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We are experts on 1918 flu, yet act like fools with Covid

● Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.

The 1918 flu pandemic was in many obvious ways different from Covid-19. But it does nonetheless offer an eerie lesson. The biological character of the microbe that haunts us — its infectiousness, its virulence — is not determined by nature but by us, its hosts. We decide how destructive the microbe will be.

That is the 1918 flu’s warning, and it is one we are battling to heed.

For a long time it was thought that humanity was simply unlucky; fate conspired for a lethal flu virus to cross the species barrier at the tail-end of a world war, just in time for decommissioned soldiers to spread it across the globe as they returned home.

But over the past 25 years microbial science, led by the pioneering work of evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald, has crafted a different story. The virus was probably mild when it crossed the species barrier. It was because millions of men were engaged in trench warfare that it evolved into a lethal killing machine.

Why so? All things being equal, a flu virus is forced to make a trade: to flourish it must become milder and more transmissible, because it needs its host to move around and spread it. If it immobilises and kills quickly, it will die along with its host. But not when millions of young men are packed together in trenches. Nor when the rotation of troops keeps bringing fresh batches of the uninfected to the front line.

The virus now does not require human mobility to flourish, and so natural selection no longer produces a mild virus. “The environmental conditions associated with ... trench warfare ... could not have been more favourable to the evolution of extreme virulence of airborne pathogens,” Ewald writes.

The best way to have prevented the virus from mutating into a mass killer would have been to end the war. Nobody knew that. The microbe produced by the war killed 50million people, double the number who died in combat.

The parallel with Covid-19 is striking; the biological evolution of the virus — its infectiousness, its capacity to evade existing immunity and, who knows, perhaps also its virulence — is being shaped in no small part by what we do. The difference, though, is that we know that we are making it more harmful.

Still, we don’t seem able to stop ourselves. The story is as simple as Ewald’s tale about the flu. A vaccine was developed in record time. But its global distribution was left largely to the market. The result is that much of the African continent remains unvaccinated.

What happens next has been endlessly foretold: new, more infectious and resistant variants arise among the unvaccinated and quickly spread across the globe. Borders close, tourism collapses and the economies of the unvaccinated lie in ruins.

It is truly astonishing that we know this will happen over and again, and yet world leaders do nothing to stop it. The precedent it is setting is dire. More lethal viruses are bound to confront us in future — whether tomorrow or in a decade no-one can say. And the rolling crises of climate change will pick up pace too. Covid-19 is a dress rehearsal for a time when humanity will either govern its relation to nature in the common interest of the species or descend into chaos.

We are off to a gobsmackingly bad start. The legitimacy of global institutions lies in ruins. The leaders of advanced industrial economies look like clowns in their folly. They are poster children for how not to deal with the existential emergencies to come.

A century ago the people whose decisions made a flu virus lethal had the excuse that they did not know. Now, the most powerful members of the human race are making a virus stronger with their eyes open wide. It is an extraordinary spectacle: the most scientifically advanced civilisation in history using its might to spread disease.

OPINION

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2021-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://timesmedia2.pressreader.com/article/281840056950468

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