The Next Pandemic: Who Is In Control?

(Ryan DeBerardinis/Shutterstock)

The United States recently announced a $150 million, three-year investment in vaccine production technology to deal with the possible “new infectious disease threats."  Bill Gates says “We'll have another pandemic.” If there is a new pandemic, what kind of virus might it be? Can human beings control a pandemic after all?

2 Possibilities for the Next Pandemic

If the next pandemic does occur, what kind of virus will it be? There are two possibilities.

The first possibility is the emergence of a new variant of the SARS-CoV-2. The virus has already mutated from the earliest original version to D614G, then to Alpha, Delta, Omicron, and recently to the subspecies BA.2 of Omicron. On March 22, BA.2 replaced BA.1 with a global detection rate of over 50 percent. 

As long as the virus is still spreading in the population, the conditions are created for it to continue to mutate. And if a person was infected with more than two different strains at the same time, it is possible to reassemble new variants.

Although Omicron is less pathogenic, the infection base is still large enough to allow the virus to continue mutating.

The second possibility is the emergence of a brand new virus or bacterium.

Scientific Advancements Can’t Change the Impact of Pandemics on Human Populations

Historical pandemics with similar global devastation include the medieval plague (known as “The Black Death”), the smallpox outbreak of 1520, and the 1918 influenza pandemic. These pandemics have taken the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

The damage caused by SARS-CoV-2 has also been devastating. The current official count of deaths from it is about 6 million. But scientists have analyzed that the real number of deaths is much higher than that. According to two articles published in The Lancet and The Economist, the excess mortality model estimates that the real number of deaths caused by COVID was about 18 million by the end of 2021, which is three times the number reported so far.  

Since the pandemic first broke out in 2020, people have been trying to use past epidemics as a reference to predict the pattern of the current pandemic in order to control it.

Historically, people have been vaccinated against infectious diseases, so when facing the current COVID, people are also habitually turning to developing new vaccines and administering vaccines in a frenzy. 

However, although it turns out that while vaccines can reduce the risk of serious illness, the drawback is that it is difficult to prevent infection and transmission of the virus. The Omicron infection is significantly spreading in humans, resulting in no substantial decline in the death toll worldwide until March 2022. Furthermore, the unique RNA viruses causing Covid-19 are so fickle and the vaccine induced antibodies have such a short expiry duration of protection that, after two doses, three or four more doses will be needed in order to maintain a medically meaningful blood concentration.

The 1918 influenza pandemic ended in the summer of 1919. Hence it was thought that Covid-19 pandemic might also be seasonal and would end in the summer of 2021. 

However, in the summer of 2021, the Delta variant brought a new peak of the pandemic, and in the winter the Omicron variant peaked again. The change of seasons is not the super-resolution for the Covid-19 epidemic, either.

After more than 200 years of development, modern human science has moved from the macroscopic world visible by human eyes to the microscopic level to the cellular, molecular, and nanoscopic levels, and now to the stage of molecular biology, mRNA vaccines, and gene editing technologies.

Although science and medicine are so advanced today, the great impact of the pandemic on human society is still there, and the situation of human beings being plagued by the pandemic seems to have not changed.

History is repeating itself—people are now just as tired of long periods of isolation during the pandemic exactly as people were during the flu pandemic more than 100 years ago.

Who is Controlling the ‘Coming’ and ‘Going’ of the Epidemic?

Epidemics of all sizes throughout history have one thing in common: they come and disappear without warning.

This leads one to ponder: Why can’t we control the coming and going of epidemics even though human science is so advanced?

And furthermore, if the coming and going of the epidemic are not controlled by humans, who is controlling them?

In 2020, American astrophysicist Avi Leob, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University and former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies, proposed a bold theory that there are civilizations and extraterrestrial intelligences higher than humans in the entire universe.

A long time ago, some scientists suggested that humans are not the only intelligent life in the universe. In 1964, Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev suggested that there were extraterrestrial civilizations. Enrico Fermi, winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize for physics, proposed a similar theory that there are similarly intelligent, technologically advanced aliens like human beings in our universe.

But Fermi, who has never seen or been in contact with any such extraterrestrial advanced civilization, says he cannot fully prove the existence of such life.

However, there is a limit to the amount and range of material that the human eye can see. For example, the naked eye can only see visible light, which is a small part of the light spectrum. When it comes to infrared and ultraviolet rays, the human eye can no longer see. Scientists have found that there are some cosmic objects whose existence cannot be detected by visible light, but only by infrared, ultraviolet, and other light waves.

So, is it possible that the coming and going of the epidemic is also controlled by intelligent life that human beings cannot see? At present, we have neither solid scientific evidence to confirm this, nor do we have evidence to deny this.

However, the development of medicine often follows the advancement of physics, and perhaps the medical community will make more discoveries in this area in the future, which may help humans in the fight against epidemics.

In this epidemic, many scientists have lamented that man should be humble in the face of natural disasters. This raging epidemic has cost the lives of millions of people and affected the world for more than two years. In addition to the urgent research and development of vaccines and drugs, and the use of various measures to deal with the epidemic, people should also take a moment to reflect on themselves, e.g. rebuilding natural immunity and adjusting human behavior so that they can further find a truly effective way that can lead people out of the epidemic or prevent another possible forthcoming one.