ONE OF the most infuriating things in the Covid-19 discussion is the obsessive insistence that it wouldn’t be right to act to prevent a future novel coronavirus outbreak in the absence of solid proof that any measure we took was based on certainty.
Thus we cannot, the argument goes, push for a permanent and absolute and cast-iron ban on trading in wild animals for human consumption – and for traditional Chinese medicine – on the highly likely ground that Covid-19 originated in a live animal and seafood market in Wuhan, China, with the disease being transmitted from illegally-traded bat or pangolin meat.
We would need irrefutable proof, the argument goes, before pushing for, insisting on, before demanding with all the pressure and passion we can muster, that markets must cease this hateful, and probably highly dangerous, trade forthwith and forever.
Oh, really? And why? Why, with approaching 220,000 people worldwide dead as a result of Covid-19, with lives and other aspects of health and economies having been wrecked, why is it other than commonsensical to act on the basis of a well-founded suspicion?
Why, for that matter, not act on the basis that there is no proof that the wildlife wet markets were not responsible for this unparalleled death and destruction?
Has everyone advocating delay and prevarication forgotten about the precautionary principle?
In The Guardian of 28 April, Graham Readfearn writes about “…uncertainty about several aspects of the Covid-19 origin story that scientists are trying hard to unravel, including which species passed it to a human. They’re trying hard because knowing how a pandemic starts is a key to stopping the next one.”
Later, Readfearn adds: “Analysis of the first 41 Covid-19 patients in medical journal the Lancet found that 27 of them had direct exposure to the Wuhan market. But the same analysis found that the first known case of the illness did not.
“This might be another reason to doubt the established story. Prof Stanley Perlman, a leading immunologist at the University of Iowa and an expert on previous coronavirus outbreaks that have stemmed from animals, says the idea the link to the Wuhan market is coincidental “cannot be ruled out” but that possibility “seems less likely” because the genetic material of the virus had been found in the market environment.”
You get the picture. Do not act to outlaw this in any case obscene wild animal trade without absolute proof that it’s to blame for the biggest single global disaster (excluding world wars) in living or written memory.
Such a position would have served the world well in, for example, the run-up to that adventure in large-scale blood-letting remembered as the Iraq invasion. Instead, much of the West was content then to act on a weakly founded suspicion that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction. No waiting for conclusive proof there, then.
Where action would involve putting pressure on China over its wildlife meat trade, it’s a different matter. Offending the world’s biggest money-lender, to which about 150 countries are in hock, might be thought a dangerous game.
It’s rather like the situation in Dublin recently at a commemoration of the Armenian massacre. An acquaintance of mine asked why the Irish government was not represented. Came the reply: “We can’t afford to offend Turkey.”
Enter Edvard Munch…
Bronterre News 