Wanted: Evidence-based discourse on pandemic origins and prevention

We’re three years into the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic responsible for at least 6.8 million deaths (although the true number may be closer to 15 million), immeasurable suffering and social turmoil, as well as direct and indirect global economic devastation in the order of tens of trillions of US dollars. Just as mask mandates and the remaining COVID-19 restrictions disappear across the globe, the threat of a new global pandemic related to avian influenza lurks on the horizon.

Yet, suddenly, the old polarized and vitriolic discourses on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have once again erupted.

Specifically trained and continually informed by an abundance of excellent peer-reviewed scientific publications, I attempt to navigate the tensions between the labels “most likely” and “low confidence” while wondering why the Department of Energy (DOE), the FBI and other agencies feel the need to make public statements in the absence of any appreciable, new public information.

Once again, we as a global community are wholly missing the bigger picture. It is widely recognized that zoonotic spillovers, in which pathogens are transmitted between animals and humans, are the leading cause of emerging infectious diseases and recent pandemics. Indeed, the information publicly available to scientists such as myself suggests overwhelmingly that this is how COVID-19 originally spread to people from wildlife sold at a “wet” market in Wuhan, China.

The DOE and the FBI have implied they have specific new information that points to a lab leak. By all means let us see it. If the Chinese government can be faulted for its lack of transparency, let’s show that we can do better. But innuendo and unsourced statements that amount to “trust us” cannot be held out as evidence that in any way matches actual facts documented through rigorous — and open — science.

I agree that we need better national and international laboratory biosafety standards and oversight. These must be paired with frank discussions on responsible and sustainable bioresearch. However, we simply cannot afford to be paralyzed by context-free public rants about biosafety versus biosecurity.

In doing so, we lose sight of the rapidly changing and degrading planet and the ever-increasing interfaces between wildlife, livestock, their pathogens and humans — all caused by relentless human activities and practices.

In the past three years, governments, international forums, multilateral organizations and civil society have widely acknowledged the need to manage health, environmental issues and socio-economic drivers holistically. This recognition has led to a broad consensus that a “one health” framework, which recognizes the interconnectedness between human health, animal health and the environment, must be implemented across sectors and at multiple scales.

Several human-linked activities — including deforestation, trade in wildlife, changes in land use and agricultural practices — are known to increase the risk of zoonotic spillovers by impacting the frequency, intensity and type of human contact with wild animals.

These include the clearing and degradation of tropical and subtropical forests, inadequate biosecurity in livestock husbandry and production, decreasing economic security and lack of access to health care for communities living in emerging infectious disease hotspots, inadequate pathogen surveillance, and — maybe most importantly — live commercial wildlife markets and trade in urban centers.

While it is inexcusable that we must ponder the actual number of existing laboratories with the highest level of containment, we cannot allow this sorry state of affairs to distract us from the thousands of legal and illegal live wildlife markets in large urban agglomerations across the planet.These markets can carrying out what amount to unanticipated, unsupervised, unregulated and hazardous virological experiments in widely accessible and globally connected public spaces.

In these cauldrons of contagion, there are often tightly stacked cages containing varied species of stressed live wildlife such as civets, macaques and bats, admixed with domestic poultry and pigs in warm, poorly ventilated spaces. Add customers with naïve immune systems to the mix and you have a perfect petri dish in which viruses can become more lethal via the exchange, recombination and reassortment of genetic material.

There is absolutely no question today that humanity’s fractured relationship with nature has dramatically increased the risk of future zoonotic-origin pandemics. Our ability to adequately prevent, prepare and respond to future pandemic threats is jeopardized by highly polarized, politicized and entrenched discourses that can shun evidence-based facts and capitalize on knowledge-free political showboating.

In spite of the daily cacophony of news, notifications and alerts, we must remain singularly focused on root-cause responses that will prevent the emergence of new pathogens. We know that stopping disease spread after a successful spillover is, at very best, extremely difficult and most likely not possible across our tightly interconnected and entangled world.

Critically, we must remain grounded in science, agile in the face of ambiguity, uncertainty and false equivalence, as well as able to navigate conflicting priorities and agendas if we are to mobilize our substantial knowledge into action and prevent the scourge of spillovers from devastating life our planet.

Chris Walzer is executive director for Health at WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society). He is a board-certified wildlife veterinarian, professor of conservation medicine at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria and author of more than 100 research publications.