40 1GM Saturday November 14 2020 | the times
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weekend essay
This incident, a trillionfold less energetic than a
butterfly flapping its wings, was unstoppable — and it
was when history swerved. Very soon this bat’s cold
stilled the world.
If we can’t stop viruses mutating, though, we can
stop what happened next — what happens when the
nexus of humans, animals and travel come together.
We can enforce the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species (Cities) laws, which
mean that bats should never meet pangolins or — the
source of the 2003 Sars outbreak — civets.
We can have difficult conversations about cultural
practices and not just those related to foreign wet
markets. There are millions of mink, packed together
like on commuter trains, who would beg to differ with
assertions of western superiority in animal husbandry.
We can discuss whether countries need to cede
more power to the World Health Organisation. How
different would the world be if health authorities kept
permanent surveillance of, say, sewage systems, and
Chinese scientists could upload any unexpected
genomes they find there without going through the
Communist Party first?
Most of all, we can revisit the scant international
health law we do have in place and see if it can go
further. Is there a case for temporary international
travel bans, enforceable as soon as new pathogens are
discovered?
Would it have been possible to make these changes
back when Bill Gates was predicting our future? No,
just as a League of Nations would not have been
possible before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot.
Arguing, say, that a one-week stop on flights is a lot
less expensive than a global pandemic is very hard to
do when there hasn’t been a global pandemic.
We don’t have that problem today. But, as with a
pandemic itself, our window to act is short. Now is the
time, scientists think, to pandemic-proof the world.
“There is”, says Sir Simon Fraser, “a real alignment
of stars.” Sir Simon, who served from 2010 to 2015 as
permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Office,
believes the world is in need of a diplomatic reboot,
even without a pandemic. “Biden is coming in, and he
wants to reframe the way the USA is seen. The
Europeans need to find a way of engaging with
America and demonstrating they are still valuable.
China needs to find a way to take some of the heat out
of their relationship with the US. The Brits want to
further their ‘global agenda’.”
It is, viewed this way, almost fortuitous that there is
a very obvious way that all of them can achieve this:It’s essential that we learn from the many mistakes made in dealing with Covid-19 but
history shows how challenging a task this can be, writes Tom Whipple
The world must
prepare now to fight
the next pandemic
House, the clouds may be parting. So it is that, like
Wilson, scientists are allowing themselves to think
about what comes next. Could there have been a
world with different international institutions, where
we could have stopped a pandemic before it began?
We can’t say we weren’t warned. Last year Bill Gates
declared that a virus could easily appear that would
kill 30 million. In 2018 at Davos, Sylvie Briand, an
infectious disease specialist at the World Health
Organisation (WHO), said that the next pandemic was
coming, “and we have no way to stop it”. Choose your
year and you’ll find your apocalyptic prediction.
What could — should — we have done with those
warnings? When should we have intervened? We will
never know precisely what it was that started this all,
but here is a likely scenario. Back in 2019, a bat got a
cold. That bat, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of
Covid, got sick. Then, in one of its cells the virus
mutated: a single cosmic ray hitting a single cluster of
atoms inside a single sub-microscopic protein shell.I
t was January 1919, and in the offices of the Élysée
Palace the three most powerful men in the world
had arrived to decide on the future. Through four
years of mud, blood, and dulce et decorum est,
Europe had mown down its men like cattle. Now
Woodrow Wilson was here, sitting between Georges
Clémenceau and David Lloyd George, to explain his
plans for a planet that could have prevented the horror.
His vision was a world where the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand had still been shot but instead of rushing to
war a confederation of countries — a League of
Nations, if you will — resolved the disputes through
diplomacy. In front of these men that day lay a plate
of éclairs and the destiny of the world.
From the Treaty of Westphalia to Bretton Woods,
when the world goes through a collective trauma —
war, depression, pandemic — it seeks to learn the
lessons. Most of all it looks for ways to prevent it
happening again. A century on, Covid-19 is still upon
us but, with a vaccine and a change in the White
The story of
advancement is,
in general, one
of improvement
in our lives. It
has made us
healthier, richer
and stronger