The Next Pandemic:
A Question of When, Not If

On February 9th, 2021, from a closely-guarded conference room in Wuhan, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that it was ‘extremely unlikely’ that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a Chinese laboratory. While this announcement allays certain fears, particularly concerning China’s role as a threat to global biosecurity, it deepens others. Institutions focussed on identifying biosecurity weak spots, such as the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, typically centre their research on the threat of ‘bio-leaks’ and ‘bio-engineered’ pathogens. In doing so, they overlook what COVID-19 has so clearly demonstrated: that international biosecurity is compromised first and foremost by the persistent outbreak of zoonotic diseases. The cause of these outbreaks? The perilous use and abuse of animals. Of course, the humble bat, chicken, or pig does not capture the imagination like a malevolent scientist intent on destabilising the world order with a lab-grown germ. And yet, while humanity’s fears are trained at this imagined actor, the truth is both more mundane and horrifying. It is the global system of food production that risks unleashing the next pandemic.

Despite an intermediate vector, likely a pangolin or bamboo rat, scientific authorities generally accept that the origin of the COVID-19 was a bat. In any case, the animal that first transmitted COVID-19 to people was being used for human consumption. Furthermore, it was probably slaughtered in a Wuhan ‘wet market’ (where live and dead animals are sold simultaneously). This has rightly led to renewed pressure on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to close wet markets and, in particular, those that handle wild animals (including the unfortunate antagonists in this story, the bat and pangolin or rat). However, while this international pressure ought to be supported, there is a certain irony in the disgust felt by the ‘West’ towards the origin story of COVID-19. From the perspective of bio-security, the wet-markets of Asia are not wholly different from the factory farms of Europe or North America. Both are packed with distressed, dehydrated, malnourished, and immunocompromised animals. This means that, if one chicken, pig, or bat carries a novel pathogen, then the disease can quickly spread throughout the wet market or factory farm, firstly amongst animal hosts, then humans. In short, both factory farms and wet markets provide perfect environments for the selection, amplification, and mutation of novel viruses.

Two further areas of unfortunate hypocrisy must also be exposed. Firstly, unbeknownst to the casual observer, wet markets can still be found outside of Asia. Indeed, according to the charity People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), over eighty wet markets operate in New York City alone. Secondly, while some label the issue of pandemics and food production as an Asia- specific problem on the basis that, in the ‘West’, we do not consume wild animals, this defence does not hold up against an even mildly functioning memory. Although comparisons are generally drawn between COVID-19 and SARS—which also originated in a Chinese wet market—the most recent global pandemic prior to COVID-19 was the Swine Flu outbreak in 2009, which originated, as its name suggests, in pigs. Furthermore, Swine Flu’s geographical origin was La Gloria, Mexico, an area in which there is a ‘major concentration of industrial pig farms’. Simply put, the zoonotic pandemic threat does not come exclusively from wild animals, nor does it come solely from the ignoble practices of wet-markets.