Among many unfortunate truths about the pandemic currently ravaging us is this one: we don’t know jack about it.
COVID-19 cases first showed up in Wuhan, China, mostly among people exposed to a live animal and seafood market there. When Donald Trump used the presidential podium to brand it “the Chinese virus,” he fed into fears already stoked by right-wing conspiracy theorists suggesting that the virus was a laboratory-created weapon of biological warfare.
The Bulletin, a nonprofit now housed at the University of Chicago, was founded here in 1945, in response to an incidence of devastatingly disruptive technology: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its goals were to educate the public about nuclear weapons, to make activists of scientists, and to manage the “Pandora’s box of modern science,” Bulletin president Rachel Bronson says. Over the years, issues like climate change and pandemics have joined the threat of nuclear war as concerns: “Whenever there’s a science-based issue that has the potential to bring great benefit or great harm and there’s a need for political action, we’re interested.”
