When I began reading Lyle Fearnley’s Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter (2020), I was struck by an isomorphism of our projects in spite of their apparent distance of themes—pandemic prevention and spirit mediumship, which are often rendered, respectively, global and local in scale. But as Fearnley put it in his book: “the pandemic epicenter …
Saiba Varma’s The Occupied Clinic begins with an entrance: descending from an auto-rickshaw, she walks in through the Kathi Darwaza gate into old Srinagar, on foot now, passing “imperial debris” on the way to the clinic: the Government Psychiatric Diseases Hospital, Kashmir. Inside the clinic, it’s a busy Saturday, with crowds of patients seeking appointments with the few psychiatrists on …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the origin of the virus causing the disease remains uncertain. The predominant theory is that its emergence in human populations was the result of zoonotic transmission, via an as-yet to be determined animal host. A competing (if still marginal) theory holds that a more likely source of the initial outbreak was an …
Experts know that coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is of viral origin. But where did the disease-causing virus, SARS-CoV-2, originate? Two compelling theories permeate public discussion over this question at present. Either the initial outbreak involved viral transmission among animals that “spilled over” into human populations, or the novel coronavirus strain accidentally “leaked” out of a high…
In November, 2015, a group of coronavirus researchers produced a novel, laboratory-made, chimeric virus with the potential to infect human airway cells and cause SARS-like disease. The research elicited a brief moment of controversy that followed a familiar pattern. Critics claimed that the experiment’s primary contribution was to make the world a riskier place. Its defenders did not disagree, …
My engagement with the Covid origins question began in early January of 2020, when my network of biodefence experts, policymakers and practitioners began exchanging notes on the ‘mysterious lung infection’ in Wuhan. A naturally suspicious group, it wasn’t long before questions were privately raised about potential accidental or deliberate origins. This wasn’t conspiratorial. …