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posted: November 3, 2024
tl;dr: A broad ranging historical survey of natural and man-made disasters...
“[Herein] lies the origins of the most terrible of all man-made disasters. Most terrible because it was carried out by a highly educated people employing the most advanced technologies and often claiming to act on the basis of science.”
To what is author Niall Ferguson referring in that quote from Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe? The COVID-19 pandemic, which was almost certainly caused by a virus that leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China? Or the Holocaust, in which the Nazis devised highly efficient systems for exterminating as many Jews as possible?
Actually it is the latter, although knowing what we know now, it applies to both. I give Niall Ferguson credit for being productive during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and writing Doom towards the latter part of 2020. However in that timeframe most people including Ferguson had fallen victim to the misdirection and misinformation orchestrated by current WHO Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar, NIH Director Francis Collins, and NIAID Director Anthony Fauci in their infamous The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 paper, in which those three proponents and funders of gain-of-function virus research directed scientists to claim that the virus was a natural zoonotic spillover.
This was before the DEFUSE grant, a blueprint for assembling chimeric SARS viruses with a Furin Cleavage Site was uncovered via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), before the backchannel communications among the Proximal Origin authors and orchestrators also became public via FOIA, and before Bruttel, Washburne, VanDongen wrote their Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 paper showing how the SARS-CoV-2 genome bears evidence of having been constructed in the manner described in DEFUSE. Alex Washburne summarizes the current evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was a human-made disaster in The Strength of Evidence for a Lab Origin.
I wonder how Niall Ferguson would write that section of Doom now, and other parts where he claims that there is no evidence of engineering, that pangolins were the intermediate host animal for zoonotic spillover, and labels the idea that the virus was created in a Chinese lab a “conspiracy theory”. Sadly, Ferguson also advocates in Doom for some form of Internet regulation that would suppress misinformation, as though there were a way for the government to determine truth when, in this illustrative case, it was powerful government officials such as Collins and Fauci who were actively suppressing the truth.
Those errors aside, there is still value in Doom. Ferguson’s main goal is not to establish the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but rather to put the COVID-19 pandemic in historical context by contrasting it with other disasters throughout history, with a particular focus on the political impacts and response to the disaster. Ferguson argues that SARS-CoV-2 was more like the 1958-58 Asian flu virus than the 1918 Spanish flu, in terms of the deadliness of the virus itself.
The United States powered through the Asian flu, whereas the response to the SARS-CoV-2 was much more drastic. This led to a wide range of problems caused by the response, not the virus itself. In Ferguson’s opinion, social distancing worked and lockdowns didn’t. Ferguson likes masks (although the evidence for the benefits of community masking with cloth masks is highly questionable), isolating old people, and contact tracing (although once a virus spreads widely, this is of little value). Ferguson is not as anti-Trump as the mainstream press at the time, but he does blame Trump for what he calls “The Dumb Reopening” of summer 2020, calling out Arizona by name. I was here in Arizona in that timeframe, and things looked very different from our perspective. Arizonans saw the tremendously negative impact of the closures of schools, businesses, churches and other forms of assembly, whereas the virus had not yet caused any major problems in the hospital system (the original reason given for the lockdowns). So Ferguson has fallen partially into the trap of believing that there was some sort of perfect lockdown that could have eradicated the virus from the human population, when in reality it was already global and endemic in early 2020, and mutating.
The best point made by Ferguson about the COVID-19 pandemic is the importance of social networks in the spread of the virus, which was not adequately taken into account in the many (inaccurate) forecasts created at the time via computer modeling. Ferguson describes the brutal Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (the modern term for ancient public health measures) taken throughout history during other pandemics. He makes the point that when someone transitions from being thought of as a human being to a disease vector, anything is justified. We saw this most clearly during the COVID-19 pandemic with the demonization of the unvaccinated and school kids (see my Kids in Cages post).
Doom is a bit like the book To Engineer is Human, which has case studies of various disasters in which technology plays a major role. Doom is broader, as it also covers political disasters such as government-caused famines. Ferguson stresses the dangers of unaccountable governments with respect to famines. Shouldn’t this also apply to pandemics, especially a lab-created one?
Refreshingly, Ferguson is not a Sinophile. He makes the argument at the end of Doom that we are currently in Cold War 2 with China, and have been since before the pandemic. But after the publication of Doom, war broke out in Europe and the Middle East. Cold War 2 growing into World War 3 is the biggest imminent disaster that humanity faces. Another lab leak-caused pandemic will also happen in the not too distant future.