For years, public fitness experts have warned of a disease spreading around the world and killing millions. After all, it had happened before.
Measures were taken around the world to stumble upon the first symptoms of a never-before-seen mistake with harmful potential.
That is why, on December 31, 2019, China informed the World Health Organization that a new pathogen was circulating in Wuhan, the most populous city in central China. A day later, in this city of 12 million people, a rainy market promoting live animals closed for fear that it would be the source of the virus that would later be called SARS-CoV-2.
Three years later, the trail of a fatal pathogen remains spreading around the world.
Now, in addition to being concerned about a virus that can pass from animals to humans, experts worry about study injuries and, unthinkably, the option of someone deliberately releasing a highly contagious and fatal pathogen.
A pandemic has long been known to be more dangerous to global security than chemicals, nuclear or conventional, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public fitness law at Georgetown University and a leading expert on global fitness.
“We’ve noticed this unfolding with COVID, and COVID is the worst pandemic risk we face,” he said.
Although COVID-19 has killed more than 6. 6 million people worldwide, other pandemics have been more lethal. It is estimated that the 1918 flu claimed the lives of 50 million people worldwide and that in the fourteenth century, the Black Death killed 30% to 60% of all Europeans in just 4 years.
Public health and national defense experts fear the next pandemic will have even greater value than this one. And they say the country has to be ready.
“It’s up to the U. S. to do so. “It’s the U. S. and other countries to prepare for anything that comes from biology, whether it’s nature, engineering or a lab accident,” Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Bloomberg. School of Public Health.
Gostin sees nature as the most likely source of the next pandemic. A highly lethal strain of bird or swine flu can naturally mutate and become contagious to humans. This situation has kept fitness experts like Gostin awake long before COVID-19.
But the reasons are possible.
“We have a host of threats ranging from lab leaks and bioterrorism to biological weapons and zoonotic herbal consequences,” said Gostin, of the 2021 e-book “Global Health Security: A Blueprint for the Future. “
“All of this leads to a high probability that we have more common pandemic-type threats and we want to take them seriously as a threat to national security. “
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is the third coronavirus to pose a major health threat, after SARS first and Middle East respiratory syndrome, which are far more deadly. The mortality rate of MERS would threaten the economy, chains of origin and the fitness system, to mention human life.
And those are the direct consequences.
With COVID-19, we will most likely see indirect effects in the coming years, as other people who skipped the regime’s medical care are diagnosed with more complex and lethal cancers, and young people who did not receive the regime’s vaccines have their health deteriorated with preventable diseases, among others. other consequences, says Gostin.
“If you think about a much worse pandemic, you can multiply it tenfold or even fifty times in terms of the economic and social damage that the United States would suffer,” he said.
This means the world will have to have a greater capacity to combat such threats and not spend cash only after the crisis hits, they and others said.
Currently, about five percent of the country’s fitness spending is faithful to public fitness and preventing the next crisis. “It’s a rounding mistake in the U. S. budget. “The U. S. ” said.
The concept of designing a fatal pathogen that causes the world to have health problems sounds like science fiction or superhero movies. But it is no longer a fantasy.
Kevin Esvelt, an MIT biologist, said other people in his own lab can theoretically assemble a harmful virus from DNA ordered for less than $1,000.
Once pandemic-capable viruses are identified, thousands of others around the world have the clinical education to make them from mail-order artificial DNA.
“Imagine a world where you can order weapons-grade plutonium by mail,” he said, “and there are thousands of engineers who have the ability to assemble anything that might just be a bomb. “
In less than a hundred days last fall and winter, the omicron variant of the coronavirus spread from southern Africa to the rest of the world, infecting 26% of Americans, Esvelt said, illustrating how temporary a pandemic reaction will have to be.
Esvelt warned Congress earlier this year that identifying pandemic viruses would make pandemics widely available and recently released a 30-page plan setting the level for a global in which they can be unleashed.
The threat is genuine and increases over time as engineering biology becomes easier, said Jaime Yassif, vice president of global biological systems and policy at the Nuclear Threats Initiative. Still, it is “trivial to create a biological weapon that causes significant harm. “She said.
COVID-19 has made the risk more real, she and others said, showing how a pandemic can wreak havoc.
“Some other people would possibly have taken note of the influence and paid more attention to it than before,” Yasif said. “It is moderate to assume that the intentions are already there and that they can grow, and that the functions are increasingly at hand. That’s my rational calculation of why I take it seriously. “
The Global Biological Weapons Convention was enacted in March 1975 to prevent countries from creating or generating biological weapons. It has largely remained since then, with some countries that signed the treaty believed to have or have had secret programs.
