Rejected, without review, by the Medical Journal of Australia (April 27, 2023) (350 words, 5 refs, 1 figure: the maximum).
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In 1991 this journal published its first letter on climate change and health (1). It was in response to an editorial, the first on this topic in this journal, two years after The Lancet had published their first editorial on global warming. At that time, the word “Anthropocene” (the human shaped era) had not been coined, and that concept probably would, in 1991, have seemed farfetched to most readers of this journal, as did the relevance to human health of changes in the concentration of trace “greenhouse” gases. Yet, today, concepts such as planetary boundaries, the Anthropocene and climate change are broadly accepted as relevant to global population health.
In 2017 the Global Virome Project published a set of slides, the second of which stated that the threat from “lab-enhanced” viruses is intensifying, via “gain of function”, also known as “dual use” (see figure) (2). Soon after, a paper describing the complete synthesis of a horsepox virus was published. One of its authors subsequently warned “any method that can be used to assemble horsepox virus could be used to construct variola, the virus that causes smallpox” (3). It has long been thought that smallpox samples are securely held by the great powers. Yet, any emergence of smallpox, today, could be synthetic rather than accidental or deliberate release from a known stockpile.
Figure caption: In 2017 the framers of the “Global Virome Project” clearly recognised the risk to human health from novel biological agents (2).
Very few editorials in leading medical or public health journal have even-handedly discussed the possibility that COVID-19 may have arisen from virological work in a laboratory (4). However, this disturbing possibility is increasingly recognised as plausible (5). Linking “gain of function” and the emergence of entirely synthetic or human-modified viruses, “novel entities” with “planetary health” and “planetary boundaries” is also not entirely new, though underrecognised (5). I call on this journal to publish an editorial about these issues. The consequences of gain of function could already be immense. In future, unchecked, they could rival the scale of climate change and even the intentional use of nuclear weapons. In so doing you would break new ground, at least for the Southern Hemisphere, as in 1991. This can be achieved while observing neutrality on the origin of COVID-19.
References
1. Butler CD. Global warming, ecological destruction and human health. Med J Aust, 1991; 155, 351. https://colindbutler.weebly.com/1990s.html
2. Global Virome Project, 2017; The beginning of the end of the pandemic era
https://www.slideshare.net/SirTemplar/2017-0907-global-virome-project (viewed 13
April, 2023).
3. Noyce RS and Evans DH. Synthetic horsepox viruses and the continuing debate about
dual use research. PLOS Pathogens, 2018; 14, e1007025. https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1007025
4. Godlee F. Covid 19: We need a full open independent investigation into its origins. BMJ, 2021; 374, n1721. https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1721.short
5. Butler CD. Comparing and contrasting two United Nations Environment Programme reports on COVID-19. Science One Health, 2022; 1, 100003 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2949704322000038?via%3Dihub
