COVID-19: Ruthlessly practical population control mechanism?

By Sajitha Prematunge-May 20, 2020, 12:00 pm

Many conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus are doing the rounds, prompting the World Health Organization to acknowledge an ‘infodemic’ of incorrect information about the virus. The most interesting among them may be that the outbreak is a population control scheme created by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. Whether the billionaire philanthropist was involved or not is irrelevant, a virus acting as a population control mechanism is intriguing theory.


A video alleging that Bill Gates is responsible for creating the coronavirus has gone viral on Instagram. As evidence it reproduced a clip from a 2015 TED Talk, in which Gates explains that a highly infectious virus could be deadlier than war, reports NBC News. The most popular conspiracy theory concerning Gates alleges that he engineered the virus as a population control scheme while others suggest that he is somehow profiting from a vaccine which is yet to be developed. There is also talk of a clandestine birth control project in a remote Ghanian village, partially funded by the Gates Foundation.

A New York-based tech nonprofit falsely rumoured to be working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to implant vaccine microchips in people, received so many death threats that the FBI had to be called in, reports Type Investigations. The New York Times observes that misinformation about Gates has become ‘the most widespread of all coronavirus falsehoods’ trending online. Misinformation aside, viruses or diseases in general, as a population control mechanism is intriguing.

Dan Brown explores just this possibility in his, albeit fictitious book ‘Inferno’, in which a virus renders one third of the population infertile. Although the genetics in ‘Inferno’ is allegedly a bit off, scientific accuracy should not get in the way of good story-telling. Brown’s virus is so discreet in that no symptoms manifest. The only thing that gives it away is the insidious threat of the warped geneticist to let loose a viral plague to control population growth.

COVID-19 seems to be achieving the same end, albeit not so subtly. In fact, Analysts from the Economist Intelligence Unit believe that the new coronavirus will infect half of the global population and have a fatality rate of up to three percent.

From an ecological point of view, the doom and gloom forewarnings of eccentric geneticist, Bertram Zobrist of Dan Brown’s ‘Inferno’, is not that far-fetched. In fact, the human population was growing 80 million people a year and by the turn of the century. Earth may reach yet another population milestone – 11 billion people, according to United Nations estimates. We are, as a species exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity.

From a strictly ecological point of view, in the absence of a natural predator, the only means with which to curtail the explosive growth of a species is to cull it. In conservation lingo, culling involves scientific and methodical removal of individual animals through sanctioned killing. Take for example the number of elephants in a national park. Most of Sri Lanka’s elephants live outside national parks, but that is a topic for another day. For the sake of argument let’s say the number of elephants exceeded the park’s carrying capacity. If the ecosystem is left to its own devices, a majority of the animals would die of starvation. One solution is to translocate a certain number of animals. But in some populations this is not practical. For example, there are over 13,000 elephants in Kruger National Park, South Africa, over 5,000 more than the habitat can support. Translocation is not an option. Culling commenced in the park as means of population control in 1967. As a result thousands of elephants were culled. Although the ethics of culling is a subject for debate, there is no argument that, if elephant populations are not kept it check it would put the whole population at risk.

Viruses can be an effective method of population control. In fact, this has already been done in Australia. No, not on humans, but a species of fish that stubbornly refused to keep their breeding rate in check. The imported fish, European Carp, thrives in Australian waterways and lakes because no native species compete for food. The species is responsible for reduction in water quality, creating an environment unconducive to other fresh water species, and to top it off the fish tastes lousy. Tests have found that the carp herpes virus could kill of 70 to 100 percent of carp, without any adverse impact on other species, according to The Register. The online tech publication points to other methods used in Australia such as the myxomatosis and rabbit haemorrhagic (calicivirus) viruses that have made big dents in rabbit populations, but also warns that such biological controls can inadvertently create a new breed of herpes-resistant uber-carp. Such are the adverse repercussions of meddling with evolution.

Getting back to population control, COVID-19 could be nature’s method of culling, to keep the human population growth in check. Right now humans with their overpopulation, consumerism and pollution have exceeded earth’s carrying capacity. A finite amount of resources cannot support such an infinite growth in human population. After all, the extent of arable land is limited and chemical fertilizer, pesticide and high-yield hybrid seed varieties can only do so much to increase food production.

