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Monday, March 18th, 2024

Council on Strategic Risks urges federal support for defense program combating biological threats

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When Ebola was a low priority for the private sector, the Department of Defense (DOD) was one of the few organizations that funded early-stage research and development on vaccines and treatments. The division of the DoD that played a critical role in that research was the Chemical and Biological Defense Program (CBDP) whose scientists accelerated vaccine development, created an FDA-approved Ebola virus diagnostic, and helped deploy therapeutic drugs.

CBDP’s work to address biological threats spans the globe. When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011 and the Syrian government began using the deadly nerve agent sarin as well as chlorine to attack its own citizens, it was the CBDP that identified an Israeli company that could provide antidotes and auto-injectors for the U.S. military and others. Program officials helped usher the company through the Emergency Use Authorization process of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

However, over the past decade, the CBDP has received annual cuts in its funding.

“Key U.S. Initiatives for Addressing Biological Threats, Part 1: Bolstering the Chemical and Biological Defense Program” is a report issued this month by the Council on Strategic Risks that outlines reasons why the federal government should support the agency.

One of the recommendations by the report’s authors is to fund CBDP by $2 billion in the next year. In subsequent years, the authors recommend increasing the yearly budget to $7 billion.  The authors suggest this increase focus on biological threats, restoring funding to CBDP’s medical countermeasure development and international partnerships.

Beyond CBDP, they propose the U.S. government invest $10 billion each year for DoD programs that address infectious disease threats, as well as $10 billion annually to the Department of Health and Human Services, spanning a decade.

“(Former) Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s Defense Wide Review in late 2019 slashed the CBDP top line nearly 10 percent and the medical biodefense component one third. This worsened an already long cycle of neglect against biological threats,” write the report’s authors.

One of the more troubling claims mentioned in the publication was that the CBDP’s potential contributions to the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic response were restricted and sometimes disallowed. “This stems from disagreements within the DoD on whether the CBDP should be involved in responding to natural infectious disease outbreaks given that its mission has been to counter biological weapons,” according to the report.

They add: “Biological defense spending has been on a consistent downswing since 2014, while chemical defense spending has been trending upwards. This is a significant problem, and in 2020 it caught the attention of Senators Mitt Romney and Mike Lee, who introduced an amendment requiring DoD to report on how cuts to the CBDP will have an effect on national security.”

The report offers reasons why biological agents might be a preferred method of attack against the United States by bad actors. For example, 100kg of anthrax released over Washington, D.C. could result in 130,000 to 3 million deaths, approximately the same lethality of a hydrogen bomb, according to the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress. In the event of nuclear war, the former Soviet Union weaponized smallpox and conducted tests to prepare to use it against U.S. cities. Also discouraging is that a deliberate biological attack may seem as if it is naturally occurring.

To counter these threats, the report offers the following changes to CBDP:

  • Investing in development of hand-held, user-friendly metagenomic sequencing technologies that can be used in the field or clinic to detect biological weapons or emerging infectious diseases.
  • Leaning into the promise of nucleic acid-based therapeutics, which should continue to receive the investments needed to fully advance them to potential use authorization.
  • Developing next generation personal protective equipment that is more effective against viruses. The technology is here to create masks far superior to N95s and specifically targeted against viruses and bacteria.
  • Researching sterilization and pathogen transmission suppression within buildings, planes and ships, a key issue during both a pandemic and biological weapons attack.
  • Developing point-of-person diagnostic platforms to be used routinely in the field.
  • Continuing broad-spectrum, small-molecule antiviral research.

In order to increase cooperation between the CBDP and its intragovernmental, private sector, and international partners, U.S. officials should conduct annual exercises to test its early warning capabilities for novel pathogens and rapid responses, according to the report.

Additionally, robotics, machine learning and AI, advanced manufacturing capabilities, among other technologies, can more rapidly and effectively meet national security needs. One function of increasing funding should be to meet a goal of advancing new medical countermeasures to FDA approval and licensure. The authors suggest CBDP is ideally positioned to play a key role in this area.

The Council on Strategic Risks report is the first in a series examining specific departments and programs in the U.S. federal government whose missions include countering biological threats.