The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) has offered recommendations for the United States to prevent and respond to potential biological catastrophes, such as the novel coronavirus.
NTI officials say global biological catastrophes may not only impact millions of lives but could have a huge impact on the global economy. Thus, they must be treated as a threat to global peace and security, as well as an international public health challenge.
NTI says recent assessments of global preparedness – including the Ebola and Coronavirus outbreaks — show that no country is prepared to fight large-scale epidemics. Safety and security measures have not kept pace, leaving nations, including the U.S., unprepared to identify emerging risks and prevent releases of pandemic agents. The situation is exacerbated by advances in widely accessible biotechnologies, such as gene editing and synthesis, which have made it easier, cheaper, and faster to create dangerous agents.
NTI — along with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and The Economist Intelligence Unit – created the Global Health Security (GHS) Index to measure readiness for such catastrophes. The index reveals that most countries receive a failing grade for outbreak preparedness, with an average overall health security score among 195 countries of 40 out of 100. Further, most countries have health systems that aren’t built to withstand an emerging outbreak, with an average overall health system score of a shocking 26 out of 100.
Leadership by the United States is critical in the fight to prevent biological catastrophes. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) need to have programs and personnel in place to detect outbreaks before they become epidemics and to rapidly respond to emerging threats, like Coronavirus, before they become global crises. Further, the U.S. Government must provide leadership and advocacy for other governments to strengthen international institutions to better respond to biological threats. In 2014, the United States launched a major global response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, creating the Global Health Security Agenda.
To deal with the Coronavirus and other future outbreaks, NTI made a series of recommendations for the United States to take to reduce risks.
Specifically, NTI says the United States should convene a heads-of-state level summit on biological threats, chaired by the UN Secretary-General and increase U.S. funding for health security and related programs, including within the U.S. CDC, USAID, DoD, and State-led efforts.
Among other actions, the NTI recommends the following:
Reduce biotechnology risks, in cooperation with international research funders, publishers, and the private sector, by establishing a global mechanism for preventing illicit gene synthesis, funding innovations in biosecurity-by-design, and supporting an international entity to provide guidance on countering biotechnology catastrophe;
Spearhead the creation of a new global health security challenge fund to provide incentives for countries to fill identified outbreak preparedness gaps;
Support a permanent UN facilitator or office dedicated to responding to high consequence biological events;
Develop a network of U.S. global health security professionals in posts around the world, dedicated to building international capacity to detecting threats early and stopping outbreaks before they become epidemics;
Support a global health security workforce trained to respond in areas of crisis, weak infrastructure, violence, and instability;
Promote innovative solutions for the rapid development, scaling, and dispensing of medical countermeasures for emerging biological threats; and
Exercise pandemic preparedness at senior levels of government and participating in bilateral and multilateral pandemic preparedness exercises at least annually.