John Oliver returned with the season premiere Last Week Tonight on Sunday, noting that a lot had happened since his last show aired in November. That included the beginning of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, Wall Street being “thrown into a frenzy” about GameStop and the second Trump impeachment trial ending in acquittal.
But he spent the main segment of his show talking about the possibility of another pandemic and how to prevent it.
“Now might be the most important time talk about this because scientists attempted to warn us about the ‘next’ pandemic long before the current one hit, and we didn’t really listen,” he said.
He showed a 60 Minutes clip from 2004 — “just after the SARS epidemic was contained” — in which a disease ecologist was he said that what should be “keeping [people] awake at night” was that another disease, more lethal than SARS, would surface, “wiping out people as it moves along.”
In fact, since that interview, there have been several infectious disease outbreaks, including H1N1 in 2009, Ebola in 2014, MERS and Zika in 2015 and the current novel coronavirus pandemic.
“If we’re not very careful, the next pandemic could be even worse,” Oliver said, showing a clip of another disease expert interviewed last year by Vice explaining that there are several “viruses currently circulating in wildlife [that] kill 60 to 70 percent of the people they infect. … This is not by any stretch of the imagination the worst Mother Nature has to offer us.”
Oliver cited research estimating that up to 75 percent of new or emerging infectious diseases come from animals and another study estimating that there are 1.7 million currently undiscovered viruses in mammals and birds, up to half of which could infect humans.
Bats, especially, are ideal hosts for viruses. But as Oliver noted, getting rid of bats would seriously disrupt the world’s ecosystem. Not to mention that it’s not bats’ fault humans likely caught the coronavirus from the animal.
Oliver noted that deforestation, urbanization and mining has changed the Earth’s landscape so much that species that tend to carry viruses have been able to multiply as the population of their natural predators decreases. In fact, “31 percent of outbreaks of new and emerging diseases … are linked to deforestation,” Oliver read from a report.
For example, the first victim of the Ebola outbreak in 2014 was a boy who was playing near a tree infested with bats in a village that had been impacted by deforestation. In addition, Lyme disease also was likely caused by urbanization, which allowed the white-footed mice population to grow; those animals are the primary transmitters of disease.
In addition, humans actually bring wild animals into their lives, increasing the risk of spreading disease. Oliver showed a video of a British man who owned a crocodile and recalled Paris Hilton’s circa-2000s pet, a kinkajou, which bit her.
Another high-risk area are so-called “wet markets,” where food including meat and seafood is sold. Some of those markets sell wild animals like bats and snakes and keep several species of animals from different parts of the world in cages close to each other, which also increases the risk of spreading disease to each other and then to humans.
Another place experts have identified as a big source of concern are agricultural state fairs, which have led to multiple disease outbreaks, and factory farms, where livestock is kept so packed together that viruses can spread easily.
“When you put all this together, it does begin to seem like we’re actively trying to start pandemics,” Oliver said.
So how to stop doing that? “The most effective way would be to close down all wildlife markets, ban factory farming, stop eating meat altogether, halt deforestation, shut down all state fairs and definitely take away Paris Hilton’s kinkajou. But obviously, none of those are going to happen,” he said. “Draconian measures are just not going to work.”
For example, a “wet market” ban could mean some people would not have access to food and may lead to a “black market” — as happened in 2003 when China tried such a measure.
Oliver suggested following Thailand’s lead, with an app in which farmers take photos of potential health hazards and submit them online for authorities to investigate.
Oliver warned viewers that people should not get “complacent” as the current pandemic begins to abate. He noted that many experts are concerned that once the pandemic ends, people will likely go back to “business as usual,” as one put it, based on past behavior from previous pandemics.
“So for the good of future generations — and in all likelihood, us in a few years’ time — we really need to remember how we feel right now and invest accordingly, because the truth is you never know where the next pandemic is going to come from,” Oliver said.
Watch the segment below.
