Coronavirus infections are not due to karma

In the Chinese Year of the Rat, is nature exacting karmic revenge for barbarities inflicted on wild animals? That’s what some are saying about the outbreak of coronavirus, spreading from central China.

If you have a simplistic view of karma – that people get what they deserve – it’s easy to draw such conclusions. Especially if you believe nature enacts a great reckoning where everything balances out.

These superstitions are endorsed on Twitter. Here’s an example: “Nature brings balance to the world population in the strangest ways. There are creatures on this earth, put there for human consumption, but when you cross the boundary into the natural food chain, you disturb that balance and nature will punish those that cross the food chain.”

In fact there is no evidence “nature” brings such population balance. Drastic changes to conditions for species survival are more likely to result from collisions of meteors, comets and planets, for example, which have led to mass extinctions over millions of years.

Using impenetrable circular logic, you could of course argue that some of this was karma against misbehaving dinosaurs, etc.

The current grasping for a natural balance explanation was sparked by the news that Huanan food market in Wuhan, capital city of China’s Hubei province, has been closed over fears it may be the source of the corona infections.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) says the Huanan market offers “carcasses and live specimens of dozens of wild animals – from bamboo rats to ostriches, baby crocodiles and hedgehogs, in a scruffy complex of 1 000 stalls spread over an area the size of nine football fields”.

It is “typical of the wet markets” where most people in China buy their food.

Yet arguments put forward should not withstand academic scrutiny.

To wit: “This is a wildlife-origin virus – it’s pretty clear,” said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based nonprofit organisation that has been studying virus origins in China for 15 years.

“Probably bats are the origin from looking at the virus itself, and it got from bats into people in the wildlife market,” he said, according to the WSJ.

Pretty clear, and probably bats. Perhaps not so clear after all.

Actually, humans have been eating animals since time immemorial. The distinction between wild and other animals is man-made.

Humans may be less susceptible to picking up diseases from species to which they are more accustomed – pets and farm animals, etc.

But is karma different when you eat from a cow that dies screaming in an abattoir, instead of from a baby crocodile slaughtered among other suffering species at a Chinese food market?

No.

It’s not a matter of karma, or superstitions about natural balance. Scientists have simply not yet worked out how to deal with less common contagions.

Media coverage is also influenced by Western prejudices about which animals may be eaten, and which are inedible.

What if it’s merely a matter of cultural taste? And who gives anyone the right to decide which, if any animals, may be eaten?

• Disclosure. I have visited several parts of China and have previously written for Chinese employers.

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