Issue 57: What Was Covid-19?
5.30.21 | On the origins of the virus and the nature of the pandemic
Hello,
This week debate reignited around the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as prominent scientists called for a thorough investigation of the “lab-leak” hypothesis and President Biden ordered the U.S. intelligence community to produce a report within 90 days on whether their best assessment is that the virus emerged naturally through an animal spillover or that it escaped from a virology lab in Wuhan that was conducting gain of function research on bat coronaviruses.
There is so far only circumstantial evidence to support a lab-leak genesis. The case for a lab escape story, with its strengths and weaknesses, is summarized really well here by Donald McNeil Jr., the former New York Times science reporter who’s been on the Covid beat since nearly the beginning. Of course, the evidence supporting the natural spillover hypothesis is also only circumstantial, since nobody so far has been able to find a close-enough relative of this coronavirus in animals that could have been the source of the spillover. The Chinese government has stymied international investigation efforts that could resolve the question, and international tensions are clouding the picture further.
It’s important to focus for a moment on why it’s so difficult to determine whether the pandemic had a “natural” or “man-made” origin. As we all pretty much know by now the virus that causes Covid-19 is closely related to coronaviruses that circulate naturally in bats, and these viruses do with regularity jump the species barrier to infect humans. This kind of thing happens so often that it’s the origin story for most of the severe communicable diseases that spread among humans. And the fact that it is so common has led some scientists—not only in China but all over the world—to try to “get ahead” of this natural process by genetically modifying animal viruses in ways that make them able to infect human cells in the lab, in order to anticipate which naturally-occurring mutations might give a virus pandemic potential. By peering over the evolutionary horizon in this way, the thinking goes, we can not only identify potentially pandemic viruses before they jump into humans, but get a head start on developing treatments and vaccines against them. The sanest versions of the lab-leak hypothesis propose something like this — that a series of experiments in a facility in Wuhan took a bat coronavirus that had been collected from the wild and modified it slightly so that it could infect human cells. Then, one or more people at the lab became infected by accident and set the pathogen loose among the local population.
So really the question is: did this bat virus fall over the species barrier, or was it pushed? It’s still too early to make definitive claims one way or the other. But that’s fine, in a practical sense: the methods for fighting this pandemic are the same whether the virus learned to infect humans by chance or by design. What’s more, the wider systemic failures to contain the virus in the U.S. and elsewhere once it began spreading person-to-person had little or nothing to do with how the virus came to be in the first place.
In the longer term, as we make sense of what this pandemic means for the future of human civilization, the stakes are dizzyingly high. What kind of story about this pandemic becomes dominant has enormous implications for China’s global reputation as a rising power, for the practice of gain of function research in virology worldwide and genetic research more generally, and for how we weigh and mitigate against the risk of future pandemics.
That is to say, this debate isn’t simply about the science. It’s intensely political and ideological. But that is always the case with the stories we tell about disasters and their causes. The question of whether or not any given disaster happened “naturally” or was “man-made” has long been foundational to thinking about catastrophe. In this way, disasters (or, more specifically, the narratives we build to remember them) can become instruments for changing the way people understand how and why things happen in the world. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, for example, is generally thought to have contributed to the intellectual and cultural revolution of the Enlightenment sweeping across Europe at the time, pushing people away from divine explanations for worldly events as they reckoned with how a just God could have obliterated a prosperous and pious city by earthquake, fire, and tsunami. I write more about this in an essay in a forthcoming book, Critical Disaster Studies (which you can — and should! — pre-order here):
[T]he fundamental problem posed by disaster has been with us all along, though its manifestations change. The kinds of disasters we face, and the ways in which we understand, experience, anticipate, and repair them, are fundamentally shaped by the cultural and material contexts within which they erupt. Disaster is a problem of knowledge and is known by its consequences. It is, as the philosopher Susan Neiman described the problem of evil, “fundamentally a problem about the intelligibility of the world as a whole.” Over time, developments in the state of knowledge for understanding the world, along with innovations in technological tools for sensing, interpreting, and shaping it, change the nature and consequences of disaster. Evidence of this can be found in the long historical career of the discourse around disaster causation, which roughly speaking moved from the designation of disasters as “acts of God” in Enlightenment Europe, to “acts of man” amid the androcentric technological hubris of the mid-twentieth century, to the twenty-first-century sense that disasters are emergent effects of complex systems.
