Brian May on Going Vegan in Response to the Coronavirus

Brian May initially went vegan for a month, but since the coronavirus pandemic, which has been linked to meats sold at a wet market in Wuhan, China, he has continued his vegan diet and thinks many people should consider a plant-based diet.

In an interview with NME, "I took up the Vegan Challenge in January and I’ve been three months a vegan now. To me it was an experiment, because for a long time I’d been an animal campaigner but grappled with the fact that I was still eating them occasionally...If you want to get deep into it, I think we should be looking again at whether we should be eating animals. That’s a central issue here, this pandemic seemed to come from people eating animals and it’s becoming more well known that eating animals is not the greatest thing for our health."

May added, "But to go vegan was just a decision, and I haven’t been preachy about it, but now we’ve seen more of the effects of how eating animals has brought us to our knees as a species, I think it’s time to re-examine our world in a way that doesn’t abuse other species. Whether we will see that happen, I don’t know, but I think I will start to be a bit more preachy about veganism because to me it is the way forward, in so many ways."