ArgumentThe Next Pandemic Might Not Be Natural
Germs have killed more people than all the wars in history, and people have been trying to make use of them throughout all those wars. In the U.S., we have seen small-scale bioterrorist attacks – the Rajneeshee poisoning of restaurants in 1986 and the Amerithrax letters that were mailed in 2001. Still, the years running up to this current coronavirus pandemic not only saw the gutting of U.S. national health institutions but also a cultural groundswell of science denial in the anti-vaccination movement. Today the United States in particular is paying for that denial in livelihoods and lives. The warnings were clear. If 9/11 was a “failure of imagination,” then history will no doubt judge the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19 as a failure of courage, compassion, and, most of all, competence.
Was the new coronavirus cooked up in a lab? That’s the current conspiracy theory spreading across the globe. From Iran to Russia to the United States, conspiracy theorists and scheming political operatives are making wild accusations with absolutely no evidence to back them up, whether they blame Chinese researchers or the U.S. military. Max Brooks writes in Foreign Policy that, at present, all the data suggests that this virus—which has sickened more than 2.4 million people, killed over 167,000, devastated the entire world economy, and pulled off a trick the Soviet Navy only dreamed of by neutralizing a U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier—originated in the natural world. But what if the next one doesn’t?
Brooks writes that germs have killed more people than all the wars in history, and people have been trying to make use of them throughout all those wars.On a smaller scale, in the United States we’ve seen bioterrorist attacks such as the Rajneeshee poisoning of restaurants in 1986 and the Amerithrax letters that were mailed in 2001 to specific targets around the country.
He adds:
The years running up to this current coronavirus pandemic not only saw the gutting of U.S. national health institutions but also a cultural groundswell of science denial in the anti-vaccination movement.
Today the United States in particular is paying for that denial in livelihoods and lives. The warnings were clear. The danger was real. And instead of using the precious calm before the bio-storm to prepare a vulnerable population, U.S. President Donald Trump not only responded with feckless, token gestures but made a very public point of downplaying the threat of the virus as a hoax. How much damage could have been prevented had the world’s richest, most powerful nation behaved differently? How many lives could have been saved? If 9/11 was a “failure of imagination,” then history will no doubt judge the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19 as a failure of courage, compassion, and, most of all, competence.
And if the next administration doesn’t reverse course, and fast, the next pandemic, whether naturally occurring or the result of a genuine attack, could make this one look like the seasonal sniffles.
Right now, as the world struggles with a naturally occurring bug, there are still massive germ warfare stocks all around the globe. Even if we could trust that the Russians abided by the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 and destroyed their arsenals, what about China or North Korea, which never ratified the treaty? And these are just the nation-states.
What about the terrorist groups, the nonstate actors with no land to defend and nothing to lose?
