![]() ![]() Security guards line the road in front of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China’s central Hubei province on February 3, 2021, as members of the World Health Organization team visit to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 coronavirus. It can take years to conclusively trace back a zoonotic disease to its animal source, and China has made it clear it won’t cooperate with further investigations that could clarify any role WIV research may have played in Covid’s origin, however inadvertently. The reality is we may never know for sure. And recent reporting in Vanity Fair spotlighted risky and reckless research modifying coronaviruses in the lab to study whether they would infect humans more easily, and detailed how the scientists conducting such research closed ranks to ensure their work was not blamed for the pandemic. A pair of preprint studies published in 2022 pointed toward a live animal market in Wuhan as the origin of the first outbreak. An analysis by the US intelligence community found both possibilities plausible. It isn’t known for certain whether the virus that caused Covid-19 was an accidental release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was studying similar coronaviruses, or a far more common “zoonotic spillover” from an animal in the wild. With the right steps, we could even make ourselves “highly resistant if not immune to human-targeted biological threats,” MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt told me.īut if we ignore the threat, the consequences could be devastating. If the world takes that warning shot seriously, we can insulate ourselves against the next pandemic, be it naturally occurring or human-made. “Amateur biologists can now accomplish feats that would have been impossible until recently for even the foremost experts in top-of-the-line laboratories,” argued Barry Pavel, a national security policy director at the Atlantic Council, and Atlantic Council co-author Vikram Venkatram.Īvoiding a catastrophe in the coming decades will require us to take the risks of human-caused pandemics far more seriously, by doing everything from changing how we do research to making it harder for people to “print” themselves a copy of a deadly virus.Ĭovid-19 was a warning shot for how fast a pandemic disease can spread around the world, and how ill-equipped we are to protect ourselves from a truly killer virus. To prevent pandemics that could be far worse than Covid-19, the world has to dramatically change our approach to managing global biological risks. Those advances have opened the door to innovations in medicine, but they also present a challenge: Viruses as deadly and disruptive as Covid-19, or potentially much worse, are going to be possible to produce in labs worldwide soon, if not right now. Terrorist groups engaged in biological terrorism - like the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which launched a botched bioattack in Japan in 1993 - have so far largely been unable to improve on anthrax, a naturally occurring pathogen that is deadly to those who inhale it but isn’t contagious and won’t circulate the globe the way a pandemic disease can.īut our ability to engineer viruses has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, thanks in part to the rapidly falling price of DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis technologies. But the Soviets seem to have never finalized anything deadlier than what nature came up with. The Soviet Union had a large program, which is suspected to have led to the accidental release of at least one influenza virus that caused tens of thousands of deaths. ![]() Part of Pandemic-Proof, Future Perfect’s series on the upgrades we can make to prepare for the next pandemic.ĭecades ago, when the world first agreed on the norms and guidelines in the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), designing and producing biological weapons was expensive and difficult. ![]()
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