For example, the Soviets tried to make Ebola a more contagious pathogen, but it didn’t work well, said Christine Parthemore, executive director of the Council on Strategic Risks, a nonpartisan, nonprofit security policy institute.
China and Iran would possibly have reached the limit, or even crossed it, by making offensive weapons, he said. Based on public tests conducted by the U. S. government. In the US, for example, Iran can use “botulinum toxin, which is not for Botox, at least not only. “
“The story is there,” Parthemore said.
The Defense Department first looked at mRNA vaccines, which have been used to fight COVID-19, as a quick way to counter state biological threats and modified pathogens, he said.
And the vaccine that proved effective this summer against mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) evolved to counter the option that someone is looking to release its deadliest cousin, smallpox, in the world.
But the vast majority of countries are unlikely to try to release a fatal pathogen, he said, because it would be difficult to protect their own populations from a large outbreak.
However, Parthemore fears that nations will lose religion in foreign settlements and treaties. Russia’s war against Ukraine and the inability of the United Nations to prevent it have weakened foreign agreements in the eyes of many countries, in addition to those aimed at biosecurity.
“The loss of acceptance as truth with cooperation and the UN and collective action and Russia and others acting as if they have further deteriorated the criteria that we cherished so much for decades, is quite frightening,” he said.
One question is what regulation will be imposed on clinical pictures and researchers involved in the synthesis of possible pathogens.
Yassif supports “more conduct regulations” to safeguard clinical advances that can be misused by bad actors.
In 2012, the clinical network and others debated studies in the United States and the Netherlands that explored five mutations that make bird flu more contagious to humans. Some members of the virological network have defended these studies to understand naturally emerging dangers. Yassif et al. This concern has facilitated the creation of a global danger.
“The systems we have in position are not as extensive or physically powerful as they are,” Yasif said.
The structure of the new biosafety laboratories has also raised considerations among experts.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than a dozen countries have announced plans to build level four laboratories, the safety point, designed to investigate maximum harmful pathogens.
These labs lack strong foreign oversight, Parthemore said. “Obviously, if I had an offensive program and had to safely engineer pathogens, a BSL-4 lab is where I would do the job,” he said. transparency in those laboratories and their proliferation is a massive problem. “
It’s also very simple to sort out a pathogen’s building blocks on the Internet, Yasif said. percentage of the market that is unclear, and we’re looking to close that gap,” he said.
No action can reduce the threat of a pandemic to zero, Mavens said.
But there are many features for moves and a “layered defense”. Intervening in the procedural problems that a bad actor would use to create a biological weapon will make the world a much safer place.
Technology can solve the challenge created through biology, Esvelt said. He envisions increased protective equipment, especially for physical care and other workers, as well as germicidal lamps that kill pathogens without harming other people using the same indoor space. He needs sewage and airtracking at airports to stumble upon new pathogens that can have a long era of incubation before symptoms appear, as HIV does.
Preparation is not just about clinical advances. It also means making an investment in people, said Dr. Raj Panjabi, senior director of biodefense and global physical security at the U. S. National Security Council. U. S.
For decades, EE. UU. no has invested enough in public and animal fitness providers, he said, adding epidemiologists, veterinarians, public fitness nurses and network fitness workers.
In October, Biden’s leadership unveiled what it called a national biodefense strategy and implementation plan to counter biological threats, pandemic preparedness, and ensure global physical security.
Panjabi defined some of the strategy’s goals and timelines in a webinar this fall:
“Time is life in a hurry,” he said. The quality of our reaction depends on the quality of our preparation. “
Management has asked for $88 billion over the next five years to put the plan into effect. “Billions to invest now to save trillions in the long term and countless human lives in the United States and around the world,” Punjabi said.
Congress has still allocated enough budget to continue this program.
“It doesn’t make sense that Congress didn’t take into account the administration’s proposed pandemic preparedness program,” said Inglesthrough, who recently co-authored a proposal to conduct diagnostics in the event of a physical emergency. He hopes he will be assigned soon.
Their disastrous pandemic is inevitable, they said, but prevention requires preparation and foresight.
“The pathogens of bureaucracy are very wise to adapt and convert the form. But fashion science is very wise to counter that,” Gostin said. “If we are wise and well prepared and invest heavily and vigorously in it, we can particularly reduce risk. “
Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday. com.
USA TODAY’s fitness and patient protection policy is made possible in part through a grant from the Masimo Foundation for health care ethics, innovation and competence. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial contributions.