Coronavirus may be natural, but the pandemic was man-made
It has probably crossed your mind that you were pretty unlucky to have experienced the COVID-19 pandemic within your lifetime. Certainly, the western media narrative has dubbed it a “once-in-a-century” event. There is, however, increasing scholarship suggesting that the pandemic was actually an entirely predictable outcome of human actions. Before your mind jumps to conspiracy theories of a lab-designed virus, this research points to a very different culprit: capitalism. There is a growing body of research suggesting the relentless pursuit of profit and the dynamics of global capitalism have created ideal conditions for natural diseases to transform into full-blown pandemics. To that end, COVID-19 wasn’t a freak occurrence but a disaster waiting to happen, and if we don’t take drastic measures now, there will be more “bad luck” to come.
SARS-CoV-2 is a zoonotic virus, meaning it originally emerged in an animal population before being transferred to humans. Other well-known zoonotic viruses include Ebola, HIV, and the aptly named Bird Flu. Alarmingly, the number and frequency of zoonotic disease outbreaks have rapidly increased over the last century, with scientists suggesting that 75% of emerging diseases today are zoonoses. So, how does this relate to capitalism?
To be reductive, capitalism is driven by the pursuit of profit. Given the ceiling on what consumers are willing to pay for a readily available good, companies are limited in how much they can raise prices. Therefore, reducing production costs provides an alternative mechanism to increase profit margins. Companies cut, squeeze, and outsource in order to maximise efficiency and minimise overheads, leading us to an era characterised by globalised mass production. In the realm of agribusiness (the farming industry and its related bio-economy, which employ 40% of the world’s population), such practices have led to a host of unanticipated consequences known as spillover effects, one of which being the inadvertent emergence and spread of dangerous zoonotic pathogens.
Consider deforestation. Whilst its environmental harms, such as habitat loss and soil erosion, are now widely understood, the threat it poses to public health is less so. Rainforests are extremely complex ecosystems, providing a plethora of opportunities for zoonotic viruses to be contained—away from humans. The average wild animal is estimated to carry around 10,000 viruses that could potentially harm us, so it’s extremely valuable to keep them enclosed within the rainforest's ecosphere. When we cut down rainforests, we diminish this protective quality and facilitate the encroachment of farming and human communities on forest habitats. This means that human and domesticated animal populations are more closely co-existing with virus-carrying wild populations that they wouldn’t have previously encountered. Consequently, the opportunities for zoonotic pathogens to transfer into the human population have rapidly increased. Evidence suggests that this is what happened with COVID-19, whereby a bat infected with SARS-CoV-2 was near enough to domesticated animals in a Chinese wet market to transmit the virus before then coming into contact with a human.
A combination of modern factory farming practices has also encouraged zoonotic diseases to become more severe (virulent) and spread more quickly (transmissible). The overcrowding of livestock in poor conditions weakens their immune systems and makes them more susceptible to disease. This is then amplified by the fact that mass-bred livestock tend to have small gene pools. Reducing the genetic heterogeneity of a population decreases the immune defences that arise from genetic diversity and speeds up the transmission rates of viruses in farmed populations. Antibiotics are routinely deployed to curb this, and their overuse has created more antibiotic-resistant pathogens, which can be more severe and harder to combat. Additionally, factory farms slaughter animals at younger ages in order to reduce the cost of feeding and housing livestock whilst increasing the production rate. This inadvertently causes pathogenic mutations, which are able to endure younger—and thus by default—stronger immune systems, to be evolutionarily advantageous, again making pathogens more dangerous. In conjunction, these spillover effects of capitalism thus create opportune conditions for diseases to rapidly pass through densely populated factory farms, becoming more virulent and transmissible in human populations—a chain reaction already observed in zoonotic viruses such as Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, Swine flu, and Bird flu. Whilst definitive evidence is yet to be found, there is broad academic consensus that the spillover effects of factory farming played a key role in the characteristics of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Notably, however, research suggests that the public is less willing to accept this link than the one made with wild animals, given the implications it has for their diet.
Once passed into human populations, the rate at which coronavirus spread can be understood through patterns of contemporary capitalism. Since the onset of colonial expansion and trade, particular diseases have spread globally. Indigenous populations, which had not gained herd immunity to colonial diseases, have been disproportionately susceptible to epidemics; the 17th and 18th century smallpox epidemics killed large swathes of the Native American and Australian Aboriginal populations, respectively, for instance. Whilst this may be considered an inherent risk in an interconnected, globalised society, capitalist values such as outsourcing further exacerbate the issue. Exploitative supply chains operated by multinational conglomerates often begin in the Global South, where labour and land are inexpensive, and then move goods to consumers in the Global North. In absolute terms, the Global South is where the vast majority of zoonotic diseases emerge due to poorer industry regulations, poverty, climate change, and the agribusiness practices previously described. Of course, in relative terms, these factors have often arisen as a result of environmentally and socially exploitative industries operating in the Global North. Still, the outcome is that commodity chains can quickly move zoonotic diseases from the source around the globe. This was the case with COVID-19, where the global expansion of markets and breakdown of national borders in the pursuit of capital allowed SARS-CoV-2 to leave China and turn into a global pandemic in a matter of weeks.
It is important to note that I’m not suggesting that socio-economic factors created coronavirus. SARS-CoV-2 and other similar zoonoses still have inherent biological qualities and are natural in their origin. Rather, coronavirus may not have had the biotic properties in order to become a deadly, worldwide pandemic without the influence of capital-led farming practices. In this sense, the emergence of coronavirus may have been natural, but the scale and severity of the pandemic were man-made.
So where does this understanding leave us? If you’re anything like me, you’re probably a little anxious about the future. Given that zoonotic viruses are becoming more frequent, more severe, and more infectious, it’s a very real possibility that we will witness further pandemics in our lifetime. In order to prevent a repeat of the COVID-19 pandemic, a concerted effort must be made by big business and governments worldwide to reduce the spillover effects of global capitalism. Inevitably, however, neither will act quickly enough, and the burden will fall on consumers to demand change. Beyond petitions and protests, being thoughtful about where and how your food is produced is key. Avoid factory-farmed animal products and farmed goods shipped from high-deforestation areas such as Brazil, Nigeria, and Indonesia, as well as the key products that are driving deforestation: palm oil, soy, beef, coffee, and cocoa.
The World Health Organisation has dubbed this the “One Health” approach, which details how ecosystems, animal, and human health are closely interlinked and interdependent; therefore, looking after all is necessary for improvements in global public health. One Health is widely employed by professionals and academics working in the environmental sector, but it remains a fairly alien concept in public discourse. Perhaps if environmental education taught us the more immediate and viscerally threatening symptoms of climate change, such as disease and pandemics, people would demand change a little quicker.
