contamination of the food supply. The government and industry continued to conduct table training for these emergencies, however, dozens of officials interviewed for this story may recall any training similar to a human pandemic.
Caitlin Durkovich, DHS’s undersecretary of infrastructure from 2012 to 2017, said cybersecurity and Islamic State had diverted much attention. “It’s hard to blame the agri-food sector in general,” Durkovich said. “There has been a systemic failure within the government to monitor this threat.”
Some researchers have tried to pay attention to pandemics and the threat they pose to food supplies.
Andrew Huff, a former Sandia researcher, noted that the food industry had become increasingly consolidated after H1N1 influenza and created a style that showed “significant and widespread food shortages.”
In 2014 and 2015, he tried to raise the factor to lawmakers each and every time he went to Washington. Ebola is as cool for West Africa and avian influenza back in circulation, highlighting considerations on infectious diseases. But Huff said little came from his visits. “Often they say, “Good job, ” and do nothing, ” he said. “No one had the political will to do anything about it.”
Under the Obama administration, the federal government had invested its cash and political interests in the global physical security program, which diverted attention to epidemic control and stopped making plans in the United States, said Joseph Annelli, a former USDA official who worked. pandemic making plans for the Bush administration.
But as recently as last year, researchers continued to spread the demanding situations that U.S. meat-packing plants would face an epidemic. In 2019, Chia-ping Su, a Taiwan infectious disease expert who has been a CDC grant, published an article highlighting the importance of workplaces in infectious disease control.
Working with other members of the CDC Institute of Occupational Safety, His experienced many disorders that can obstruct the reaction to COVID-19. One incident, a 2011 tuberculosis outbreak at a meat packing plant in Amarillo, Texas, showed how car sharing can be a source of infection and how language barriers and fears of reprisals can simply call into question an investigation.
“As a worker, you spend more than 8 hours in your workplace, probably more than the time you spend at home with your family,” Su said in a Skype interview from Taiwan. “So if you’re talking about the prevention or control of infectious diseases, it’s very important in the workplace.”
But in the United States, he noted, the fitness care formula rarely records industry or career when it sends lab effects to public fitness agencies and CDC. This has been a specific challenge with COVID-19, which has delayed the ability of epidemiologists to recognize workplace-related epidemics, public fitness officials said.
In retrospect, they said, the nature of the paintings on meat-packing plants turned them into hot spots.
“You put 3000 other people in a meat packing plant after I declared a disease that can be passed on to humans,” said Robert Harrison, director of the occupational fitness program at the University of California, San Francisco. “You don’t want a rocket specialist to know that you want to implement prevention programs. It is the most disastrous and highly preventable occupational disease of my career as an occupational doctor.
In February, John Hoffman, principal investigator at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Food Protection and Defense, began “sounding strong” about an approaching pandemic. Hoffman, who advises DHS in the food and agriculture sector, said he had begun calling his contacts in public service, universities and industry, adding meat and poultry, to ask why they were not activating the national pandemic plan. (Hoffman noted that he did not speak on behalf of the University of Minnesota or DHS).
To help the food and agriculture sector prepare, for example, the idea that USDA inspectors can work seamlessly with plant managers to expand infection strategies.
But, he said, his urgency was not widely shared. In March, Hoffman circulated a document among government officials on the key bush-era pandemic making plans similar to critical infrastructure. With apparent frustration, he wrote that the time for the initial two stages of pandemic reaction – making plans and preparation – had been lost due to CDC’s “misdirected guidance” and “decision delays and lack of coordination between infrastructures” through the government. . As a result, industries such as agriculture and food were found without delay in the reaction phase. By then, he wrote, corporations had lost the possibility of unloading PPE and paintings with local and national government on problems such as infections “until the point of ill health of the painters becomes critical and operational viability is questioned.
His conscience was met with the silence, resistance or even ridicule of some agencies and industry representatives, he said. “I’ve been called “old fool, ” he said. It’s the environment. That’s crazy. It’s unprofessional. »
Failure to comply with national standards developed 15 years ago has led to the collapse of meat packaging plants, Hoffman said. The government deserves most of the blame for not following the pandemic plan, he said, and showed no industry leadership. “When the government didn’t respond,” Hoffman said, “companies took their own devices.”
