David Morens’s Hope for Social Transformation

Commentary

Dr. David Morens was Dr. Anthony Fauci’s trusted associate, researcher, ghostwriter, and all-around fix-it guy. A trained public health intellectual, he found himself in an enviable professional position—a high post in a prestigious government agency—until everything turned south in 2020, when he found himself part of one of the greatest capers in public-health history. He went along with it until he was caught. He has pleaded guilty to document destruction and now faces sentencing with a possible prison sentence.

The turn of events marks a good time to revisit Morens’s article from the journal Cell that was published in October 2020. This was the article, co-signed by Fauci himself, that famously called for “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.” It’s a pretty ambitious agenda, to say the least.

What was the point of the article? It was an elaborate attempt to justify the claim that COVID-19 originated from zoonotic spillover, not a leak from a lab. By elaborate, I mean it. The article reconstructs the whole of written and unwritten history dating back 12,000 years. Ambitious doesn’t quite describe it!

Pandemics are not new, this piece observes. Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases have threatened humans since the Neolithic Revolution (about 12,000 years ago), when people began domesticating animals and settling in villages. This created new opportunities for zoonotic spillover.

Ancient examples include smallpox, malaria, measles, and plague (Justinianic Plague and Black Death). More recent ones include the 1918 influenza (about 50 million deaths), HIV/AIDS (about 37 million deaths by then), 2009 H1N1, chikungunya, Zika, repeated Ebola outbreaks, SARS (2002–2003), and MERS (2012). Morens argues that recent experience shows that we have entered a “pandemic era,” driven by complex, interconnected factors.

Let’s leave aside that many of these diseases listed are themselves speculated to be part of their own lab leaks. To be sure, there are such things as natural infectious diseases. The mention of cholera especially caught my attention herein.

Morens writes, “In 1831–1832, 45 years before a coherent germ theory would be articulated, it was clear that as cholera spread slowly westward, it moved no faster than coaches and ships traveled: it slowed down in the winter as travel slowed down, and it picked up again in the summer as travel increased.”

Further, he writes, “Cholera, for example, was not known in the West until the late 1700s and became pandemic only because of human crowding and international travel, which allowed new access of the bacteria in regional Asian ecosystems to the unsanitary water and sewer systems that characterized cities throughout the Western world. This realization leads us to suspect that some, and probably very many, of the living improvements achieved over recent centuries come at a high cost that we pay in deadly disease emergences.”

This is an extremely strange analysis. He is placing the blame on progress itself, and human travel, rather than the traditional explanation for cholera epidemics. And what is that? Dirty water in the community. Finding that explanation was one of the great achievements of the 19th century. Once that was discovered, cities the world over started to place a strong emphasis on clean water.

Like magic, the problem was solved. Refrigeration and personal and medical hygiene also played an enormous role in improving public health. That’s the actual historical record. Few would dispute it. And fewer still would blame human beings for refusing to be locked down.

So you see what is happening here. Morens (and Fauci) are blaming people for moving around and blaming urbanization rather than the more obvious factor: germ-filled drinking water. Why would they do this? My own theory is that we were in lockdowns at that point in history and they were looking for a way to justify limits on human mobility and stay-at-home orders.

If you think about it, and you put intellectual integrity aside, this is a rather ingenious way to frame matters to justify the policies that Fauci said were so instrumental in implementing. And not only was this article implicitly backing lockdowns; it was making a sweeping case that human mobility and zoonotic spillover have been a problem for the entire history of mankind.

What to do about it?

Here is where the article goes completely off the rails: “Since we cannot return to ancient times [thank you for that], can we at least use lessons from those times to bend modernity in a safer direction? These are questions to be answered by all societies and their leaders, philosophers, builders, and thinkers and those involved in appreciating and influencing the environmental determinants of human health.”

So here we go, bending modernity. We must get busy “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence.” That requires “reducing crowding at home, work, and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation, intense urbanization, and intensive animal farming,” Morens writes.

“Equally important are ending global poverty, improving sanitation and hygiene, and reducing unsafe exposure to animals, so that humans and potential human pathogens have limited opportunities for contact,” he writes.

If you read that carefully, you will see that these intellectuals have quite the ambitious plan here that would likely affect whether you can buy meat or build houses with wood or even live in a city. It would likely mean that you would not be able to keep a dog or cat because, of course, they spread disease. Indeed, we have here something of a template for a new form of social and central planning—a form of communism with dictators—as organized by public-health elites in top agencies.

Let’s look at Morens’s sweeping and dystopian conclusion:

“SARS-CoV-2 is a deadly addition to the long list of microbial threats to the human species. It forces us to adapt, react, and reconsider the nature of our relationship to the natural world. Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases are epiphenomena of human existence and our interactions with each other, and with nature.

“As human societies grow in size and complexity, we create an endless variety of opportunities for genetically unstable infectious agents to emerge into the unfilled ecologic niches we continue to create. There is nothing new about this situation, except that we now live in a human-dominated world in which our increasingly extreme alterations of the environment induce increasingly extreme backlashes from nature.”

He is here positing that a “human-dominated world” is anomalous whereas Scripture and the Greco-Roman tradition teaches us the opposite: that this was God’s plan for the world of creation. We are not the enemy. We are made in the image and likeness of God, not an invader but a caretaker with a mission. This is a rather important point of departure from the Western narrative. For those confused about this point, I recommend St. Augustine’s “The City of God.”

My own reconstruction of Morens’s career puts this far-flung article at a real low point. He likely saw everything unraveling and did not entirely know what to do about it. This was his answer. We might be tempted to write it off as delusional, but I’m not sure we should. It reveals a dictatorial mindset that is targeting freedom itself as the enemy to be crushed in the name of human health. If nothing else, this was what the COVID-19 pandemic period of our lives was really about.

Perhaps we should be grateful to Morens for mapping it all out for us, in the same way we should be glad for “The Communist Manifesto” for telling us exactly what they had in mind. You have to ask yourself whether you really want to live in such a world as designed by scientists, technocrats, and central planners. My vote is no. I would rather find health and well-being through another path than dictators in agencies telling us all what to do based on their far-flung theories, especially once we realize that these theories were really just a coverup for other nefarious deeds.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.