When people deliberately caused a viral outbreak
Watching Stephen King's "The Stand" and what we can learn from a doomsday outbreak (with >99% fatality) that caused hundreds of millions of rabbit deaths.
Hello, dear friend!
How are you? The COVID-19 pandemic was first declared by the World Health Organization a year ago, on March 11. It has been a tumultuous year, but with effective vaccines being administered now, we have a way to reduce the suffering globally. However, the emergence of variants of concern has certainly accentuated the need to accelerate vaccinations globally. I discussed about we can expect in the coming months with Sunit Arora for Mint’s The Signal and the Noise podcast. You can listen to the recording here.
We are not in this pandemic together
Or at least, not in the pandemic in the same way.
The pandemic isn’t over when it ends for those of us who are privileged enough to be able to work from home and get vaccinated (relatively) early. Last Wednesday, I was happy to share my thoughts on a year of the pandemic with the Society of Women Engineers- New York. I spoke freely about many of the disparities with respect to gender, race, socioeconomic status, healthcare status, and nationality that have come to light during the pandemic. We like to say that “we are all in this together” but we know very well that on a fundamental level our experiences are vastly different.
For example, Our World in Data reported that there hadn’t been a single reported vaccination in 67 regions and countries (as of last week).
We cannot let the virus rage on in parts of the world. At the time of writing variants of concern are also decimating much of Latin America (especially Brazil) and cases are on the rise in parts of India as well (after a relatively quiet winter).
The Doomsday Outbreak
Now on to the main topic of the newsletter.
The COVID-19 pandemic is unmistakably The Big One. None of us alive today have a reference point for a pandemic of this nature. But it is not the only pandemic we will face or even the worst scenario imaginable.
SARS-CoV-2 is highly infectious and more lethal than seasonal influenza, but it is less deadly than many other viruses like SARS, MERS, and certain subtypes of avian influenza.
Last week I started watching The Stand, a limited series on Paramount+, based on a novel written by Stephen King in 1978. In the first act, an extremely lethal strain of influenza with a fatality rate over 99% gets out of a government lab and kills most of the people in the world. The novel is mainly about the 1% of people who survive the pandemic. This is fiction, of course, but an outbreak that killed >99% of the infected has happened in the past.
Don’t believe me? Read on.
There's a biological arms-race playing out under our noses for decades.
The classic experiment that's played out over time doesn’t involve people, but rabbits. And many of them die catastrophically.
But I need to go to the start of the story.
Rabbits are not native to Australia. They have no natural predators on the continent. European settlers first brought them so that they could hunt them. Soon, they were breeding like... rabbits. Millions of rabbits were suddenly stripping the Australian countryside of vegetation.
Australian farmers became their sworn enemies and the government was asked to act. No one could shoot or trap or poison enough of them.
And this is where the story gets dark, very dark.
At the end of 1950, Australia decided to use biological warfare, employing a deadly virus for which rabbits were completely susceptible. An extremely lethal biological agent, myxoma virus, which is related to the smallpox virus was released to cull all the rabbits. That’s right. The government purposely released a virus rabbits were susceptible to in order to infect them to death.
The first wave of the rabbit outbreak was calamitous. The virus causes a horrible disease called myxomatosis that killed over 99% of infected rabbits within two weeks.
Hundreds of millions of rabbits perished in that first wave.
From an agricultural control perspective this was deemed a wildly successful "intervention". Billions of dollars was saved by the use of this virus. People put aside the moral problem of deliberately setting a virus on a population of animals that were artificially introduced. The virus was then released in France in 1952, and it made it to the United Kingdom in 1953.
Now, before I tell you what happened next I need to tell you a little bit about the virus. Variants of the myxoma virus can be categorized by the severity and rapidity of the disease they produce. When the virus was first introduced most of the animals were dying within the days from a severe strain.
But four years later there were more rabbits that were surviving. And by 1956, there was a type of virus that was being isolated that killed only around half of the rabbits that were infected and they were living for much longer as well.
What was going on? During the spread of the catastrophic epidemic, strains that were less deadly were being selected. From the perspective of spread, it is in the best interest of the virus to keep the host alive longer so that it has more exposure to other potential hosts. If a rabbit gets morbidly sick in two days and can’t spread the virus, then it doesn’t help the virus to spread. This does not mean that over time, all viruses mutate to become less deadly, but in this case with a virus that was killing nearly every rabbit, it did.
But over time, rabbits also undergoes evolution. This won’t be seen in the first generation, but in the descendants. When many susceptible animals die in a population, the other animals are often less susceptible. Obviously, the ones that have been infected and have survived will have antibodies that will make them immune. But, after generations even rabbits that have no antibodies and have never been infected were less susceptible to the virus.
This coevolution became the textbook case for the biological arms-race between a host and pathogen.
However, the story did not end with rabbits beating the virus. After the mortality rate of the rabbits declined, then it began to rise again. Notably, over time virus strains mutated to get more deadly again.
These deadly new viruses strains resulted in infections that were longer. They had overcome the immune responses of the rabbits in a viral counterattack that continues to this day!
So what is the current status of rabbits in Australia? There seems to now be around 200 million of these creatures roaming the countryside. And Australian scientists are trying to develop new viruses to kill more of them.
And now for some book-related stuff. :)
Although this book was written as a topical commentary on the pandemic, it deserves to be a keeper. It has many of the hallmarks of a popular science classic due to the breadth of coverage and the lucidity of explanations.
An alternative title for this book could have been 'What you didn't know about viruses, pandemics, and vaccines, and wanted to ask'. In simple language assuming no previous knowledge, the book does a breezy run through these broad topics.
(Review of COVID-19: Separating Fact from Fiction by Devangshu Datta in Business Standard)
COVID-19: Separating Fact from Fiction seems to be generating interest online and positive reviews.
I recorded a short video from my basement home office last week explaining what the book is about and why I wrote it. Please excuse my self-conscious basement recording. :)
Book Lounge conversation
I'm looking forward to a Book Lounge conversation hosted by Takshashila Institution virtually on Friday (March 26). The has free registration and is scheduled for 5:30 PM IST and 8:00 AM EDT (USA). Please do register here if you’re interested. It should be a very good discussion.
We talk about ethics !! What right we had to introduce virus in rabbits? Scary world we are living in.