Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen initially said all 17 million minks would be culled because the virus that causes Covid-19 had moved from humans to minks and back to humans. The country’s public health officials reported that while in the mink, the virus had mutated, raising the risk of a new strain circulating among us that our vaccines would be ineffective against — a finding that, to be clear, is preliminary and has not been confirmed in peer-reviewed research. In a worst-case scenario, that could set back the clock on our pandemic recovery.

This fear isn’t limited to Denmark. There have also been Covid-19 outbreaks on mink fur farms in the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Italy — and the US. At least a million minks have already been culled by gassing in the Netherlands and Spain, though the US has so far avoided culling.

The threat to public health seems to raise an ethical dilemma: Should farms kill all their minks in order to prevent a mutated form of the virus from spreading among all human beings? Is causing that much animal suffering justifiable if it prevents a lot of human suffering, which could result if our future vaccines are ineffective against the new strain?

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, was among those pushing back. She pointed out that there is no data available to support the claim that the mink variant risks jeopardizing our future vaccines. Denmark’s public health authority suggested that might be the case based on its findings, but those findings were not peer-reviewed, and no specific data on the mutation was released to the scientific community — yet another instance of “science by press release” during the pandemic. What’s more, viruses mutate all the time, so the mink variant is not necessarily cause for panic.

Read the full article about COVID-19 mutations in minks by Sigal Samuel at Vox.