The human race is one of, if not THE most wonderful and special entity in the universe.
We might be the only example of true consciousnesses in it.
Those who call us parasites/virus/ etc don't get what the gift of consciousness actually is or what it means.
Genesis, is a good starting point for an education.
I say "gift", those championing the OP would only see it as a curse.
Consciousness demands we behave like we do. We are only young, we have much to learn.
Like the child who outlives the womb it came from, so we must learn to outlive our birthplace because earth will not remain habitable to us forever (Regardless of our unconscious effects on it).
We HAVE to expand our horizons. Consciousness drives us to a higher place and forces us to pay the sometimes heavy costs.
The old farts and liberals who share and sponsor the opinion of the OP likely have nothing to fear from the future of the human race because they are nearing their input on it. For the following generations, that attitude, one that is reductive, contractive, is a disaster. We absolutely must look to grow and develop at ANY costs.
There are arguments that we are in a special moment, that we have to "use" the planet MORE than we are doing now. It is a philosophy that thinks that the human race must grow and develop as rapidly as it can, to reach a point where reliance on the finite resources are no longer crucial because we will have figured out how to overcome that problem.
Yes, we have SS guards, nuclear weapons, murderers, etc, but those are not the norm, we have people who give their lives to the betterment of others (Literaly millions of them in WWII), we have heroes on our doorsteps.
We have managed to massively reduce hunger, poverty, war in the recent past to an incredible degree and we will continue to improve the lives of our species at a rate never seen before in history.
So say we are a virus or a parasite is an insult to everyone of us and a marker of the wit of those who say such things.
We are as close to God as anything in the universe can be.
We are wonderful.