Health authorities in the UK considered mandating the killing of all pet cats to fight against the first COVID-19 outbreak.
Ex-Deputy Health Minister Lord Bethell admitted that the concern about pets came because they knew very little about the virus and did not know how to respond to it.
“We shouldn’t forget… how little we understood about this disease,” Bethell said while making the admission.
“There was a moment we were very unclear about whether domestic pets could transmit the disease,” he said.
“In fact, there was an idea at one moment that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?”
Bethell said there was “a bit of evidence around” the idea of killing pet cats after Siamese cat became the first to contract COVID-19.
However, the plan was “closed down” fairly quickly.
The UK Government then advised cat owners not to kiss their pets and to “observe very careful hygiene” while keeping them indoors if a household member contracted COVID.
The news came after The Daily Telegraph published over 100,000 leaked WhatsApp messages between ministers, officials, and scientists throughout the COVID pandemic.
But the extreme measures were not just in the UK.
Denmark ordered a cull of its mink population, which they believed to be carrying the virus. However, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was later forced to apologize for the order, admitting it was illegal.
Mandating people to kill their pets is yet another example of the horrors they would have faced in pursuit of stopping the virus.
The notion of killing pets was spurred on by ‘experts’ and studies,’ who claimed cats were “highly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2.”
The website for Office for Science and Society, with a tag line that claims they are “separating sense from nonsense,” wrote this in 2020:
“A preprint study published on March 31st, 2020, found that cats were “highly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2″ and could spread it to uninfected cats. While these results are interesting, we must take into account the study’s limitations. Namely, the sample size and the experimental conditions.”
“This study really only proves that cats can become infected under experimental conditions. It doesn’t tell us about natural conditions. Study cats were inoculated by placing a large number of viral particles directly in their noses. In real life, cats may inhale viral particles released from a COVID-19 positive person or animal, but the particles won’t be hand-delivered directly to their noses, and there will be far fewer of them.”
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