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Hello. I'm Katrien Devolder. This is thinking out loud conversations with leading philosophers from around the world on topics that concern us all.
This is a special edition on ethical questions raised by the Corona pandemic.
In this video, I talk to philosopher Peter Singer about the causes of the pandemic and what ought to be done to prevent future pandemics.
So so this time I wanted to talk about the causes of the pandemic,
so there are quite a bit of conspiracy theories out there about the origins of the Corona virus.
Some believe it has been that the virus has been manufactured to boycott the Chinese economy or other things that comes from people eating bats.
But where does it really come from? Well, the best evidence that we have is that it came from what are called wet markets in the city of Wuhan,
where, of course, the virus was first found and became widespread.
A wet market is a market at which consumers go up and there are live animals there in the market.
And then the consumers say, I want to buy that one.
And the animal is taken out of the cage and slaughtered on the spot and then handed over to the
consumer and as well as there being these sort of wet markets for chickens and other domestic animals,
of which there are in a number of places. In Wuhan, there is also a wildlife wet market.
So there were wild animals that were on sale that are eaten in China,
particularly the pangolins or scaly anteaters, were there, they're considered a delicacy.
And it's believed that the virus was transmitted to humans through feeding pangolins.
You've argued in a recent article that a good thing to do would be to
ban these wet markets to help prevent spread of similar viruses in the future,
is that correct? That's right. And let me acknowledge my co-author of this was written with Paola Cavaleri, an Italian thinker,
about animals who with whom many years ago I coedited the book The Great Ape Project.
So, yes, we wrote this column op ed, which we published in Project Syndicate who syndicated it to many different newspapers.
So people have seen it in a number of different newspapers around the world.
It is calling for a ban on wet markets in general as being particularly likely to spread viruses.
That's obviously the case is strongest for wildlife wet markets.
And the Chinese authorities have, in fact, reacted to the corona virus by prohibiting wild animal markets, live wild animal markets.
How well this will be enforced or is stuck with after the crisis is hard to say because there was a similar prohibition after the SARS epidemic,
which is also believed to have come to humans from eating wild animals.
And that ban didn't last. I think very much longer after SARs was over.
So that's part of the danger that there may be a ban that that doesn't stick.
But we would like to see this taken up more broadly, not just left to individual governments,
but for the World Health Organisation to get onto this and say this is a general danger to the world.
And to put whatever pressure they can on governments everywhere to prohibit these wet markets.
Some important cultural and economic values maybe may get lost when when these markets are banned.
So how should we take these considerations into account? Well, I think that they are clearly outweighed here by the public health consequences.
And we don't respect everything that cultures do.
Obviously, we've had campaigns against female genital mutilation, even though cultures may practise them.
And I think this is something too, whether the consequences for everyone in the world.
is so serious that even if it is part of people's culture to eat particular animals,
and even if there are some people who make a living from capturing these animals or selling these animals, it's a it's a fairly small industry.
And I think it's pretty clear that it is, as I say, decisively outweighed by the benefit to humans.
And I should say, obviously, there's a great benefit to the animals themselves, to the wildlife,
because these are horrible conditions in which the animals are captured and kept caged before finally being slaughtered.
And obviously, they're not slaughtered in a way that uses any kind of stunning or anything of that sort.
Do you think banning wet markets is sufficient? I mean, what about factory farming, for example?
I mean, does factory farming also contribute to the spread of infectious disease?
Yes, undoubtably it does.
That seems, as I said, not to have been the case with Corona virus, but it is an ever present risk of new viruses developing and forming pandemics.
And in fact, that's clearly happened in the past. The swine flu epidemic of 2009 is believed to originated in an American factory farm.
And the reason this happens is factory farms concentrate very large numbers of animals very close together.
And the crowding and stress is likely to weaken their immune systems.
So viruses can get hold and they can mutate very quickly and then they can emerge and be very dangerous to humans.
People often don't realise how serious the swine flu epidemic was because it mostly wasn't Western people in contrast to corona virus,
which is causing this enormous panic because it is affecting people in Europe and North America and here in Australia.
But so far, it's killed. I think what is it was 30,000 people.
That's bad. But according to the Centre for Disease Control,
the swine flu epidemic killed somewhere in the range of between 150 to five hundred and seventy five thousand people.
So that's a good example of how dangerous factory farming is for human health.
If we think that a ban on wet markets is justified, even if that comes with a major economic costs,
if we want to be consistent, should we also ban or severely restrict factory farms for the same reason?
I think there's a very strong case for saying that we should.
And that is partly due to the pandemics, partly due to the environmental damage that they do,
because by concentrating so many animals, they obviously also concentrate the manure and waste of those animals.
So they cause pollution of rivers and streams in the area.
Very often they cause air pollution for neighbours. They're also wasteful of overall food production because we end up feeding much more food value.
Whether you talk about it in terms of calories or in terms of protein,
there's always more that goes into the animals than actually comes out of the animals.
There are good reasons for saying that, yes, we should ban factory farming.
Politically, that's going to be far more difficult, of course, than than banning wet markets,
which don't have anything like the clout of factory farming.
But there is a public move away from it where in Europe there've been restrictions on it.
There are a lot more people looking for organic and ecologically produced foods.
And in the United States, whenever people have been given a chance to vote in states that have citizen initiated referenda,
they voted against standard practises of factory farms,
such as the degree of confinement of animals in those farms. Factory farms have these negative impacts on the world.
And on the one hand, they have this immediate impact on animal welfare and maybe on humans through spread of infectious disease.
And then there is the slower negative impact that you mention on climate change. Is this slower impact,
I mean, should we give it as a different weight is this morally less relevant or how should we look at this?
No, I think I'm sure that I think we should certainly be concerned about the future.
I don't think we should discount it.
But I suppose if you're really objecting to factory farms in terms of their climate impact, you would have to differentiate between different species.
And in fact, it would be the big cattle production feedlots, which are very intensive,
but confine animals less than, say, chickens or pigs are confined and die.
They are the worst because the ruminant animals produce the most methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas.
And then pigs would be next and chicken would be after that. Whereas in the point of view of animal welfare, as well as some of the environmental,
local environmental pollution and the production of pandemics, it's the pigs and chickens which are the worst.
So, you know, it it goes in different ways.
As I said, I think it can be very difficult to get some governments, the United States government, for example, to prohibit all factory farming.
But I'm hopeful that the development of alternative products where the plant based
meat like products or what's now being called cellular agriculture growing.
meat at the cellular level, cultured meat as it's sometimes also called.
If that can produce products that are very similar to the products or factory farms and are economically competitive.
That might be in the longer run, a way of stopping this threat to human health and to animal welfare. In general
the source of the epidemic, the pandemic sorry, has received relatively little attention.
Do you have any idea why that is? I mean, suppose that it was actually a person killing all the people that have so far died from the COVID-19
epidemic. I mean, people would be outraged and they would want to do something about it.
But now, I mean, people don't seem all that interested in looking at the source of the problem.
Yeah, you're quite right. They're not. And that's because they're worried about controlling the pandemic.
They're worried about themselves and their loved ones getting
the disease and about hospitals being overwhelmed by it and whatever its origin is not going to prevent that happening.
The way to prevent that happening is to stop it spreading. And that's what people are focussing on right now.
I think that perhaps when that's over, when the immediate anxiety of "Is everyone going to get this,
how many people are going to die from it" when that anxiety is over,
then I hope the people will sit down and take a cool look at how did this happen in the first place and what can we do to.
I would like to say make sure it never happens again. But I don't think that's possible.
So realistic what I can say, people could say, what can we do to minimise the chances that this will ever happen again?
And clearly, one of the things that will do that is to prohibit wet markets.
And so do you think that actually this pandemic receives is receiving too much attention compared to other diseases that also have a major impact?
So I'm thinking of tuberculosis or malaria or conditions caused by worms.
I mean, can we use this pandemic to raise the profile of public health threats more generally?
It would be good if we could.
But again, what's happening is that we have a disease that is affecting affluent people and they're worried about it.
They're panicking about it. And malaria, say tuberculosis, by and large, those are not threats to affluent people.
So it's not going to be easy to raise their profile.
It was exactly the same with Ebola when Ebola was confined to Africa.
There was very little attention paid to it once a couple of cases got to the United States or Europe.
Then suddenly it was all in the headlines and a lot of research went into finding treatments and finding a vaccine for it.
So I think we do need to keep making that comparison.
We do need to say, look, you know, far more people are dying because of malaria and TB and other preventable conditions in low income countries.
And if we're putting so much effort into trying to save lives in our country
and causing very serious consequences in terms of the economy slowing down,
people becoming unemployed,
eventually that will affect our capacity to develop new hospitals and to provide good health care services to everyone.
So if we're ready to run those costs to save lives, then what about the fact that we can save lives so much more cheaply in low income countries?
Are we really prepared to say that they don't count because they're not like us?
Basically they're not, they're not white people. They're not affluent people, whatever it is that we used to say, to draw that line between us and them.
Do you think that the world will be a different place when this pandemic is over?
Or will we soon forget and just make the same mistakes all over again?
I hope the world will be a different place. It certainly needs to be a different place.
There are several things that we could have done better.
Obviously, preparedness for pandemics is one thing.
Apart from what we've been talking about, particularly in the United States now, it's very clear that they were not at all prepared.
The New York Times has a story about how there was supposed to be there was a federal contract led to produce a reserve supply of ventilators.
That was started 13 years ago, which never happened. Not a single ventilator was produced.
So, you know, you would hope that people will investigate that and make sure that incompetence
doesn't happen again. And, of course, as I say,
you would hope that people search the origins for pandemics and try everything they can to minimise pandemics happening again,
whether they originate from wildlife or from domesticated factory farmed animals.
Thanks so much. That was very informative, as usual.
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