A taste. [AmericanMind/Claremont Inst.] It’s complicated, but we’ve been preparing for this.
In September 2018, President Trump unveiled the first National Biodefense Strategy the U.S. has ever adopted. It laid out a series of priorities and goals that would move us for the first time toward a coordinated, all-means-of-national-capability response to biological events, whether natural or resulting from a biological attack.
The key word there is toward. Later that year the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory introduced a publicly available tool that maps out current biodefense responsibilities. The tool also displays the tangle of laws, directives, and agencies that together are intended to protect U.S. citizens. It is telling that the nickname for this tool is “the spaghetti monster.” Click on that link and browse the site to get some idea of what a complex mess things were in in 2018, and still are to a fair degree since it was last updated late in January.
Nonetheless, the National Biodefense Strategy marked a significant step forward in preparing for potential crises. It argues that an increasingly interconnected world puts the U.S. at risk of biological threats no matter where they originate or in what way. An April 2019 Summit was held to address implementation of the strategy. The transcripts of all of the talks, minus one from the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense that was classified, are available online and worth careful reading. In January, the GAO reported on challenges and opportunities in implementing the strategy.
The National Strategy lays out five key goals:
- Enable risk awareness to inform decision making across the biodefense enterprise (see “spaghetti”). This includes analyses and research to characterize deliberate, accidental, and natural biological risks, and surveillance and detection activities to detect and identify threats and anticipate incidents.
- Ensure biodefense enterprise capabilities to prevent bioincidents, including naturally occurring disease and laboratory accidents, consistent with our counter-WMD activities. This includes disrupting plots, degrading technical capabilities, and deterring support for terrorists seeking to use bioweapons. It also acknowledges the importance of dual-use biological research.
- Ensure biodefense preparedness in order to reduce the impact of bioincidents. This includes maintaining a vibrant science and technology base, ensuring strong public health infrastructure, developing/updating/exercising response capabilities, establishing risk communications, developing and efficiently distributing/dispensing medical countermeasures, and preparing to collaborate across the country and internationally to support biodefense.
- Rapidly respond to limit the impacts of bioincidents through information sharing and networking, coordinated operations and investigations, and effective public messaging.
- Facilitate recovery to restore the community, economy, and the environment after a bioincident. This includes actions to restore critical infrastructure services and capability, coordinate recovery activities, provide recovery support and long-term mitigation, and minimize cascading effects here and around the world.
In other words, responding to a bioincident like the current spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus today requires significantly more than rushing out tests and giving soothing messages—or is it panicked messages we are now demanding from the administration?