STAT – The $6.3 trillion wellness industry thrives on distrust of science, glorifying “natural” alternatives, and fear-based marketing. The result? Pseudoscience that’s not just harming human health.
It’s killing animals, too, specifically via H5N1 bird flu.
Holistic pet health influencers, organic farmers, and alternative medicine advocates embrace behaviors that increase the risk of viral transmission, paving the way for a potential human pandemic.
It’s already killed pets. And now, with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s virtual erasure of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, the very department tasked with overseeing, monitoring, and responding to the ongoing H5N1 outbreak, it will most certainly worsen.
Wellness misinformation isn’t just rampant in human health — it’s deeply embedded in veterinary health, too. And there are even fewer guardrails in place to combat it than there are in human medicine.
The veterinary wellness industry is growing rapidly, with raw pet food alone estimated to double its global market value from $7.39 billion in 2024 to $14.5 billion by 2030.
For years, the raw pet food industry has capitalized on the same anti-science rhetoric that fuels vaccine denial and chemophobia.
They claim raw diets are “ancestral” and “biologically appropriate,” despite overwhelming veterinary and epidemiological data showing that raw diets increase the risk of bacterial and viral infections — without offering any health benefits.
And those infections can include H5N1. The highly pathogenic avian influenza has long been deadly for birds.
In the past two years, it has spread into other species: seals, foxes, cats, cows, and more. The more this virus moves through mammals, the more chances there are to mutate, adapt, and potentially jump to humans …