Tyson’s representatives said the company formed an organization that administers the coronavirus in January to assess the dangers and begin work on mitigation plans and the PPE. But on the ground, there’s chaos. “Suffice it to say that any anti-pandemic plan they had, was not the right one,” said a former Tyson manager. “Everybody pushing.”
JBS, which owns dozens of beef, red meat and poultry plants in 26 states, said it began holding daily meetings with executives in February to meet CDC guidelines. But a former JBSger told ProPublica that the company did not start its reaction to COVID-19 at its plants until March, and although he was aware of contingency plans for fires, hurricanes and tornadoes, “I never speak of a pandemic,” the worker said.
Detlefsen said he had also tried to provide pandemic plans to the food and agricultural industry in early March. An FDA official got in touch and said, “We want to dust off the continuity of business plans and send this to agricultural and food entities in case it goes wrong,” he said. “And then bam, in a week or 10 days, everything went on the air.”
When the FDA contacted the agency later that month, Detlefsen told the agency, “If they didn’t have a plan in place, it was too late.”
Despite warnings about the desire to establish relationships with local public fitness officials, emails from several states show that Tyson began contacting local fitness agencies about COVID-19 until mid-March. Many other companies have contacted or, like Smithfield, have responded to inquiries from some fitness officials.
Officials in Crawford County, Iowa, fought for a month to talk to anyone at Smithfield about the company’s efforts to save COVID-19 at its red meat plant. In thwarted emails, Kim Fineran, the county’s director of public fitness, said she had recruited the mayor of Denison, the Chamber of Commerce, a state representative, the local union and the state’s fitness department, but Smithfield seemed to forget about them all. Training
“We’re probably going to have an explosion of cases in Crawford and the surrounding counties if we don’t solve this problem,” Fineran wrote in an email on March 31. “We can’t have an effect on the company if they don’t respond.
After peaking in May, Crawford has the cumulative infection rate of the time of the 99 Iowa counties. But neither corporate nor state officials have disclosed the number of cases related to Smithfield.
A Smithfield spokesman said the company had been “in common communication with a number of local, state and federal fitness authorities” during the pandemic.
Lauritsen’s first contact with a meat-packing company on the coronavirus occurred between mid-February and February, he said, when he called an employer to ask if an employee would be quarantined. This has led to discussions with giant meatpackers about how to get rid of short-term disability waiting periods, additional pay and extended paid leave.
At the time of the pandemic, some meat processors announced changes to their licensing policy to protect older staff and inspire patients to stay at home. Despite benevolent messages from the control of meat-packing companies, the country’s public fitness departments won court cases in which supervisors told staff to repaint while showing symptoms and threatened to fire them if they did not.
Many staff members said they feared calling sick, regardless of new policies, given the industry’s long-standing policy of punishing those who did.
“With very strict presence needs before COVID, I’m afraid they’re well prepared to wait to paint when they’re not in good physical shape to avoid punitive reprisals,” said Gina Uhing, director of a Nebraska fitness district that houses a Tyson plant. emailed in mid-April.
At a JBS plant in Michigan, a state epidemiologist documented thirteen cases in April in which painters continued to paint despite fever and other symptoms. An occupational medicine nurse at the plant wrote to the county fitness branch that “even a control member threatened his paintings.” “He feels that superior control doesn’t take this seriously and doesn’t talk to painters,” according to the call notes.
In his letter to members of Congress, Smithfield’s executive director was angered by the complaint that he had acted too late. But in an April 12 email to Colorado fitness officials, South Dakota epidemiologist Josh Clayton, who was investigating a primary outbreak at the company’s Sioux Falls plant, wrote, “Smithfield Foods was first and foremost slow in taking its precautions.”
The CEO’s letter was signed through more than 3,500 Smithfield employees, usually administrative staff and executives. It didn’t include virtually anyone in a chain of remedies, where the virus was furious.
Sweet Casta-eda, whose father works at the Smithfield plant in Crete, Nebraska, said his father had noticed that his colleagues and alongside him added that they were sick. He said it is remarkable the lack of frontline staff signing the letter.
Someone asked those workers, he said, or their families, that they would possibly have been exposed to COVID-19 through them, if the Smithfield senators’ complaint was valid.
Saying that no one criticizes the company, he said, “implies that it is above the law, above criticism, above all else.”
Mollie Simon contributed to the report.