Biological catastrophe International community unprepared to deal with catastrophic biological event

The risks of a global catastrophic biological event are growing, intensified by an increasingly interconnected world, terrorist and state interest in weapons of mass destruction, global political instability, and rapid advances in biotechnology. International leaders and organizations today are unprepared to react with the kind of effective, coordinated response needed to investigate and identify the pathogen, prevent the spread of disease, and, most importantly, save lives.

NTI says that without the right procedures and tools in place, there’s little doubt that a rapidly spreading high-consequence biological event would place overwhelming stress on the people and institutions responsible for response. The lack of established procedures would very likely undermine the trust and cooperation needed between the health professionals, humanitarian responders, and security officials who would be aiming for a coordinated, effective international response.

To address this preparedness deficit, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security, and the Center for Global Development convened senior health, humanitarian, security, and political leaders to participate in a tabletop exercise designed to explore command, control, and coordination of an international response to an unusual and rapidly spreading biological event that began in the fictional country of “Vestia.” NTI says that the exercise uncovered major gaps in international coordination, information sharing, and attribution between health and security officials. It sparked disagreements among leading experts over whether a permanent United Nations-based coordinator is needed to facilitate coordination among the various entities responsible for pandemic response. And it uncovered divisions over committing attention and resources to finding the perpetrators as a way to deter future attacks.

A new NTI Paper, A Spreading Plague: Lessons and Recommendations for Responding to a Deliberate Biological Event, presents key findings and recommendations for urgent improvements to avoid catastrophic consequences of deliberate and other high-consequence biological events.

In addition to key findings from the tabletop exercise, the report offers recommendations from the event organizers, shaped around four emergent themes:

·  International Coordination

·  Information Sharing

·  Investigation and Attribution

·  Financing for Response and Preparedness

NTI notes that while the report’s recommendations were informed by the discussion during the tabletop exercise, they should not be attributed to the event participants.

— Read more in Elizabeth Cameron et al., A Spreading Plague: Lessons and Recommendations for Responding to a Deliberate Biological Event (NTI : Bio, 2019)