Times Evoke: Preventing the next pandemic — We can make this a 'never again' moment

Steve Osofsky is a wildlife veterinarian and Jay Hyman Professor of Wildlife Health and Health Policy at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. He led the drafting of The Manhattan Principles on One World, One Health in 2004. He is also a Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability Faculty Fellow. Writing for Times Evoke, Osofsky discusses how to prevent the next pandemic:


As I write this, no one knows how long our lives will remain in the upside-down state we find ourselves in. As a wildlife veterinarian focused on how the health of wildlife, the health of domestic animals, and our own health are all inextricably linked together and with the health of our environment, I want my fellow global citizens to know that the coronavirus pandemic was preventable. It was not a surprise. It was predictable, and it was predicted.
And while the obvious human suffering and loss we are seeing across the world are horrific, what perhaps saddens me most as a health professional is that we did not have to get to this point. For decades now, many of my colleagues and I working at the intersection of wildlife conservation and public health have been warning that human behaviours, in terms of how we interact with the natural world, were greatly increasing the risk of a pandemic.



THEIR LAST SONG: Hunted as food in East Asia, passerines or perching songbirds face extinction today (Getty Images)



I want people to know that the majority of emerging viruses come from wildlife— not to blame wildlife or to create a backlash against wild creatures. I would argue for the opposite, in fact – what we need could perhaps best be described as behavioural distancing (not to be confused with the social distancing we are all hopefully adopting, but just as important over the longer term). While there are literally hundreds of thousands of viruses in mammals alone, there are really only three basic ways we, through our own behaviours, invite them into humanity’s living room – we eat or trade the body parts of wild animals; we capture and mix wild species together to trade them in markets; and we destroy what’s left of wild nature at a dizzying pace (think deforestation), greatly enhancing our encounter rates with new pathogens along the way. Our species continues to pillage what’s left of wild nature and our planet’s fellow species, as if there were no tomorrow. And with no lack of irony, it actually feels like that day has come.



While I have spent my career trying to think of ways to enhance my own species’ respect and concern for the rest of life on Earth, perhaps a tiny, invisible virus will be what actually (hopefully) tips the scales towards a critical mass of global understanding of the fact that our own health is intimately tied to how we treat the natural world. Forests, freshwater systems, oceans, grasslands and the biodiversity within them support humanity with (among other things) clean air, clean water, a climate stabilising mechanism and healthy food, if we behave ourselves. Thus, whether we are talking about mitigating the global climate crisis or preventing the next pandemic, we need to redefine our relationships with wild nature and our fellow species at this critical juncture in the history of human civilization.



Like the SARS coronavirus behind the outbreak of 2003, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) almost surely came from bats and got to humans via the Wuhan “wet market”. Such markets often feature domestic and wild animal species – a mix of creatures from the land and sea from all over the world – all crowded together (along with the pathogens they carry) for sale for human consumption. Many, if not most, of the free-ranging wildlife-related supply chains feeding these markets are illegal – and many are leading to the extinction of a wide range of wildlife species in high culinary and/or cultural demand.

For decades, the conservation community has tried extremely hard to stop this trade, without success – the demand and profits to be made were too high, and world leaders never seemed to feel that the costs to global biodiversity mattered all that much. But now, we have perhaps the most obvious, and most personally palpable, example of some of the real costs of the insidious global wildlife trade, in the form of a public health tragedy and associated trillion-dollar economic losses we are all bearing. This is not some theoretical concern: every one of us is directly experiencing this first-hand.

While we missed our chance to stop SARS and now SARS-CoV-2 from emerging, how many more times must humanity allow this cycle to repeat? It’s time for markets selling wildlife (especially bats, primates and rodents) to be deemed totally unacceptable to humanity. It’s time for us to adopt some behavioural distancing when it comes to wild nature. While earnest conservation arguments and related attempts at moral suasion have failed for decades, the pandemic crisis every one of us is now living in makes the way forward crystal clear. It’s not too soon to make this a “never again” moment. The very good news is that we can, and we must.