Corona Daily 290: Disease X

In 2009, a project named PREDICT was launched. Its main purpose was to identify the sources of zoonotic diseases, by studying different places and practices. Wildlife animals should be in the wild. When they come in contact with human beings, it leads to the risk of a deadly pathogen. For ten years, the PREDICT consortium studied biology and the behavior of animals and humans to predict the risk of a spillover of a virus from the animal kingdom into the human race. It was a small but critical health security operation that cost only $200 million over ten years.  In September 2019, the fieldwork stopped, because the Trump administration announced it doesn’t wish to run the project any more. The timing of closing PREDICT was so spooky, no good fiction writer would include such an event in his novel.

But this was only part of the pattern. World Health Organisation (WHO) has been publishing “Pandemic Preparedness plans” each year. After the start of the pandemic, Trump accused it of being corrupt and in China’s clutches. On 7 July, 2020, the Trump administration formally notified the USA was withdrawing from the WHO.

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Why is the USA so important in the world order? For one, it was considered to be the world’s best prepared nation to face a pandemic. It has the monetary and military power, but also a large pool of great scientists. Most international organisations including the UN and WHO have been mainly financed by the USA. As a de facto leader of the world, other nations look at it for guidance in matters such as a global pandemic. With its super-surveillance ability, USA is expected to be the first to learn about a risky virus.

Some people feel it was unfortunate Trump happened to be the US president precisely at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. The anti-science Trump might have managed to convert SARS or Ebola into global pandemics. A critical element of the strategy is to nip the pandemic risk in the bud. The USA knew the gravity of the novel coronavirus in the first week of January. And yet, in the last week of February, Trump was in India gloating in front of 100,000 people. This month, a detailed post-mortem report has been published about how things managed to go so wrong for the best prepared nation.

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The concern is not about Trump, though. Yes, his one-man bullying has exposed big holes in America’s checks and balances. USA is the leader of the free world, or I should say a ‘relatively free world’. With America first or some similar nonsense slogans, the risk is moving that leadership mantle to China. But Trump is likely to be replaced soon, USA will restore its membership of WHO, and the next presidents will hopefully act as adults. The concern is different.

In Feb. 2018, a WHO panel had created a list of pandemic-scale disease threats: Ebola, SARS, Zika… Disease X. That disease X has got a name now: Covid-19.

The global population growth, deforestation, agriculture and mining activities encroaching into animal habitats now make the risk of zoonotic diseases inevitable. It doesn’t have to happen in a Chinese wet market. Man’s incessant encroachment in wildlife is predicted to make viruses jumping from animals to humans a frequent event.

The same WHO list included disease Y and disease Z. That is the reason the world needs to closely study all pandemic preparedness plans. Post-mortem of the current pandemic will not be enough.

Ravi