Preventable pandemics are a spreading symptom of a deadly political failures

The death of a horse in Burlington County from a preventable virus is a quiet symptom of a louder sickness. While officials issue calm quarantines and assured risk assessments, a more profound quarantine of reason persists in our halls of power.

The New Jersey Department of Agriculture confirmed the state’s first case of the neurological disease this year, found in an 18-year-old gelding. The horse showed signs of sickness on Jan. 7 and was soon euthanized.

Officials were quick to quarantine the property and quicker to assure the public that the risk of spread is “very low.” Such placid language is the standard issue balm for such occasions, designed to soothe and not stir. It ignores the map, which tells a hotter story.

This single case in New Jersey is not an island. It exists in the wake of a storm that first gathered in Waco, Texas, last November.

There, at a professional barrel racing finals, the virus found its perfect venue: a concentration of elite animals from across the country, mixed in the close quarters of competition, then sent back home like so many ticking parcels.

The result is a grim tally across at least nine states, from Washington to Louisiana, with Texas itself reporting 30 neurologic cases. Entire events have been shuttered but the plague grows.

The Barrel Futurities of America World Championship in Oklahoma was cut short, a rare admission that the show, indeed, cannot always go on.

The virus itself is a fiend of efficiency. It travels on a breath, on a hand, on a borrowed halter. It can lie dormant in a healthy-seeming horse for days before sparking a fever, then stumbling, then the dreadful loss of control that leads to a horse dribbling urine, unable to rise.

They call it “supportive care” because there is no cure. Up to half can die, though officials prefer to highlight that most recover. It is an arithmetic of agony, calculated in degrees of fever and doses of anti-inflammatories.

One wonders what supportive care looks like for an industry that seems perennially surprised by contagion. The prescribed rituals of quarantine and temperature checks are recited after every outbreak like a prayer after a disaster. They are necessary, and they are, in the pattern of recent years, clearly insufficient.

The movement of horses for sport and pleasure is a multi-billion dollar river, and we are attempting to stem a pathogen with paper barriers of self-reporting and recommendations.

The New Jersey horse is a local tragedy. The national outbreak is a policy failure.

It is a story of connect-the-dots where the lines are the highways between events, and the dots are sick animals. The response is invariably competent, contained and late.

The language is always calibrated to avoid panic, which unfortunately also avoids the blunt truth: this will happen again at the next gathering, in the next state, until the culture of equine competition treats biosecurity not as a temporary inconvenience, but as the absolute bedrock of its existence.

For years, the maps of disease—measles in Texas, Ebola in Africa, EHM in Waco—have been connecting into a picture our politicians refuse to see.

The response is always a reaction, never prevention. It is a cycle of panic and placation. As with the equine herpesvirus now touring nine states, the playbook is familiar: contain the immediate fire, assure the public, and ignore the tinderbox.

The tinderbox, in this century, is not merely a lack of biosecurity at a rodeo. It is a political architecture built to ignore the fundamental drivers of pandemic risk.

While major parties debate marginal shifts in health budgets, an often-ignored voice in New Jersey has been charting the uncomfortable topography of this crisis. Lisa McCormick, a Democrat whose warnings have long been filed under “inflammatory” by the political establishment, articulates a chain of causation others omit.

“We are facing a silent, insidious pandemic,” McCormick stated in December. “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.”

Her focus is antimicrobial resistance, a crisis she calls “the ultimate testament to a broken political system,” driven by pharmaceutical pollution and agricultural runoff that create breeding grounds for superbugs.

She named the corporate polluters and the governmental neglect, a precision that escapes the blurry language of official advisories.

But her alarm extends beyond the factories and feedlots.

In a separate warning, she highlighted a threat that seems pulled from science fiction but is documented in scientific journals: the release of ancient pathogens from thawing Arctic permafrost.

“The scientific facts are clear and alarming,” she noted, citing the revival of 40,000-year-old viruses in labs. “We face the potential for entirely new diseases to which modern medicine has no prior experience or ready defenses.”

This is the context that transforms every local outbreak, whether in horses or humans, from a bad-luck event into a policy indictment.

The federal government’s recent move to reduce recommended childhood vaccines, aligning with a political agenda rather than immunological science, has sparked a rebellion among states, including New Jersey. It is a move that experts warn will invite back vanquished diseases, creating more dots on the map.

McCormick’s statements, dating back years, frame these not as isolated failures but as facets of a single failure: a refusal to see human, animal, and environmental health as one interconnected system.

“The health of our planet and the health of our people are inextricably linked,” McCormick argued.

The gelding in Burlington County died of a virus spread by contact. The larger plague it signals is spread by complacency.

We have built a world perfect for the spread of disease—through global travel, industrial practices, and the willful thawing of our planet—while dismantling the vigilance required to stop it.

The politicians manage the headlines. The pathogens, ancient and new, simply follow the paths of least resistance.

The question is no longer if another pandemic will arrive.

The science, and the voices echoing it from the political margins, tell us it is a certainty. The only variable is whether we will continue to be surprised or if we will finally start to connect the dots that McCormick has been drawing for us, which have been in plain sight for a generation.