In a massive case of federal overreach, the Food and Drug Administration under Joe Biden has just placed new, never-before-seen restrictions on farmers and ranchers that will prevent them from treating their own livestock.
Starting June 1, farmers and ranchers can no longer purchase antibiotics or antivirals over the counter for their livestock, which they’ve been doing since the 1940s. Instead, they’ll have to pay for costly veterinary visits to get a prescription for safe, common, over-the-counter meds that they’ve been administering to their herds for generations.
Farmers and ranchers spend their entire lives tending to their animals. They know how to identify the most common ailments that affect their herds and how to treat them. If a cow gets milk fever, they know to inject her with calcium gluconate IV and administer a couple of tablets of calcium bolus for a few days. If your horse has an eye infection, you give it enrofloxacin. Antibiotics for chickens have been around since 1948.
Ranchers and farmers have always been trusted by the FDA to know how to administer these medicines. Antibiotics and antivirals for animals have been for sale over the counter at farm stores for decades. This system has always worked just fine. We should also note that there is no such thing as an animal pharmacy or a livestock pharmacist to sell these medicines to the people who grow our food. Livestock owners can just go buy the medicines at the store!
Or at least that’s how it used to work. Now the unelected, faceless bureaucrats at the FDA have decided that farmers, ranchers, animal hobbyists, and even people who own goldfish can no longer be trusted to treat their animals for common ailments without an expensive visit to the veterinarian.
Imagine that you’re a rancher and one of your cows gets sick, and you know exactly what medicine you need to treat it. But you’re in a rural area, and the nearest veterinarian lives two hours away. No one is hauling a cow two hours to see a vet because that would be ridiculous. Rural veterinarians instead make house calls.
So, in order to get the medicine for your cow, the veterinarian ends up charging you for an hour’s visit to examine the cow, plus four hours’ driving time. The average hourly wage for veterinarians in 2023 is just over $50. That means you have a $250 bill to get a prescription before you can even drive to the feed store and get the $4 medicine your cow needs. Does anyone think that will impact the price of steak, hamburgers, milk, bacon, and other products?
The same new rule from these unelected bureaucrats will also mean that if you own a goldfish and it develops one of the many common bacterial infections out there, you can no longer go to the pet store and buy the little antibiotic tablets for it. You have to take your fish to the veterinarian first.
No one voted on this. The FDA did not consult with a single rancher or farmer to ask them what they thought of the new rule. They just implemented it from on high, and once again, Americans get shafted. Food prices will skyrocket as a result of this, and the unelected, faceless bureaucrats will shrug their shoulders as if it’s all a big mystery why it happened.
The same FDA that approved the untested, dangerous, and ineffective COVID vaccine booster shots after they were tested on 8 mice believe that farmers that have been working with livestock for generations are too reckless to care for their herds. Get ready for another huge increase in meat prices in a few months when the effects of this regulation kick in.
