An insightful profiling

At a time when nations are heaving a sigh of relief after the two-year wild run of the deadly Coronavirus infections that killed millions across the world and brought healthcare and economies to a halt, everyone is hoping that the medical science would finally bring the viral disease under its control and it will be on its way out soon.

Scientists, biologists and medical experts have been sounding precautionary notes of not treating Covid-19 lightly, advising people to put up with Covid-appropriate behaviour. It is here that a renowned biologist Seyed Ehtesham Hasnain and technologist Arun Tiwari joined hands to provide a gripping genetic perspective of viruses in "Decoding the Pandemic" which could jump into the human population and cause another, even more devastating pandemic.

After seeing how SARS-CoV-2 swept the globe and continues to do so, the helplessness of the combined might of the world to stop it from harming people has raised a serious existential doubt. No one can ignore the fact that there are an estimated 1.7 million viruses that live in mammals and birds and nearly half of them could jump out to start another pandemic anytime.

Tracing the root cause of COVID-19, a malady that was SARS-CoV earlier, H1N1 even earlier, and will be something else in the future, the authors pin down the overpopulated and unequal world as one of the main causes. The fact is that when billions of people braced the hardships of lockdowns, including the loss of their livelihoods, a handful of billionaires made merry.

While informing the US Congress, US President Joe Biden acknowledged that 20 million Americans lost their job in the pandemic and, at the same time, roughly 650 billionaires in America saw their net worth increase by more than USD 1 trillion. Wherever there are marginalised people, living at the cusp of what is civilised and what is wild, and at every factory slaughtering animals for their meat, zoonotic viruses are jumping into human bodies. These slow-motion snippets must be captured and pruned to avoid them from becoming an apocalyptic feature-length film later. The question is, who is going to do that? Can it be done? It is a pity that this question cannot be answered for sure at this juncture.

The book calls for developing antibodies for specific SARS-CoV-2 proteins, which would not only end the nightmare of COVID-19 but also provide a platform to tackle future infectious agents, which indeed is an inevitability. It is a sad fact that no new antibodies have been developed in the last many years, actually decades.

Also, development of new antivirals is equally lagging. Perhaps it was not a financially viable business effort, and the industry shunned it. But now that through Covid-19, the world has faced such a huge and unprecedented medical crisis, it will reinvigorate the discovery of new antivirals for coronavirus sooner than later.

The book flags five points which cannot be fixed by an individual or a government and require global solutions: SARS-CoV-2 happened, the healthcare industry stands skewed, bio-unsafe industrial production of meat, poultry and dairy products, paradigm shift to genetic screening, and fixing innate immunity.

In the last chapter "What Next", the authors predict that by 2050, it will be a world controlled and run by technology and money as the nation states are fast losing their power over big corporations.

The book calls for establishing 'open' vaccine platforms supervised by the WHO. The fast-track vaccine development for COVID-19 across the technology spectrum has established the importance of collaborative work on a platform. There will be SARS-CoV-2 variants and even new viruses would appear in the course of time. The outbreak of a new virus cannot be predicted, but what can surely be done is to stay prepared to contain it locally, which is only possible by robust biological surveillance and, in case things go out of control, vaccinating people well in time. It is time to have a pan-Coronavirus vaccine that is regularly updated to protect against any new coronavirus that jumps into human beings, in case.

Views expressed are personal