Going down the wrong path

Novel Viruses, Dangerous Mutations

Viruses, novel or mutated, are the main characters in the scare-mongering play that foretells a pandemic.

So it was during the Asian Flu in 1957, when Shope pg. 166 of R. E. Snope, Influenza: History, Epidemiology, and Speculation, The RE Dyer lecture." Public health reports 73.2 (1958): 165. declared that . . . the world is being exposed to a virus with which it has little or no previous experience.

So it was during the Swine Flu Affair of 1976, R. E. Neustadt, H. V. Fineberg, The Swine Flu Affair: Decision-Making on a Slippery Disease, National Academies Press, 1978 and the Bird Flu scare of 2005. It was repeated again in 2009, but we hardly noticed the pattern, and it keeps hitting us over and over again.

⊕ Further reading
High Court settlement for teenager over swine flu vaccine, RTE,4 Nov 2020
Bird flu could kill 150 million people, BBC News, 30 September, 2005
Swine Flu Scare, The New York Times, July 3, 1976

But, there exists more than a quadrillion quadrillion individual viruses (10³¹) on Earth, and the number of microorganisms in a teaspoon of soil is the same as the number of humans inhabiting the African continent!

So, who decides that something is novel about these novel or mutated viruses?

Do we deem them novel, because we know everything about existing viruses and their strains? This possibility seems improbable given the large number of viruses.

The true answer is that 'they are deemed novel', because the people studying those did not already know about them. They were novel to them, but perhaps not to the physiology of the billions of humans inhabiting planet Earth.

As if the discovery of the New World negated its very existence before Amerigo Vespucci or Christopher Columbus first set foot on it!