We have reached that point in the COVID-19 pandemic, a year after it began spreading across the globe, when the armchair analysis and blame-assigning begins in earnest. We’ve seen it as it relates to the meat industry, with the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis launching an investigation into meat plants and media outlets scrambling to amass evidence to justify finger-pointing, usually at the meat companies.

It’s too soon. A century from now historians will still be uncovering new information and interpretations of old information to try to make sense of this period. Our understanding in the here and now would greatly benefit if all the self-appointed pundits would acknowledge what they don’t yet know.

Just yesterday I read a story on the website of Public Citizen, a “nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power,” that essentially described the USDA as going rogue on worker safety issues in the early weeks of the pandemic. USDA did not reach out to OSHA for help or guidance, the story said, and made an effort not to engage when OSHA later offered its assistance, taking guidance instead from industry alone. The piece linked to thousands of documents, including nearly 400 pages of communication, that Public Citizen had obtained using a Freedom of Information Act request.

The story made for a grabby headline: “USDA Delayed Involving OSHA in Federal Response to COVID Outbreaks in Meatpacking Plants, Documents Show.” Except the documents don’t show that.

I didn’t read all the pages, but I did read a randomly selected series of communications, some from USDA personnel, some from OSHA, some from meat companies. The documents had been redacted, but what I read spoke to confusion, fear, testiness, frustration — familiar emotions, then and now. What the documents did not reveal was any deliberate effort on USDA’s part to avoid addressing worker safety issues. The pages that I read didn’t show any corporate representatives actively putting “profits over people,” either.

Neither the documents nor the story address OSHA’s lack of resources that had been strangling the agency’s efforts for years before the pandemic. Or the fact that OSHA issued only “guidelines,” not directives, for handling worker safety. Or the way that OSHA and the CDC and other officials changed their recommendations repeatedly in those first few months, sometimes doing a 180 in a matter of days. Public Citizen's story did not mention the alliance formed between OSHA and the North American Meat Institute specifically to address worker safety in the plant.

Mistakes were made, and big ones, I think. The spread of the illness among meat plant employees and the subsequent supply chain disruptions went sideways so thoroughly, so quickly, that embarrassing gaffes and nefarious decisions will come to light over time, I believe. And there will be plenty of blame to go around. Some will land on the agencies, some on the administration, some on the unions, some on employees — and some on the meat processors. A rush to pass judgment on any of these players, or a rush to absolve them, would be a mistake.

Because we just don’t know.

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