I do not get how you are arriving at that conclusion. Would the huge genetic variance in humanity not make an extinction event quiet unlikely, for any kind of transmissible disease?
I thik just the % number is pretty meaningless
However all of that is irrelevant since the GP was musing on the “huge genetic diversity of humans” being a barrier to xenomutation of animal viruses to humans.
Thats not the case, because humans are pretty much genetically identical to near a 1000th of a percent - so a particularly virulent virus that mutated from an animal to a human because of an organ transplant has a pretty good chance of causing a major pandemic.
You don’t even have to take my word for it, Covid, swine flu, h1n1 are all examples of animal infections jumping - and that’s without the added long term exposure / selection pressure a transplanted organ would provide.
Caveat: I’m all for this kind of research and development given the lack of transplantable organs in many health departments, but I’m also in favor of r&d for artificial replacements too.
"It kills between 25% and 90% of those infected – about 50% on average."
Even if it was airborne and very infectious it would not render an extinction event. It could possibly destroy civilization, though.
> However all of that is irrelevant since the GP was musing on the “huge genetic diversity of humans” being a barrier to xenomutation of animal viruses to humans.
No, you misunderstood. This was only meant regarding the ability of any virus to cause an extinction event. This was not applied to crossing the human-animal barrier.
How do you go from a very bad flu to an extinction? Well, we haven’t tried to do that at scale yet [That was a dark joke], but presumably with a very low percentage of death, Covid was able to disable our ability to obtain toilet paper, sail the Suez Canal, not drink bleach and horse dewormer, and enrich commercial real estate owners [I’ll stop with the jokes]. More seriously, our logistics were in the ditch for a while, and we realized we had very few factories for a lot of stuff that is essential for critical things—the plastic cap for the tiny glass vials that we put vaccines in? the tiny cardboard sticks used to hold the test to check if meat processing chains are clean? We had a lot of “I never thought that was a thing” moments. There’s a lot more to be had.
More deaths, especially through a slower mechanism, could block our ability to distribute some essential medicine, disinfectant, food, or even water. If some parents believe that their kids could be dying unless they obtain a compound that is in a protected facility, that facility could be breached—even if it’s all a hoax and that’s actually an insufficiently protected bio-security lab with live samples of a worse infection.
If you’ve seen any pandemic horror story, you’ve seen countless errors in judgment, from the billionaire fleeing to the last uninfected island, carrying the virus on board, to the scientist who missed an assumption, etc.
I’m praying that you are right, but *we don’t know* because (back to the sincerity behind that first joke) we have no idea if our genetic diversity protects us against any zoonotic infection. It’s a domain we understand in principle but have no way to acquire relevant scientific knowledge. Hence why this is a *new type of risk*.
Oppenheimer was able to say that the atomic bomb wouldn’t ignite N2 and the whole atmosphere. Imagine they knew this was a risk but couldn’t run the math because of uncertainty in quantum physics. Would the project be threatening in a completely new way?
To answer your question:
> I do not get how you are arriving at that conclusion.
You indeed can’t because I’m not reaching that conclusion, not formally. There are obvious gaps in my speculative reasoning. But those gaps are known unknowables. They currently seem impossible to disprove clearly.
This is why this was explained to me in a class about the philosophy of science, not microbiology.