First, notice that the headline has the same effect as a Charly Alcaraz drop shot. It looks like an innocent or clumsy ball until it bounces and somehow sticks to the clay like a fishtail. If he had written “Foretelling the unpredictable,” he would have encountered contradiction from those who set Aristotle’s hair on fire, and he would have committed an unforced error. The unpredictable, of course, cannot be predicted, and indeed there are mathematicians and economists who see the unexpected as the only real source of changes in stock and financial market behavior. Einstein discovered the theory of relativity in 1905 and, as mathematician John Allen Paulos says, no newspaper appeared in 1900: “It’s only five years until the theory of relativity is discovered!” The foreseeable is already being priced in by the markets. Only the unpredictable can compel them to rebuild their accounts.
But now comes the drop. The headline isn’t about predicting the unpredictable, it’s about preventing it, which is another matter entirely. With no one knowing who will be the next agent of the pandemic, governments will feel—already feel—a strong inclination to tuck the issue into the box of lost steps, where a next ruler will find it if nothing can be done. Overall, they’ll say if we can’t predict who the next Leviathan will be, there’s nothing we can do about it. From time to time the Lord sends us a plague and we have to swallow it like it’s the cosmic pottery that swept away the dinosaurs. This argument is a balcony-to-the-street fallacy, and it needs to be smashed if we are to learn anything from the disastrous and cruel recent experience. Too many people have died to look the other way.
For starters, viral jumps from animals to humans were at the root of all pandemics of the 20th century and probably much further back. When an animal virus spreads to humans, it finds a population of millions or billions completely unaffected by its attacks. The technical term for this spread between species is zoonosis. As far as we know, which is a lot, all pandemics are zoonoses. Whatever is coming, it will almost certainly come from an animal. Can we build barriers against animal-borne viruses? Oh yeah. You only have to invest $20,000 million a year in veterinary medicine and management. Overall not in one country or another. The interested reader can find a solvent analysis in Nature.
If we look at historical data, the biggest killer in history is still the 1918 Spanish Flu. It wiped out 50 million people, double the number of the Great War that ended just that year. Not even AIDS, which has killed 36 million, nor SARS-CoV-2, which is 15. Ebola (15,000 dead), Nipah (350) or Zika (50) are footnotes to the universal story of shame (thanks for the sentence, Jörg Luis). Avoiding new cucumbers is in our hands. To kill people, we already have psychopaths.
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