If people don't die of hunger, over population will breed resentment, leading to friction among communities, which in turn will spawn conflict. And if humans don’t decimate each other by waging wars and numbers don’t drastically reduce, some natural disaster is sure to keep their hubris in line. If Homo sapiens do not have a natural predator to keep their growth rate in check, nature will ensure that balance is maintained, somehow. And disease is the most potent weapon against over population of any species, in Mother Earth’s arsenal.

Pandemics have decimated populations throughout history. The first of which, occurred in 430 BC, killing as many as 100,000 people in Athens, Greece. Some scientists theorise the disease was typhoid fever, while others believe that it was Ebola. The Plague of Justinian, which began in 541 AD is named after the Byzantine Emperor Justinian who reigned from 527 to 565 AD. He himself recovered from the plague, but the mysterious illness tolled the death knell for the empire. The Antonine Plague between 165 and 180 AD, which is believed to have been smallpox, killed over five million people when soldiers of the Roman Empire brought the disease back with them when returning from a war against Parthia.

Although it is referred to as the Great Plague of London, it actually originated in China in 1334 and spread along trade routes. Florence lost a third of its 90,000 population in the first six months and Europe lost 25 million people in all. In 1519, Hernando Cortes, the first of the Spanish conquistadors, and his men brought smallpox to what is now known as Mexico. It killed between five to eight million of the native population, who had no immunity against the virus they had not previously been exposed to. Fewer than two million survived.

The bubonic plague, the Black Death, caused by a bacterium, spread by fleas on infected rodents, was the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history, with a death toll between 75 to 200 million in Eurasia and North Africa, peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351. European settlers introduced smallpox to America in 1633. It nearly decimated Native Americans. Historians estimate the death toll to be around 20 million. The Modern Plague in 1860s killed more than 12 million people in China, Hong Kong and India, until a vaccine was produced for the bacterial infection in the 1890s.

The Spanish flu pandemic is believed to have claimed 500 million lives between 1918 and 1920. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, better known as SARS was detected in 2003 in China. By July more than 8,000 cases and 774 deaths had been reported. The 2009 swine flu pandemic, caused by a new strain of H1N1, which originated in Mexico, may have killed as many as 575,000 people. The 2014 Ebola hemorrhagic fever in West Africa, which claimed around 11,300, was the largest Ebola outbreak to-date. The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has killed over 25 million people and counting. These are but a few examples of how potent diseases are as a population control mechanism.

Disease ecologist, Dr. Peter Daszak, who examined the correlation between the risk of pandemic and human population density in a 2008 study published in the journal, Nature, has found that the rate of emergent diseases caused by novel pathogens has increased significantly with time. What’s more interesting is that more than 300 new infectious diseases emerged between 1940 and 2004 and such diseases were linked to human population growth spurts.

While these studies amply demonstrate that nature will keep human population growth in check, other studies have found that viruses actually shape human evolution. Two studies by R.G Ferguson, ‘The Indian tuberculosis problem and some preventative measures’ (1933) published in the National Tuberculosis Association Transactions and ‘Some light thrown on infection, resistance and segregation by a study of tuberculosis among Indians’ (1934) published in Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association suggest that many of the surviving American Indian families were descendants of the families that had lower mortality rates during the peak of the epidemic in the 1880s. This in turn indicates that natural selection favours disease resistant qualities. That goes to show that, of all the human needs, the need for procreation is a major factor that drives human evolution and ensures the survival of the species.

According to research article, ‘Viruses are a dominant driver of protein adaptation in mammals’ by David Enard, et al, Department of Biology, Stanford University, United States, published in the journal eLife, 30 percent of all protein adaptations since humans' divergence from chimpanzees have been driven by viruses. The lead author explains that when an epidemic or pandemic targets a certain population, the population either adapts or goes extinct.

ScienceDaily article on the subject, ‘Viruses revealed to be a major driver of human evolution’ argues that, since viruses hijack nearly every function of a host organism's cells in order to replicate, it would make sense that a virus would be the ultimate driver of cellular evolution as opposed to other evolutionary pressures such as predation and environmental conditions.

As such, in a sense the over 300,000 people who died of COVID-19 has been culled out of the human gene pool because their genetic makeup didn’t possess disease resistant qualities. In an ecological point of view, this is ruthlessly practical.

The question is whether through vaccines and preventive measures we are undermining our own evolutionary process that could allow us to become a disease resistant species. Whatever killed off the dinosaurs, be it a disease or a comet that collided with Earth, it paved the way to dominance of man over the world. It’s a natural evolutionary process. What’s to say that we are the culmination of evolution on earth and not just another link in the process of evolution?