Article
posted 28th September 2023
What's the point of free time?
Plenty, right? I've had more than I need the past three years and more. For some it's been a prolonged retreat, a sojourn into inner worlds with their conspiracy theories, outrageous conjecture and capitulation to an unregulated media that knows not the value of truth or rigour. For others, the time spent reading and evaluating epidemiological modelling and the people who make the predictions that supposedly matter, might also be considered a troubling detour.
Reading about pandemics during pandemics is surely not a recipe for at home contentment. And troubling as it was to sit night after night reading about what was happening on the ground in Wuhan (1), or, more recently, what the mistaken forecasts made by the Swedish elite meant for our British government when they allowed those from the far North to bend their ear regarding herd immunity (2), there was still a strange comfort to be had in countenancing those on the front lines reacting with intelligence, compassion and indefatigable exactitude (3, 4).
My main concern regarding COVID now it's waning, isn't the understandable controversy surrounding the actual origins of this thing. Either way, there were very good reasons why we ended up in the position we found ourselves in. So if it was a lab leak, we have to ask the reasons why it was in the lab in the first place, and what went wrong if it did get out accidentally. And if it was of natural origin? Well this is were things get tricky because the two reasons, whilst discernible certainly as polarised arguments, are actually fundamentally related. For the prime moving force that results in lab leaks and spillover events from the wild is down to one thing: Agriculture and the business model now at play all over the world.
Slash and burn agronomics is at the heart of South American business practices, and has resulted in the lungs of the planet being reduced to approximately 80% of their capacity. Modelling data suggests we could be entirely without the Amazonian rainforest come 2064 (5), and whilst I appreciate that this is what Greta Thurnberg might be angry about, those Dead Epidemiologists* who've been labouring the point for decades, have been doing so for reasons that became abundantly clear at the start of 2020.
Slash and burn practices clear the ground of biological firebreaks. In effect, those forests would have previously acted as a physical barrier between social animals such as bats and humans. But once they're gone, we are unfortunately and precipitously poised for spillover events. Whether it's Brazil and Zika virus (6) or COVID and Wuhan (7), the apparent link between the two isn't a tenuous one. In fact, our predictive powers are such that India is being touted as the next point of origin (8).
So by taking into account the effect of modern agriculture on the environment, we now know why we're at greater threat because of our own actions. Which means if the leak did come from a lab, the reasons those viral samples were there was so to study them from a threat perspective we not unwittingly created. And if it did spillover? It's really not a shock to those epidemiologists and philanthropists who've been advocating for our preparedness for years and going essentially un-noticed. And now we've been left with a horrific side-show of COVID and vaccine hesitant truth deniers of all stripes, who've eschewed the traditional mainstream media as the idiom of the unenlightened.
There are viral labs all over China. They're there on the ground in most Chinese cities. Regarding the lab in Wuhan, teams working out of that institution were charged with gathering samples in the wild from bats and performing 'gain of function' studies. These have been performed before with viruses that make COVID appear indubitably tame in comparison (9), and if you're balking at the notion of tinkering with a viral agent so to greater increase it's threat to health, don't be alarmed. There is wisdom enough in why they perform these experiments, but it should be lost on no one that those gain-of function studies in Wuhan that were ostensibly funded by American tax dollars, didn't feature a whole lot when it came to devising the vaccines. But as to why there isn't the drive to develop vaccine programmes in parallel with these rounds of research? You'll have to ask the likes of Fauci that question.
It also strikes me as rather odd what the set-up is regarding these viruses collected in the wild. A bat virus did indeed cause grievous concern for miners in 2012, with three out of six succumbing to a lethal pneumonia (9). Right there is cause enough for such research, especially if the clearing of guano from caves is a feature of modern mining in China. Apparently those men charged with clearing the deposits of droppings that accrued over time had been at it near two weeks. Can you imagine?
Anyway, those caves from which the men contracted the virus were situated in Yunnan, nearly 1,000 kilometres from Wuhan. Which begs the question, why not build the labs closer to source (or right bloody beside it), rather than have the viruses shipped that distance to be kept on hand in a city of millions? When every attempt has been made to mitigate risk, that's usually subsequent to them being recognised. We have a troublesome trek back to a new normality, but unfortunately, plenty don't consider what their normal even was.
* Dead Epidemiologists is a punkish brace of essays and reportage by Rob Wallace and the title refers to their demise within academia. They're simply passed pillar to post because no one wants to deal with the truth they're telling us.
Links
1 Wuhan Diaries: Dispatches from a quarantined city; Wang Fang, Harper Collins 2020
2 The Herd: how Sweden chose its own path through the worst pandemic in 100 years; Johan Anderberg, Scribe 2022
3 Duty of Care; Dr. Dominic Pimenta, Welbeck 2020
4 Spike: the virus vs the people, the inside story, Jeremy Farrar with Anjana Ahuja, Profile Books 2021
5 https://sentientmedia.org/amazon-deforestation/#:~:text=Deforestation%20Statistics,has%20been%20destroyed%20every%20day.
6 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5300271/
7 https://tayjuhanafoundation.org/dev/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/TJF-Brief-May-2020.pdf
8 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7194795/
9 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7606707/