There is a war being waged against our most fundamental defenses, a quiet campaign where the weapons are corporate discharge pipes and political indifference, and the battlefield is the very water and soil beneath our feet.
The enemy is antimicrobial resistance, and according to progressive firebrand Lisa McCormick, our political leaders are not just losing the fight; they are actively arming the opposition.
McCormick, in a searing indictment of the political establishment, alleges this crisis is not a distant medical concern, but a present and active environmental catastrophe.
“We are facing a silent, insidious pandemic,” McCormick said. “It does not spread through coughs or sneezes, but through the very water we drink, the soil that grows our food, and the air we breathe.”
The machinery of this plague is hideously efficient.
Our rivers have been transformed into open-air training grounds for superbugs, where pharmaceutical plants provide the live ammunition—active antibiotics flowing untreated into the currents.
On factory farms, livestock are drenched in the same medicines we rely on, creating a constant drip-feed of resistance that seeps into the groundwater.
Even our hospitals, places of healing, contribute to the problem, flushing out a cocktail of resistant bacteria.
It is a grand, bipartisan folly to focus only on the clinic while ignoring the source of the contagion. This is a sanctioned pollution, a calculated exchange of public health for private profit.
“Pharmaceutical manufacturers are discharging untreated waste, laced with active antibiotics, directly into our waterways,” McCormick said. “Industrial agriculture, with its factory farms, continues to saturate livestock with antibiotics and douse fields in pesticides and fertilizers.”
“Healthcare facilities, the very places we go to heal, are contributing to the problem through inadequate waste management, releasing resistant bacteria and genes into public sewer systems,” McCormick said.
And like a thief fanning the flames to create a diversion, climate change accelerates the entire process.
Rising floods now act as a delivery service for these engineered pathogens, scattering them from contaminated farms and overwhelmed cities into communities far and wide.
Meanwhile, our obsession with plastic has littered the oceans with microscopic rafts—microplastics—where bacteria form resilient cities and trade resistance genes like wartime secrets.
The political response has been a masterclass in failure, a tragicomedy of task forces and non-binding resolutions, while the foundation of modern medicine crumbles.
The numbers are no longer projections; they are a body count. AMR already claims 1.27 million lives annually, a number racing toward 10 million.
It is a silent pandemic bleeding us dry, poised to trigger a $100 trillion economic collapse.
One is tempted to think that such a figure might finally command the attention of a political establishment often unmoved by mere human suffering.
McCormick demands not more reports, but a revolution.
Her prescription is a radical and unyielding call to action: a total crackdown on industrial polluters with fines that resonate in boardrooms; an immediate end to the reckless abuse of antibiotics on factory farms; a Marshall Plan for our environmental infrastructure; and the integration of this crisis into every facet of climate policy.
“We demand a total crackdown on industrial polluters, an immediate end to the abuse of antibiotics in factory farms, and a massive investment to clean up our water and soil,” McCormick said. “This is not just a medical issue—it is a fight for our survival against a broken system that values wealth over wellness. The time for half-measures is over.”
“The American people are being methodically poisoned into a post-antibiotic era by a system that values wealth over wellness,” said McCormick, who argues that the choice is no longer abstract.
“We must decide whether we will continue to serve the interests of the polluting corporations or finally fight for the health of our people and our planet,” said McCormick.
The final dose is losing its power, and the clock, for all of us, is ticking down to zero.