TWO YEARS AFTER likely origination in a wet market in China, the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and its mutations are spreading across the globe with terrible, long-term consequences. We now know what it’s like to have a global-scale crisis, one that disrupts everything.
Infectious disease specialists have been warning governments for a long time about such impending crises, and the World Health Organization (WHO) had encouraged countries to ensure that they met minimum standards for pandemic preparedness long before COVID-19. In 2018, the WHO detected outbreaks of six of its eight “priority diseases” for the first time. The rise of populist nationalism in recent decades has led governments to starve the United Nations and the WHO of the financial resources and authority they need to safeguard global public goods, instead of empowering these institutions to act. So, while pandemics are a result of our global interconnectedness, they are exacerbated by our lack of global cooperation.
While a glimmer of light has emerged in the form of remarkable vaccines that are safe and offer hope to many, there are serious questions about who has access to them, and how soon. A group of more than 170 former world leaders and Nobel laureates has urged President Joe Biden to support the demand by South Africa and India for the World Trade Organization to temporarily waive COVID-19 vaccine patents so that vaccine know-how and technology can be shared openly with all.
However, there is also the all-important question of whether the exclusive pursuit of “technological fixes” can ever be a substitute for addressing the deeper moral, ecological, and political challenges the world has been ignoring and that have exacerbated COVID-19. The underlying causes of pandemics are the same global environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss and anthropogenic climate change.
The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) held a workshop in 2020 that warned “an estimated 1.7 million currently undiscovered viruses are thought to exist in mammal and avian hosts. Of these, 631,000-827,000 could have the ability to infect humans.” Additionally, the workshop report revealed that “more than five new diseases” emerge annually in human populations, any one of which could breakthrough as a global pandemic. These top scientists concluded, “Our business-as-usual approach to pandemics is based on containment and control after a disease has emerged and relies primarily on reductionist approaches to vaccine and therapeutic development rather than on reducing the drivers of pandemic risk to prevent them before they emerge.”
Pandemics originate from microbes held in animal disease reservoirs, but their emergence is driven solely by human activities. These include changes in land use for expanding and intensifying agricultural development and livestock production, deforestation, human settlement in primarily wildlife habitats, and urban sprawl, according to the IPBES. All these activities accelerate contact between wildlife, livestock, and people, allowing animal-based microbes to enter human populations and lead to infections or outbreaks, and sometimes into full-blown pandemics that spread quickly along travel routes and in high-density urban areas.
The search for exotic new dishes by the bored rich, as well as widespread hunger, leads to the breach by new viruses of animal-human barriers. In Kenya, hunger, worsened by lockdown measures, has pushed some to eat giraffe meat and that of other endangered species.
Unless we make transformative changes in our taken-for-granted “lifestyles,” the costs of climate change coupled with more-regular pandemics will prove disastrous for the entire human race. This will be a century of crises (despite technological breakthroughs), many of them more dangerous than what we are currently experiencing.
Once mass immunizations spread and the threat of COVID-19 recedes, there should not be any return to “business as usual,” either within or between nations. It has to be a wake-up call to political, business, and intellectual leaders to take a long, hard look at their socially and ecologically destructive policies. If we ever needed wise, globally minded public leaders—as opposed to mere politicians—it is now.
Vinoth Ramachandra, author of Sarah's Laughter: Doubt, Tears, and Christian Hope, serves on the senior leadership team of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
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