Almost every pandemic we’ve seen over the last century has come from a virus that’s spilled over into humans from an animal. “Generally, pandemics are seen as a biomedical problem,” says Raina Plowright, an infectious disease ecologist at Cornell University. “Certainly, once the pandemic is underway, it is a biomedical problem because you need to have vaccines, you need therapeutics, you need testing,” she says.
“But the genesis of the pandemic is actually an ecological problem,” says Plowright. That is, it’s due to the complex interactions between wildlife, habitat, climate and people.
But there’s been relatively little discussion about a spillover’s ecological origins and how to stop it from happening in the first place. Plowright found only four publications on how the coronavirus circulates in natural bat populations. That’s compared to the tens of thousands of research articles she’s pulled up on the coronavirus spike protein, which has been the focus of vaccines and efforts to understand how the virus enters and infects our cells.