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February 1 - February 10, 2022
origins of these kinds of catastrophic events. Going forward, to prevent the next pandemic, we have to focus equal attention on improving global lab safety.
Nobody believes COVID emanated from a deliberate act.
But many foreign adversaries already assume that any American official traveling abroad could be operating on behalf of US intelligence agencies.
If more health reporting were regularly included in these assessments and treated on par with other threats, it would keep it in front of policymakers, so they would be in a more informed position to secure the nation against biological risks.81
Far from enabling these kinds of potential incidents, if public health experts collaborated more closely with our intelligence community it might help forestall such an approach.
The other piece of this puzzle, in addition to the clandestine capabilities, is the sequencing data.
In 2007, the cost of sequencing a single human genome was about $10 million, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute; today it’s under $1,000, and most predict the cost will soon fall below $100.91
In Brazil, testing of sewage found SARS-CoV-2-positive results in samples collected on November 27, 2019, much earlier than the first reported case in the Americas.
Like a lot of our pandemic planning, the creation of this program was triggered by fears surrounding the emergence of the H5N1 bird flu in 2005.105 Over its first ten years, PREDICT funded about sixty labs that became part of an ambitious global alliance to find viruses in animals that had the potential to leap into humans. Through this effort, a network of scientists collected and examined more than 140,000 biological samples from animals, identifying about 1,000 viruses that were never before cataloged. Among them was a new strain of Ebola.106 In 2016, PREDICT helped find a virus in China
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US funding for PREDICT was allowed to expire in 2019, just weeks before COVID emerged,
We also need to invest in technologies for fashioning drugs and vaccines that can defeat entire classes of respiratory viruses.
It took more than a month after the authorization of the first vaccine to begin vaccinating the 1.34 million residents of US nursing homes, where the most COVID deaths were occurring.
“Preliminary Investigations Conducted by the Chinese Authorities Have Found No Clear Evidence of Human-to-Human Transmission of the Novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV)
“Coronavirus Missteps from CDC and FDA Worry Health Experts,”
Kevin O. Saunders et al., “Neutralizing Antibody Vaccine for Pandemic and Pre-emergent Coronaviruses,” Nature (2021).
“Ski, Party, Seed a Pandemic: The Travel Rules That Let Covid-19 Take Flight,”
“Opinion: Intercepting Pandemics Through Genomics,”
David Cameron, “Scientific Coalition Developing Surveillance System for Detecting Emerging Pandemics in Real-Time,”