The book in which this essay appears is part of a wider effort among scholars to draw attention to this fact about disasters — that the way they’re defined, understood, and addressed is always a project with political and ideological dimensions. Generally we think about disasters as major disruptions that strike out of the blue, as moments in which everything is suddenly different. But increasingly, disasters emerge out of our efforts to keep things the same, or at least to keep them continuing along the same path. If the lab-leak hypothesis turns out to be correct, it will be a grim illustration of this irony—in pursuit of our goal to prevent a pandemic that would change the course of civilization as we know it, we touched off a pandemic that changed the course of civilization as we knew it. The same general point holds if it’s conclusively proven that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over naturally. Disease outbreaks from animal spillovers are happening with increasing frequency as a side-effect of humanity’s ongoing push to exploit resources in formerly wild places, connecting them to a tightly interconnected system for the continuous global flow of material, people, energy, and information, a system which also routinely produces massive inequality and ecological stresses that make catastrophes like pandemics (and severe weather, droughts, blackouts, collective violence etc) increasingly likely.
That’s an argument I make along with London School of Economics sociologist Rebecca Elliott in the lead essay for a special issue of the journal Sociologica we co-edited, which is out this week:
What some recognize as ‘social order’ is experienced by others as a chain of everyday disasters. Conditions of social stability, when there is no “disaster” to speak of, in fact depend on the normalization of certain kinds of suffering, exploitation, and destruction. Disasters tend to be officially declared only when the suffering produced by the social order as a matter of course spills its banks in some way — becoming periods of ‘suffering out of place,’ as the historian Jacob Remes has put it. As such, imperatives to ‘get back to normal’ reify a set of conditions that are chronically disastrous for many people, as well as for the planet. … [We should recognize] that the establishment and policing of temporal, geographic, and social boundaries around what counts as disaster are central institutional and cultural tools in the process of keeping suffering ‘in its place.’
While the pandemic is coming to an end here in the U.S., it continues to rage in countries without ready access to vaccines — and indeed worldwide more deaths from the virus may ultimately happen after the vaccines were developed than happened before they became available. How we make sense of this pandemic crisis, what kind of story we believe about its origins and where we mark the boundary for when it ends, will deeply shape the kind of world we build as we inevitably do move into what we can think of as the next inter-pandemic period. Thinking critically about this process is an important step towards making sure the world that gets made in the aftermath is more equitable, just, and sustainable for everyone.
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Now that we’re really entering summer I’ll be slowing production on this newsletter, sending out a new issue every two weeks.
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The pandemic isn’t over for the unvaccinated: On Saturday the 29th, there were just 11,590 cases of Covid reported in the U.S., the lowest number since late March of 2020, just as the pandemic was taking off for the first time here. It’s an incredible milestone. And it’s something we’ve reached mostly because nearly half the population has been vaccinated against the virus. Among the unvaccinated, Covid continues to spread at alarmingly high rates, especially as more contagious variants circulate and people lower their guard.
— “The Unseen Covid-19 Risk for Unvaccinated People.” Dan Keating and Leslie Shapiro, The Washington Post.Work as a vaccination barrier: As many as half of the people who say they are hesitant to get a vaccine say they’re holding off because they’re worried about missing work, which highlights the importance of paid sick leave and flexibility from employers to encouraging vaccine uptake.
— “Concerns About Missing Work May be a Barrier to Coronavirus Vaccination.” Alyssa Fowers, The Washington Post.When the vaccine divide runs within families: Some people’s opposition to vaccines is more purely ideologically motivated, and when this is the case, it can drive a wedge through families.
— “The Families Torn Apart By Vaccine Politics.” Eve Peyser, New York Magazine.
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