Dance music star Moby has been corrected by experts and angered social media users after he tweeted that there would be "no pandemics in a vegan world".
The staunch animal rights activist, who has 'vegan for life' tattooed on his neck and the words 'animal' and 'rights' on each arm, prompted outrage with the "reminder" he shared to social media.
"A reminder: in a vegan world there would be no pandemics. 100% of pandemics are zoonotic in origin," he wrote, alongside an image of him showing off a third vegan tattoo - the letter 'v' on his ring finger.
The 'Lift Me Up' hitmaker's inaccurate statement immediately drew backlash, with UK news outlet Metro pointing out that while many pandemics and epidemics are 'zoonotic' in origin - that is, transferred from animals to humans - not all of them happen due to human consumption of animal products.
Diseases like malaria are spread through mosquito bites, cholera is waterborne and even the bubonic plague is thought to have begun with fleas on rodents.
"This is why people hate vegans," one Twitter user replied to Moby.
"This sort of self-righteous and completely illogical statement doesn't make anybody want to consider what they eat. There are many good cases but can be made for not eating animals but this is not one of them."
"This kinda sounds like you're advocating for humans to extirpate (destroy) all animal species," wrote another.
"Cuz, like, transmission of diseases from animals to humans would still happen even if we didn't eat them. Either way, some very big braining you've exhibited here."
"You're not doing a service to the good cause of veganism by straight-up spewing counter-factual bullshit," a third wrote.
Richard Reithinger, vice president of Global Health RTI International, told Metro:
"Consumption of meat and animal products are only one of the many ways that pathogens can spillover from animals to humans. Other channels include animal husbandry or contamination of foods through animal fluids/faeces.
"Ultimately, the reason why increased spillover events are happening are because of our increased contact and encroachment with wildlife -which is more a symptom of resource scarcity and population growth."
Moby has not removed the post from his Twitter and has not commented on the backlash.
