‘From the Black Death to polio, the most dangerous pathogens have moved silently, transmitted by apparently healthy people...
‘It isn’t ‘pandemics’ per se that we need to fear. The concept of being ‘overdue for a pandemic’ actually makes little sense. Pandemics aren’t cyclical, nor are they necessary products of global warming. We are vulnerable to pandemic outbreaks because of our interconnected world, not because there is some mysterious mechanism in the world that’s going to produce them. It takes precise conditions, what we can call ‘disease factories’, to produce pandemics, and these conditions don’t exist until we create them. The 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic was the product of a disease factory: it most likely sprang out of a giant pig farm in the Mexican state of Veracruz, owned in part by Smithfield Foods, a giant US pig-raising and meat-packing conglomerate.’
Read here (Aeon, June 30, 2020)
