What surprises me again and again is that so many smart people, who should have known better, think that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 [= coronavirus disease 2019] is man-made and that it is intentionally spread by man. Recently yet I heard the statement: Because the coronavirus has spread all over the world, it must be so that it has been made by man. Without any further explanation. Besides that this statement as such is a clear case of false reasoning (see my blog False reasoning in Covid-19 times (and not only then) ), also its contents is surprising: As if it isn’t so that pandemics are of all times. A simple Internet search will give you a long list of pandemics that have plagued man through the ages. Let me pick some from a list in the Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic#Notable_outbreaks):
- Plague of Justinian (541-750 AD). The first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague started in Egypt and reached Constantinople the following spring, killing … 10,000 a day at its height, and perhaps 40% of the city's inhabitants. Altogether the plague killed a quarter to half the human population of the known world. It halved Europe’s population between 550 AD and 700 AD
- Black Death (1331-1353), causing 75-200 million of deaths worldwide. Starting in Asia, the disease reached the Mediterranean and western Europe in 1348 and killed an estimated 20-30 million Europeans in six years; a third of the total population, and up to a half in the worst-affected urban areas. It was the first of a cycle of European plague epidemics that continued until the 18th century. There were more than 100 plague epidemics in Europe during this period.
- Third plague pandemic (1855). Starting in China, it spread into India, where 10 million people died. It reached also North America and, today, sporadic cases of plague still occur in the western United States.
- And not to forget: The Spanish flu pandemic that begun in 1918 in the USA (despite its name) and was “brought” by American troops fighting in the First World War to Europe. This flu infected 500 million people around the world, killing 20-100 million, especially young adults.
These are only a few examples of the many pandemics that have scourged humanity. Each pandemic had its own characteristics, but they have at least one characteristic in common: They had all a natural cause. And why would it now be different, also because there are good explanations about the natural origin of Covid-19? (see note below)
This being said, one wonders why so many people think that the coronavirus has been intentionally made and spread by man. Although it is mere speculation what I am going to say now (in the sense that I think that I cannot base my view on scientific investigations), I guess that one major reason is the alienation of man from nature. Most men today live in a civilized environment. Here I mean “civilized” as distinguished from natural. Everything around man is apparently man-made. Currently more than half of the world population lives in urban areas where most what you see has been artificially been made by men. This makes that more than ever before man is dependent on man and not so much on nature. Moreover, when people these days think of viruses, they don’t think of some nasty disease. No, what they think of are the viruses in their computers, and one thing that computer viruses have in common is that they are man-made and that they are intentionally spread by evil people. Isn’t it strange then that many people tend to think that also the coronavirus must have been made and spread by evil men? In these days and age many men are that way estranged from nature that they cannot imagine that it is nature – like in older days – that is responsible (in a neutral, causal sense) for the origin and spread of the germs of a disease. It’s true that also in the past there were all kinds of “explanations” for calamities that scourged man (for instance that they were punishments from God). However, in these days that man has become less and less dependent on nature and has become more and more civilized, in the sense that man has become increasingly dependent on what has been made by man, and in these days that men live farther away from nature than ever before, it seems almost obvious that everything that happens to man must be man-made and man-caused, including a nasty disease like Covid-19. But even though man is a civilized being through and through, man is and remains a natural being in the first place: A being made of natural stuff, “constructed” by nature from natural materials. Man is a civilized animal. And that’s why man will always be prone to what nature has in store for us, including a nasty virus like SARS-CoV-2, popular known as the coronavirus.
Note
See for example https://globalhealthnewswire.com/viruses-vaccines/2020/03/17/the-covid-19-coronavirus-epidemic-has-a-natural-origin-scientists-say
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