The way we talk about the disease, you know,
that is what propels our policy responses.
So, if we think of it as a foreign incursion,
then we want to do things like close the borders
or control people’s movements who are unwanted
people’s movements, and we want to create
these weapons — vaccines and drugs.
And, you know, that might work for older diseases
that we already had under control, but when
you have a brand-new disease like this one
— and we’re already seeing this — you
cannot make a drug or vaccine fast enough
to protect people from the first wave.
And the first wave is the most deadly wave,
because that’s when we have no immunity
at all.
And so, we’re seeing the effect of that
now.
Instead of spending — you know, we should
have been spending way more time and resources
prioritizing collective actions, which we’re
having so much difficulty doing now, sort
of after the fact.
After we’ve had these huge outbreaks and
we have so much virus around, now we’re
trying to talk about, “Well, maybe we should
wear masks.
Maybe we should stay home.
Maybe we should close restaurants.”
We should have been doing that early on.
And I think if we had told a different story
about this pathogen, that it is a social phenomenon,
that it is within our ability to arrest its
spread by changing our behavior through cooperative
actions together, I think we might have been
in a different place.
Talk about how society has dealt with, for
example, Zika and Ebola, and how COVID-19
is different from those pandemics.
Well, Zika and Ebola never really became full-on
—
Epidemics.
— pandemics, of course, but as outbreaks,
you know, those are much more — have been
much more containable.
But I think, you know, it’s the same approach,
where we look for drugs and vaccines rather
than looking at the deep root causes, which
are human-driven.
All of these things are coming out of wildlife
and animals.
All of these microbes live in animals and
wildlife and are harmless in those environments.
So we think of them as invading us, but what’s
really happening is we’re invading their
territory.
So, when we invade wildlife habitat, we destroy
where the bats roost.
And so, they don’t just go away.
They come and live in our farms and backyards
instead.
And that facilitates all kinds of novel, intimate
contact between wildlife and human bodies,
whether it’s wildlife trade or bushmeat
hunting or wet markets or, you know, casual
contact, any number of those things.
We are not getting at those root causes.
And so, since 1940, we’ve had hundreds of
these new pathogens emerge, whether it’s
Ebola in West Africa, where it had never been
seen before, Zika in the Americas, where it
had never been seen before, or this new coronavirus.
And so, this is a drip, drip, drip of new
pathogens that are emerging.
And, you know, the underlying reasons are
because of the way we’re interacting with
the environment and with nature.
These are things that are under our control,
so we need to start talking about it that
way rather than casting ourselves as sort
of the passive victims of these foreign, invading
germs.
People, in many cases, are learning the word
“zoonotic” disease for the first time,
the spillover, the jumping from animals to
humans.
If you could explain that further, just what
you were talking about?
So, about 60% of the new pathogens that we’ve
been seeing since 1940 originate in the bodies
of animals.
About 70% of them originate in the bodies
of wild animals.
Those are not microbes that cause disease
in those creatures.
So, just like we have lots of microbes that
live in our bodies; they don’t make us sick.
You know, we have things in our guts, and
they don’t make us sick.
They actually are beneficial to us.
So, those microbes are living in animals’
bodies.
When we come into novel, intimate contact
with those animals — say, for example, if
there’s bat excreta around and your kid
is playing near a tree and gets a little bit
of bat poo on their hands and puts their hand
in their mouth, the microbes that live inside
the bat’s body then enter the human body.
If that happens again and again often enough,
that microbe will start to adapt to the human
body.
And like every other living thing, when it
finds a new territory to exploit, it starts
to thrive.
It starts to adapt and evolve to colonize
that new environment.
And so that’s how these new pathogens are
being born.
We are creating these bridges between wild
— between the bodies of wild animals and
our own bodies, because we’re destroying
so much of the habitat where they live in.
So, instead of these animals living in far-off
places where they don’t encounter us very
much, we are cutting down the forests and
paving over the wetlands where they would
normally live, and instead they’re coming
and living in our farms and gardens and backyards
instead — those that don’t go extinct,
of course.
With the climate crisis contributing — the
climate crisis contributing to this.
Yes.
Well, because of the climate crisis, we also
have wild animals moving in all new — in
all different places, right?
We have 80% of wild species are on the move
right now, moving into the heights and towards
the poles And so, they are encountering new
human populations as they move into new places.
And those movements, of course, are life-saving
for them, but it just adds to these collisions
between humans, microbes and animals.
And that is the process that brings us new
diseases.
