The Age of Pandemics

Is it the age of pandemics or how time to learn to stop worrying and love the climate lockdowns?

On the 29th June 2023 Sir Jeremy Farrar the WHO Chief Scientist told the UK Covid Inquiry that, “It’s clear we’re living in a pandemic age.” This statement was accepted as fact and went unchallenged, the BBC gleefully shared the details in their live-feed of the inquiry at 11:38. Humans are travelling more, and moving further which combined with changing ecology and climate change, because everything is to do with climate change. We are even building towns in places where we never lived before, we are told by the masterful health reporter, so perhaps think twice before considering a new build property.

Drawing comparisons to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa Sir Jeremy continued, “What had changed was the social circumstances in which it happened - not in villages that could be isolated and quarantined and an epidemic brought under control quickly. But in major capital cities and across borders,” Again this is unchallenged and treated as gospel, Sir Jeremy is of course incredibly qualified but where is the devil's advocate in all this? Where are those to pose the opposing and equally valid reading of pandemics, historically but not now it seems, that maybe the mixing and the limited exposure particularly among healthy groups allows slow exposure and the beginnings of immunity within populations which slows spread further in future? 

The Black Death raged across a very different world, slow means of travel and isolated towns and villages didn’t make combating the spread any easier. Amongst those vast but diffuse populations without any natural defense the disease spread with a creeping inevitability. In the modern age despite our frequent flying and travel this plague would ironically have not gotten very far at all, improvements in public sanitation and understandings of hygiene have put paid to the Black Death, Typhoid, Cholera and more. All these health benefits come along before we have even mentioned direct medical interventions like antibiotics, vaccines and antivirals. 

The other and more terrifying example of disease running riot across an unsuspecting people comes in the form of Smallpox which had a devastating effect on the people of the Americas. These people for so long isolated from Old World diseases had no natural immunity and between Smallpox and every other disease brought to the Americas millions are thought to have perished, weakening further societies reeling from the shock of meeting such alien cultures. 

Neil Ferguson the statistician who the media constantly referred to as a “Coronavirus Expert” modelled the UK into lockdown, these mathematical models involved assumptions such as the disease being entirely novel and therefore no one in the community being said to have immunity. It was a terrifying but bold claim that didn’t really stand the test of time as the novel Coronavirus name became clunky and dropped in favour of Covid. Before we were 6 months into the pandemic, questions of why rates were so different by place and population began to raise questions about other diseases conferring a degree of immunity.

Humans have never existed in a vacuum and the Coronavirus family is a close one indeed, they love mammals and our immune systems may not love them but they are certainly trained by them throughout our lives. Just how novel a family of viruses that has evolved alongside our species has to be before our immune systems have no idea where to begin in combating them, I’m not sure I want to know. How such a strange branch of the family would arise in perfect isolation before bursting onto the scene one day out of nowhere, well that would be odd, imagine how unlucky you’d have to be to order the rare cooked bat carrying that particular virus or hole your PPE in the super secure laboratory. 

Even today you will see stories about uncontacted peoples in the Amazon (rainforest not warehouse), and our every day diseases are acknowledged as holding real dangers to them. It is safe to say isolation is not a protection when the chance for an encounter still exists, these isolated people are vulnerable they just don't know it. During Covid there were many backward uncontacted peoples such as Australians and New Zealanders who were largely safe but once the disease was allowed in it began to spread, fortunately its high rate of transmissibility (even amongst the injected) was never matched by its lethality and it was in its acclimatised to humans waning days when they let it run through them.

So why do we need to stop travelling when exposure builds resilience into populations? Why are we supposed to stop interacting and living with nature when its the isolated peoples in the jungle who should fear the diseases in our population reservoirs not the nature around them? 

Why do these remedies for the “age of pandemics” sound more like the establishment and activist's climate goals than real medical advice?