Tracking Down a Killer

by Jack R. Johnson 06.2021

COVID-19 is on pace to becoming one of the greatest killers of the 21st century. Well over half a million Americans have died as a result of the disease and worldwide, the figure is past three million and likely to top at least four million. How can we prevent another pandemic? As any good forensic scientist or detective will tell you, the way a criminal works, his pattern or MO, is often a clue.

Last week, President Joe Biden directed U.S. intelligence agencies to redouble efforts to determine the pandemic’s origin, including whether it could have emerged “from a laboratory accident.” Since COVID-19 emerged from Wuhan where China has a large virus laboratory (Wuhan Institute of Virology), leaks from the lab have always been treated as a possibility, but less likely than a so called “zoonotic” event, that is, a virus that can mutate in such a way that it allows it to start infecting other species.

Many of the great disease scourges of human history began exactly like this, with diseases hopping species hosts, like disgruntled dinner guests, moving from one restaurant to another. Tuberculosis, for example, is believed to have jumped from animals to humans during the process of human domestication of livestock. HIV/AIDs may have hopped from other primates to us.

There’s growing scientific consensus that such a zoonotic event was the case with an earlier variant of COVID-19, the 2002 SARS virus— a deadly corona virus for humans.  Guangdong Province in China-- where SARS originated-- is famous for its “wet markets,” where an incredible variety of live fauna are offered for sale (sometimes illegally) for medicinal properties or culinary potential. The opportunity for contact, not only with farmed animals but also with a variety of otherwise rare or uncommon wild animals, is enormous. Additionally, that Southeast Asian region was also the location of two very scary but limited viral outbreaks – the H5N1 avian influenza outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997, and the Nipah virus outbreak in 1998–99 in Malaysia. 

SARS was different in two respects. First, it was deadlier—nearly one thousand people eventually died of the disease. Second, the initial reports written about the outbreak of “a strange influenza-like disease in the province” were marked ‘top secret’ under Chinese law, making any public reporting or discussion of the outbreak a violation of state secrecy laws. Yet, despite efforts by local and central government officials to suppress news of the outbreak, word of the disease gradually emerged thanks, largely, to the Internet and one courageous doctor who stepped forward: Jiang Yanyong.

On April 4, 2003, Dr. Jiang Yanyong a semi-retired surgeon in the People's Liberation Army emailed an 800-word letter to Chinese Central Television -4 (CCTV4) and Phoenix TV (Hong Kong), reporting that Chinese estimates for the spread of SARS were ridiculously low. Although neither of the two replied or published his letter, the information was leaked to Western news organizations. As a result of the embarrassing revelation, on April 21, 2003, the mayor of Beijing resigned as did the minister of public health. Only then did the Chinese government began to actively deal with the growing epidemic. Most public health experts believe that this act prevented the disease from reaching pandemic proportions. 

A similar concurrence of events happened with the next flare up of another deadly coronavirus—COVID-19. This one, however, although less deadly, was far more contagious.

Chinese leaders were equally slow to react to the outbreak that began in the city of Wuhan, suppressing information and even punishing those who raised the alarm. They also denied or downplayed the one element that made COVID-19 far more dangerous than SARS—the ease with which it could be transmitted from human to human.

According to a Frontline documentary, in the 54 days between the first known person becoming symptomatic with the virus and the January 23 lockdown of Wuhan, local doctors who tried to sound the alarm were punished and silenced. Local, provincial and national authorities downplayed the severity of the virus and kept international health officials and scientists in the dark. The Chinese government’s weeks-long insistence that there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus cost the rest of the world valuable time.

“By the time we knew it was transmissible human-to-human, the cat was out of the bag,” said Professor Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University, director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “That was the shot we had, and we lost it.” 

“There was an early cover up in Wuhan, perhaps a few days to a week, before the threat was accepted,” according to Ian Jones, professor of biomedical sciences at Reading University. “We will never know if faster action in those first days could have averted the outbreak,” Jones takes pains to point out that again, after the revelations, China worked hard to help solve the crisis. “There has been a very open dialogue [since] and many research findings from the Chinese experience are now appearing,” Jones said.

But the pattern of denial continued in other countries.

After the virus began to spread outside of China, “the science community sounded an alarm and most US public officials were slow to recognize the seriousness, and the president [Trump] publicly minimized the risk,” said Rush Holt, former Democratic congressman and ex-CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “The role of informed scientists has been mixed - sometimes they receive public attention and sometimes they are drowned out by politicians making baseless wishful assertions,” he said.

Other countries followed similar patterns. From Brazil to Iran to Italy to India, politicians facing life-or-death decisions early on in the outbreak minimized the global health crisis. They wasted precious time fighting reality, not the disease. 

The results were deadly.

“Denial results in a delayed response,” which usually leads to an exponential growth of infections, said Thomas Bollyky, a global health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank. “Countries that were slow to respond have, so far, paid the price,” Bollyky said.

A Vox report noted that “At the height of the pandemic Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador encouraged his people to eat out at restaurants, US President Donald Trump insisted most of America could start going back to work by Easter, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro downplayed the coronavirus as ‘a little cold.’”

In fact, there are still countries like North Korea or Lesotho which have refused to report any COVID-19 deaths. In Turkmenistan, individuals have been arrested for openly talking about the virus, and it is illegal to wear masks in public. That government has also removed any reference to coronavirus from health pamphlets, schools, universities, offices, and hospitals. The U.S. under the former president actually ordered hospitals to stop reporting COVID-19 deaths to the CDC, effectively bypassing the single public entity designed to combat pandemics.

It is true, we may very well have contracted a deadly disease from bats sold in a wet market in Wuhan province, or from a variant leaked from the Wuhan virus laboratory, but it appears that man, with his infinite capacity for denial, is still the deadliest animal. To quote the sage Pogo, “We have found the enemy, and he is us.”

Preventing another pandemic like COVID-19 will require understanding that we are all connected: ecosystems, animals, humans. It’s all about transparency, as Professor Wang Linfa, a bat virologist at Duke-Nus Medical School in Singapore noted: “What we need is early warning and working together, sharing information, transparency, I mean, COVID-19 is not going to be the last one, right? Everybody knows that.”