Queen’s Brian May Says Vegan Diet is the Way Forward in Light of Coronavirus

The interview, published Wednesday, quotes May as saying he also thinks a vegan diet would be better for people's overall health.

"If you want to get deep into it, I think we should be looking again at whether we should be eating animals," Queen's co-founder was quoted as saying. "That’s a central issue here, this pandemic seemed to come from people eating animals and it’s becoming more well known that eating animals is not the greatest thing for our health."

May, an animal activist, began eating a plant-based diet since January and stuck with it. He says he feels it reflects his value system. "To go vegan was just a decision, and I haven’t been preachy about it," the guitarist explained. "But now we’ve seen more of the effects of how eating animals has brought us to our knees as a species. I think it’s time to re-examine our world in a way that doesn’t abuse other species.

What's the animal connection to the current coronavirus pandemic?

Researchers who have studied the genesis of the virus and its global spread believe that the virus started from a “wet market" in Wuhan, China where live and dead animals and birds, including bats, are sold as food and for medicinal purposes. Though experts have not ruled out the possibility that the pathogen could have been brought to the market by an already infected person, there is corroborating evidence that the virus lept from animals to humans.

 The Case against slaughtering and eating animal flesh is building.

Coronavirus is a known  "zoonotic," which is a virus that can be transmitted from animals to humans. During a genomic sequencing of the virus, scientists found similarities to a pathogen found in pangolins, a scaly anteater native to Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. These scaly creatures are sold and traded in the wildlife markets, and are believed to be the "missing link" that allowed the virus to jump from bats to humans,

Since January the current consensus among scientists studying this coronavirus' origins has been that it originated in horseshoe bats, but it is unlikely that bats directly gave the virus to humans based on what's known about earlier zoonotic coronaviruses.

Instead, scientists suspected that the bat infected another animal, or "intermediate host," which subsequently transmitted the virus to humans. An early study claimed that snakes such as the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra were intermediate hosts for the latest virus Yet, this conclusion quickly drew skepticism, partly because there exists no previous evidence that coronaviruses can jump from a cold-blooded animal, such as snakes, to human beings.

Describing his own journey into veganism, May said: “I took up the Vegan Challenge in January and I’ve been three months a vegan now. To me, it was an experiment, because for a long time I’d been an animal campaigner but grappled with the fact that I was still eating them occasionally.

May is only the most recent celebrity to tell people to not eat meat in the wake of this virus. Russell Simmons went on Instagram to ask his followers to switch to a vegan diet, and told his 1.5 million followers: "COVID-19 was caused by eating animals” and ‘COVID-19 would not exist if the world was vegan

Read More: Russell Simmons Tells Followers Coronavirus Caused by Eating Meat https://thebeet.com/russell-simmons-asks-his-followers-to-give-up-eating-meat-in-light-of-coronavirus-outbreak/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral