The World Health Assembly in May is poised to divert $10.5 billion of aid away from tackling diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. Instead, that money will go toward combating the threat of viruses newly caught from wildlife. The assumption behind this initiative, endorsed by the Group of 20 summit in Bali in 2022, is that the threat of pandemics from spillovers of animal viruses is dramatically increasing.
That assumption is almost certainly false. A new report from the University of Leeds, prepared in part by former World Health Organization executives, finds that the claims made by the G-20 in support of this agenda either are unsupported by evidence, contradict their own cited sources, or fail to correct for improved detection of pathogens. Over the past decade the burden and risk of spillover has been relatively small and probably decreasing. The Leeds authors conclude: “The implication is that the largest investment in international public health in history is based on misinterpretations of key evidence as well as a failure to thoroughly analyze existing data.”
The Covid-19 pandemic, far from justifying the diversion of funds into tackling spillovers, may undermine this narrative. If Sars-CoV-2 entered the human species through a laboratory accident, as the WHO, parts of the U.S. intelligence community and many scientists agree is possible, then it wouldn’t count as a natural spillover. Worse, it would be more than a case of research gone wrong. It would be pandemic-prevention research gone wrong. The search for spillover risk may have caused a dangerous spillover.