Once in a Century? The Laughable MSM
Although I voted Green rather than Democrat in the November 2020 US elections, I am glad Trump will go away. But much of the MSM should go with him. Their inability to perceive the inconsistencies and even hypocrisy in their own reporting makes them almost as dangerous.
There was one paragraph from the 11–07–20 Guardian that really illustrated this hypocrisy. For months, the paper has been touting its coverage of climate catastrophe and its positive initiatives in that arena. Yet the following paragraph revealed why that’s a bit of rubbish.
“Joe Biden has been elected the 46th president of the United States, achieving a decades-long political ambition and denying Donald Trump a second term after a deeply divisive presidency defined by a once-in-a-century pandemic, economic turmoil and social unrest.” (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/07/joe-biden-wins-us-election-donald-trump-loses-final-result-2020)
A once-in-a century pandemic? Is that science-by-enslaved-science-writer or by crap-shoot prognostication? Or maybe denial during a fit of hysterical optimism at Trump’s loss. Either way, it’s a demonstration of ineptness about biological systems. And about the environmental damage and overpopulation impacts of Homo sapiens on the remainder of the biosphere. And I’m not just talking about the crowded relationship between humans and food animals at live markets such as those for pangolins in Asian countries. As The Guardian itself has also reported, SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus cause of COVID-19, now infects farmed minks and even domestic cats. And in fairness to that news source, it did, on 11–10–20, print a column by veterinary epidemiologist Matthew Baylis correctly asserting the following:
“Given the huge human, social and economic costs of pandemics, there’s a compelling argument that in order to prevent future catastrophes, we can no longer afford to take such risks.” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/10/the-covid-carrying-danish-mink-are-a-warning-sign-but-is-anyone-heeding-it
Bravo for that one, Guardian, despite the confusing inconsistency. But let’s also not ignore a fundamental principle of bioscience: reciprocity. In well-functioning Nature, nothing is unidirectional, everything reciprocal. (As Native cultures implicitly understood.) Because it’s feedback — usually restraining, occasionally reinforcing — that regulates the balance of material, energy and information flow through biological systems and their individual component organisms and species. The human pathogenic organisms that arise can be viewed as feedbacks by the larger ecosystem, in reciprocal response to conditions of human socioeconomic existence.
Beyond influenza, cholera outbreaks, for example, have everything to do with humans grouping themselves into communities where sanitation was/is poor to nonexistent. The fact that we know the immediate cause as a toxic protein of the bacterium Vibrio cholera can tend to ignore the deeper cause of poor sanitation. Although the bacteria’s persistence in shellfish makes undercooked shellfish an initial source of infection, epidemic spread generally occurs through fecal-infested drinking water in overcrowded communities with lousy infrastructure.
Likewise, the bacterium Yersinia pestis is the proximal cause of Bubonic Plague, but the bacterium is spread by fleas whose environmental hosts are mammals, rats and other rodents that live in human proximity. Again, we encounter a feedback response to conditions of human socioeconomic existence. That plague outbreaks still occur in today’s world is informative. It should remind us that manipulating and degrading the environments and lives of other species has consequences, often lethal ones.
Ditto COVID-19 with its proximal cause: the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. But is it only live markets and commercial animals or pets in intimate proximity with people that represent a deeper cause? Maybe not. For we should remember that the other mammalian species that serve as SARS-CoV-2 reservoirs — bats, pangolins, minks, cats — are no longer living in the environments in which they evolved. Not even close.Their habitats have been stressed and re-stressed by human encroachment, not merely through physical crowding, but by alteration of the molecular environment through industrial and other sources of environmental toxicity. Mutagens, carcinogens, drugs, estrogen mimics, microplastics. And of course, add heat stress, the thermal nightmare associated with climate change.
All mammals have quite similar stress-response systems. The hormones communicating responses of these systems, especially those that are steroids like cortisol, directly and indirectly affect gene expression and other biochemical genetic processes in these animals.
Is it safe to assume that these stress-hormone and toxicity effects on genes won’t predispose infected but asymptomatic animal hosts (like bats) to generate more daunting viral mutants? Of course it’s not a safe assumption! As Baylis clearly writes in the Guardian article on minks, “we can no longer afford to take such risks.” And what could be more daunting to human socio-economics than a virus that kills many, yet hides in plain sight in many others who are asymptomatic?
We ignore or downplay feedback reciprocity at our own risk. Considering the extent of human alteration of the environment, “once-in-a-century” is rather irresponsible reporting. In reciprocity/feedback thinking, the responsible position is actually: Don’t look now, but there may soon be additional challenging pathogens coming into our lives. Eighty years is a long stretch from here to the end of this century.
We should be skeptical of media that doesn’t report on deeper causality. To detach epidemic illnesses from human socio-economics is a form of denial. Together with Trump, these information sources, aka establishment mouthpieces, should also go away if they won’t report on the broader context underpinning public health nightmares.
A universal and reliable public health system is the sanest short-term response. Longer term, I’d of course add halting and remediating environmental damage, but I’m a bit too much of a realist to believe that such a course correction is imminent.
