Why do we continue to debate the origins of the coronavirus, rather than focus on the notable shortcomings in the global response to the pandemic? The answer has to do with politics. From the earliest stages of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, virologists’ and epidemiologists’ efforts to pinpoint the first cases have been complicated, and in some cases compromised, by distractions and diversions. These broader debates serve a political purpose more than they do a scientific one.
Pandemic origin stories, or the search for an exact starting point, are always shaped by tensions between scientific knowledge and political discourse.
For example, between 1889 and 1892, a worldwide respiratory pandemic claimed the lives of an estimated 1 million people. The “Russian influenza” received this name in December 1889 when a disease outbreak observed in St. Petersburg began to spread across Europe, as reported in British and American newspapers. The disease quickly spread across Europe, with widespread illness and sudden increases in death rates, and then reached the United States and the rest of the world. In the two years that followed, an estimated 300,000 Americans died of influenza, pneumonia and related respiratory diseases. Even as it unfolded, questions about its origins animated discussion in scientific and popular discourse.
From the earliest days of the disease outbreak, observers questioned how the disease had reached the Russian capital city, located at the western edge of the Russian empire. German physician Oscar F. Heyfelder, who had experience treating patients in Central Asia, initiated the theory that Bukhara, Uzbekistan, was the origin for the global pandemic. In articles published in December 1889, March 1890 and May 1890, Heyfelder noted distinct similarities in cases he treated in Bukhara in the spring and in St. Petersburg in the fall.
The common symptoms, first noted among “Europeans” and then among the Indigenous communities, included chills, general discomfort, aching limbs and sudden fever, as well as anxiety, insomnia, nausea, agitation and neuralgia. Heyfelder claimed that half the population of Bukhara had fallen ill within a few weeks in the spring, often with severe cases that affected entire families and left no one to care for them, and the death rate rose quickly. He initially suspected typhus as the cause of the diseases in Bukhara. But a few months later in November 1889, when Heyfelder treated patients in Russia’s capital with similar symptoms, he declared that the two outbreaks were part of the same epidemic.