12 September 2020
COVID-19 gets an airing every single week on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions?
But listen in vain for perspicacity, for discussion about anything but the immediate.
It was no different on last night’s programme. The presenter, Chris Mason, is basically a good, plain-speaking journalist, not afraid to challenge or to push the mealy-mouthed.
But, on Covid, will he spin debate into something faintly out of the ordinary, will he make landfall on the heavily avoided shores that point the finger of very likely blame for the pandemic at China’s disgraceful and, until recently, officially encouraged and outrageous practice of farming wild animals, with all the danger that poses for the implanting into human populations of novel viruses from the wild? Er, no. Actually not.
The following – sent today – is fairly typical of pieces I’ve emailed to Any Answers? over the months that haven’t been used:
‘WORRYING ABOUT the proliferation of the coronavirus, about lockdowns, about schools, about social and economic impacts is understandable and very necessary.
But in the process we are utterly failing to see the wood for the trees, with great success blotting out, to our longer-term detriment, the bigger picture.
The BBC and other news outlets are dispensing practically everything you could ever want to know about Covid-19. Staggeringly, however, they are almost invariably failing to delve into the pandemic’s origins and, even more importantly, to propose what needs to be done to prevent future, and similarly devastating, viral assaults.
Months ago, a United Nations agency tried very hard to warn us: the world, it said, is giving all its attention to the health and economic symptoms of the pandemic but is ignoring its cause.
As a result, a steady stream of diseases could be expected to jump from animals to people in coming years. Because the continuing destruction of the natural environment and its wildlife will result in a succession of animal diseases being transmitted to people.
But the UN story wasn’t journalistically sexy, so it was virtually ignored, including by the BBC.
And so we never heard the near-desperate words of Professor Delia Grace, lead author of the report by the UN Environment Programme (Unep) and the International Livestock Research Institute (Ilri), as she went like an arrow to the heart of the matter.
“There has been”, she said, “so much response to Covid-19, but much of it has treated it as a medical challenge or as an economic shock.
“But its origins are in the environment, food systems and animal health. This is a lot like having somebody sick and treating only the symptoms and not treating the underlying cause, and there are many other zoonotic diseases with pandemic potential.”
In the same way, we virtually never hear anything about the dangers of zoonotic transfer posed by China’s farming of wild animals, or about parallel risks from the illegal wildlife trade, as highlighted in July by Prince William.
And so the chances pile up that, waiting in the wings are Covid-20, Covid-21, Covid-22…
Wake up politicians, wake up journalists, before it’s just too late.’
Bronterre News 