Eye-Opening Interview with David Quamman, author of the newly released Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus.
Rosenberg: After the publication of your 2012 book Spillover, in which the scientists you interviewed talked about expecting the "next big one," I was surprised more people didn't say, "Quammen told us so."
Quammen: Actually, in Jan 2020 [as COVID-19 hit], I immediately got calls asking me how "I knew" this was going to happen and why people didn't heed the book's warnings.
I did write an op-ed for the New York Times about the brewing COVID-19 situation, but later that month, I was in Tasmania doing research on Tasmanian devils for my next book about the evolutionary biology of cancer. When I returned to my hotel, there were many invitations to discuss what was then called the "Wuhan virus." People wanted to ask me, How I had predicted so much of this in Spillover"that a new pandemic would come, caused by a virus, in particular a single-stranded RNA virus, and quite possibly a coronavirus, coming out of an animal, possibly a bat, in a place such as a wet market in China.
Rosenberg: Was Spillover successful?
Quammen: The book did well but didn't galvanize public thinking. I actually had friends who kind of dismissed it as "quaint" and the kind of "fringe" topics that they thought I was always interested in.
Rosenberg: I was surprised how the World Health Organization (WHO) did not seem to spearhead initial COVID-19 preparedness efforts. Did they feel they had "egg on their face" after raising alarm about the 2009 swine flu epidemic, which did not materialize as a worldwide epidemic?
Quammen: That might be part of it. Whenever a pandemic is announced by the WHO, it is possible to declare it too soon or too late. I remember when Gerald Ford ran against Jimmy Carter for President in 1976. Ford had been warned by his scientific advisors that a serious, pig-based influenza was coming and that a campaign of mass vaccination was necessary. He even vaccinated himself on TV to prove the point. Since the outbreak didn't materialize and there were questions about the vaccine itself, this may have helped Carter win.
Rosenberg: In your new book, Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus, you detail the sagas of SARS and MERS, two similar animal-hosted viruses more than a decade ago that, in some ways. presaged COVID-19. Why did these diseases disappear?
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
