Sidelined at the Summit: How Veterinary Medicine Lost Its Seat at the One Health Policy Table—and How to Win It Back
The premise of One Health—that human, animal, and environmental health are inextricably linked and must be governed accordingly—is not a contested scientific proposition. It is the organizing principle behind modern pandemic preparedness, antimicrobial resistance strategy, and zoonotic disease surveillance. Veterinarians are, by training and daily practice, the professionals who inhabit the animal-human interface most directly.
And yet, across a range of federal preparedness initiatives, interagency working groups, and international health policy forums, veterinary medicine's institutional voice is conspicuously absent—or present only at the margins.
This is not an accident of oversight. It is the predictable result of bureaucratic territory, funding structures, and historical precedent that have concentrated One Health governance authority in agencies whose primary orientation is human medicine. Correcting it requires deliberate, sustained advocacy. VetPAC intends to be part of that effort.
The Surveillance Gap That Begins with Exclusion
Zoonotic pathogens—those capable of transmitting between animals and humans—are responsible for the majority of emerging infectious disease events that have generated significant public health concern over the past three decades. Avian influenza, SARS-CoV-2, MERS, Ebola, Nipah, and mpox all share an animal reservoir component in their epidemiological history. In each case, the earliest signals of human risk emerged from animal populations.
The professionals most positioned to detect those signals are veterinarians: food animal practitioners monitoring herd health, wildlife veterinarians conducting field surveillance, exotic animal clinicians observing unusual presentations in non-traditional species, and diagnostic laboratory veterinarians processing samples from across the animal health spectrum.
Yet the federal infrastructure for pandemic preparedness—anchored in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, and their associated advisory bodies—is designed primarily around human clinical data. The USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service carries significant animal health authority, but interagency coordination between APHIS and CDC on zoonotic threat assessment has historically been inconsistent, poorly resourced, and subject to jurisdictional friction.
The practical consequence is a surveillance architecture with a structural blind spot at precisely the point where zoonotic threats first become detectable.
Turf, Funding, and the Architecture of Exclusion
Understanding why veterinarians are sidelined requires examining the institutional incentives at play. Federal health agencies operate within appropriations structures that reward jurisdictional clarity. Human health agencies receive substantially larger budgets than animal health agencies—a disparity that reflects both political priority and historical precedent, not scientific logic.
When interagency task forces are convened to address pandemic preparedness, the composition of those bodies tends to reflect existing funding hierarchies. Public health officials, epidemiologists trained in human medicine, and infectious disease physicians occupy the senior advisory roles. Veterinarians, when included at all, frequently appear in technical or advisory capacities without decision-making authority over policy recommendations.
This dynamic played out visibly during the federal response to H5N1 avian influenza in domestic dairy cattle beginning in 2024. Veterinary practitioners and state animal health officials were among the first to document the unusual clinical presentations in cattle herds. Yet the public communication, policy coordination, and interagency response framework was driven predominantly by CDC and HHS, with USDA and veterinary professional organizations operating in a secondary lane.
The result was delayed information sharing, inconsistent field protocols, and a response architecture that did not fully leverage the veterinary clinical network already embedded in affected agricultural communities.
The International Dimension
The exclusion of veterinary expertise from One Health governance is not solely a domestic problem. At the international level, the Quadripartite framework—comprising the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Organisation for Animal Health, and the United Nations Environment Programme—formally acknowledges the One Health principle. However, implementation at the national level is uneven, and the United States' domestic policy architecture does not consistently reflect the integrated approach that Quadripartite guidance recommends.
American veterinary organizations have an opportunity to leverage international One Health frameworks as normative pressure on domestic policy. When the U.S. government publicly endorses WHO-FAO-WOAH joint guidance on pandemic preparedness, that endorsement creates a reasonable basis for demanding that domestic agency practice align with the integrated model those frameworks describe.
An Advocacy Roadmap for Reclaiming the Table
The path back to meaningful policy participation is not simply a matter of requesting inclusion. It requires a structured approach that builds political relationships, establishes legislative mandates, and creates accountability mechanisms.
Congressional champions are the starting point. Veterinary advocacy organizations must identify and cultivate members of the House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over CDC, HHS, and USDA—specifically the Agriculture, Appropriations, and Health committees. Legislation requiring veterinary professional representation on pandemic preparedness advisory bodies is achievable and precedented. Similar mandates exist in other federal advisory frameworks.
Appropriations language matters as much as authorization. Securing a statutory seat at a policy table means little if the agencies funding that table lack resources for genuine interagency coordination. Advocacy efforts should target specific appropriations line items for USDA-CDC One Health coordination programs, with performance metrics tied to veterinary professional participation.
State-level action creates federal momentum. Several states have developed One Health coordination frameworks that more meaningfully integrate veterinary and public health authorities. Documenting and publicizing these models—and advocating for their adoption at the federal level—provides concrete evidence that integrated governance is operationally feasible.
The profession must speak in public health terms. Veterinary organizations are most persuasive in policy arenas when they frame their advocacy around public health outcomes rather than professional prerogative. The argument for veterinary inclusion at One Health policy tables is strongest when it is anchored in surveillance data, outbreak response timelines, and the demonstrable cost of detection delays—not in assertions of professional status.
The Cost of Continued Marginalization
The United States will face additional zoonotic disease events. The epidemiological certainty of that statement is not in dispute. What remains in dispute—and what is therefore subject to policy intervention—is whether the nation's preparedness architecture will be designed to detect those threats at the earliest possible moment, or whether institutional inertia will continue to leave veterinary surveillance capacity underutilized.
Every policy cycle in which veterinarians remain peripheral to One Health governance is a cycle in which preparedness is measurably weaker than it could be. VetPAC will continue to press for the legislative and regulatory changes necessary to ensure that the professionals most qualified to detect the next emerging threat are positioned to do so—and that their findings reach policymakers without delay.
