I think Michael Klare is basically right here (see "
What Planet are We On?") except that I'm a bit hesitant to baldly accept that the origin of the coronavirus started with bats. AIDS is supposed to have started with chimps in the Congo. I remember reading an interview with
Fred Hoyle, English astrophysicist, where he speculated that AIDS was probably man-made; either that, or from outer space. Hoyle believed in
panspermia, or life from outer space. Pandemics originate when the Earth passes through a cosmic cloud of dust containing the virus.
Climate Change and Pandemics
Back in 2014, the IPCC did not identify human pandemics among potential climate-induced tipping points, but it did provide plenty of evidence that climate change would increase the risk of such catastrophes. This is true for several reasons. First, warmer temperatures and more moisture are conducive to the accelerated reproduction of mosquitoes, including those carrying malaria, the zika virus, and other highly infectious diseases. Such conditions were once largely confined to the tropics, but as a result of global warming, formerly temperate areas are now experiencing more tropical conditions, resulting in the territorial expansion of mosquito breeding grounds. Accordingly, malaria and zika are on the rise in areas that never previously experienced such diseases. Similarly, dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease that infects millions of people every year, is spreading especially quickly due to rising world temperatures.
Combined with mechanized agriculture and deforestation, climate change is also undermining subsistence farming and indigenous lifestyles in many parts of the world, driving millions of impoverished people to already crowded urban centers, where health facilities are often overburdened and the risk of contagion ever greater. “Virtually all the projected growth in populations will occur in urban agglomerations,” the IPCC noted then. Adequate sanitation is lacking in many of these cities, particularly in the densely populated shantytowns that often surround them. “About 150 million people currently live in cities affected by chronic water shortages, and by 2050, unless there are rapid improvements in urban environments, the number will rise to almost a billion.”
Such newly settled urban dwellers often retain strong ties to family members still in the countryside who, in turn, may come in contact with wild animals carrying deadly viruses. This appears to have been the origin of the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014-2016, which affected tens of thousands of people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Scientists believe that the Ebola virus (like the coronavirus) originated in bats and was then transmitted to gorillas and other wild animals that coexist with people living on the fringes of tropical forests. Somehow, a human or humans contracted the disease from exposure to such creatures and then transmitted it to visitors from the city who, upon their return, infected many others.
The coronavirus appears to have had somewhat similar origins. In recent years, hundreds of millions of once impoverished rural families moved to burgeoning industrial cities in central and coastal China, including places like Wuhan. Although modern in so many respects, with its subways, skyscrapers, and superhighways, Wuhan also retained vestiges of the countryside, including markets selling wild animals still considered by some inhabitants to be normal parts of their diet. Many of those animals were trucked in from semi-rural areas hosting large numbers of bats, the apparent source of both the coronavirus and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, outbreak of 2013, which also arose in China. Scientific research suggests that breeding grounds for bats, like mosquitoes, are expanding significantly as a result of rising world temperatures.
The global coronavirus pandemic is the product of a staggering multitude of factors, including the air links connecting every corner of the planet so intimately and the failure of government officials to move swiftly enough to sever those links. But underlying all of that is the virus itself. Are we, in fact, facilitating the emergence and spread of deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus, SARS, and the coronavirus through deforestation, haphazard urbanization, and the ongoing warming of the planet? It may be too early to answer such a question unequivocally, but the evidence is growing that this is the case. If so, we had better take heed.
Back at the end of World War II the US imported as many Nazi rocket scientists as they could to help our future war efforts against the USSR. Less known (but you can find lots of information in Annie Jacobsen's OPERATION PAPERCLIP is that they also imported those Nazi scientists who worked on chemical and biological warfare. That was seventy-five years ago. We know that some of these scientists turned up in laboratories in the US and in government agencies, supplying their knowledge on poison gas and biological agents developed testing on concentration camp prisoners.
ReplyDeleteWe know that in 1965 German scientists were working on Ebola, or Ebola-like pathogens in a lab in Marburg, Germany. An accidental release of this was deadly, so much so that it was called the Marburg Virus.
Anyone who's read some of the "alternative" views of the development of AIDS finds information about the US searching for a virus that could destroy human immune systems. In the early 1970s Robert Gallo, who eventually "discovered" HIV and AIDS, was working at Litton Bionetics, a military contractor, attempting to mix various animal viruses to create, well, something.
Advances in the scientific fields that touch on biological warfare are leap years ahead of what they were when the US military imported Nazi scientists. We have had periods where mind control drugs were created and tested in the CIA's secret labs.
So creating, or modifying, a virus to be more deadly would be no real problem for our or other countries' abilities. Why they would do it is another question to sort out. Another possibility would be to stumble across a rare, deadly virus and spread it among the enemies.
On this topic, Bob, there is a worthwhile article posted by Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism this morning, "Covid-19: Where From? Why Now?"
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/04/covid-19-where-from-why-now.html
The author, an epidemiologist, speculates that the virus originated in Chinese farming of wildlife like civets (the putative origin of SARS 1.0):
"I would argue that high density is to blame for amplification of diseases but this doesn’t say anything about the origin. As I wrote before megafarms may be better isolated from the wild than the familiar farms they defend in the article. Moreover, given the large number of wild animal farms that Chinese authorities closed, the chances of a fortuitous jump from bats, civets, racoons, pangolins etc. to humans seem greatly higher on these than on megafarms. So far, no coronavirus jump has been demonstrated from pigs to humans whereas civets were demonstrated for SARS 1.0. My opinion is that it would be a big mistake to overlook their potential role in this and possible future outbreaks."