WTimes LTE. on Polio Day.

 Dear Editor,

Today’s (World Polio Day) Washington Times editorial “Halting the coronavirus merry-go-round” with the byline “Once in motion, the cycle of illness and cures proves hard to break” missed key factors regarding biosecurity issues related to both nature and biosecurity labs. 

First. People, animals, and pathogens have always been in motion - and always will.  Thus, the “cycle of illness and cures” are “hard to break” because pathogens are constantly evolving with no start or stop.  Worse yet, our addiction to flawed concepts and our democratic republic government system failing to change is a perfect storm for accelerating biosecurity threats from multiple sources.  There are at least five ways pathogens will persistently change.

Our freedoms and security depend on understanding and codifying laws consistent with the three most complicated systems in our known universe.  The environment, the immune system, and the human mind.  Over 3 billion years every immune system needed to keep up with the evolution of microbial threats constantly produced by nature.  Our minds have engineered human systems that are now ignored (or forgotten) this constantly changing aspect of life.   Mental problem-solving skills and concepts got us this far.  But now, due to arrogance and ignorance, we persistently defend an increasingly dysfunctional government system that will only empower microbial threats to thrive. We won’t.  

October news reports included: ‘expert warnings of a “swarm” of Covid “subvariants” soon overrunning our defenses’, US hospitals experiencing a sharp rise in childhood ARI cases, horrifying flesh-eating bacteria in Florida, the first US death from Monkey Pox, Cholera in Haiti, Polio is back in the US for the first time in decades, and the Biden White House just releasing our nation’s new National Biodefense Strategy.  A ‘national’ strategy with global weaknesses, and recommendations that both political parties will resist.

Humanity needs ‘gain of function research’ in biosecurity labs in order to keep ahead of nature’s pathogen evolution.  But now we must also prepare for nefarious biothreats now possible from virtually anyone with a grudge.   This is no idol warning given the exponential growth of biotechnology we’ve seen just over the last decade.

Our greatest threat is not nukes, pathogens, or climate change. It is our failure to change our minds in reaction to a world that is changing exponentially and a government system that is flatlined.