• Preventing and Responding to High-Consequence Biological Threats

    A new report offers actionable recommendations for the international community to bolster prevention and response capabilities for high-consequence biological events.

  • The U.K. Government’s Preparedness for COVID-19: Risk-Management Lessons

    A new report from the U.K. National Audit Office (NAO) examines the government’s risk analysis, planning, and mitigation strategies prior to the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report notes that the pandemic has exposed a vulnerability to whole-system emergencies – that is, emergencies which are so broad that they require the engagement of the entire system.

  • Two-meter COVID-19 Rule Is “Arbitrary Measurement” of Safety

    A new study has shown that the airborne transmission of COVID-19 is highly random and suggests that the two-meter rule was a number chosen from a risk ‘continuum’, rather than any concrete measurement of safety.

  • Russian Anti-Vaccine Disinformation Campaign Backfires

    For more than a year, Russian-aligned troll factories overseeing thousands of social media accounts have been spreading anti-vaccine messages in an aggressive campaign to spread conspiracy theories and cast doubt on Western coronavirus vaccines. But the year-long offensive appears to have backfired. Russian officials now worry that the anti-vaccine skepticism encouraged by the troll factories has spilled over and is partly responsible for the high level of vaccine hesitancy among Russians.

  • News Manipulation by State Actors

    Did authoritarian regimes engage in news manipulation during the pandemic? How can such manipulation be brought to light? New report shows that both Russia and China appear to have employed information manipulation during the COVID-19 pandemic in service to their respective global agendas.

  • Public Health as National Security

    Experts agree that it is not a matter of if, but when, the next large-scale outbreak of infectious disease will occur. Even as more countries devote more resources to health security – defined as the framework for preventing, detecting, and responding to biological threats, whether naturally occurring, accidental, or deliberate – there are still disagreements about whether public health be framed as a national security issue.

  • Addressing Natural and Deliberate Biological Threats: Early Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

    “Infectious disease threats will continue to emerge, whether naturally, by accident, or deliberately. Stopping them from spreading and causing mass effects is possible even today, but we have much work to do bringing our assets to bear” said Andy Weber, Senior Fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR).

  • COVID-19: The Swedish Model

    In the spring of 2020, as it was deciding on what policies to take to deal with the spreading COVID-19 pandemic, the Swedish government chose a different path to many other countries, one based on a voluntary approach and personal responsibility rather than more intrusive measures. The Swedish government has created a commission of experts to assess whether the Swedish model of dealing with the pandemic was reasonable and effective.

  • Women in Global Health: Providing Actionable Insights to Healthcare Providers

    Women make up 70 percent of the healthcare workforce. After almost 2 years of pandemic-driven challenges, women healthcare workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 response are facing burnout, are leaving the healthcare workforce, and are shifting to part-time work.

  • Preventing Future Pandemics Starts with Recognizing Links between Human and Animal Health

    The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that zoonotic diseases – infections that pass from animals to humans – can present tremendous threats to global health. More than 70 percent of emerging and reemerging pathogens originate from animals.

  • Modeling Improvements Promise Increased Accuracy of Epidemic Forecasting

    Accurate forecasting of epidemic scenarios is critical to implementing effective public health intervention policies. Much progress has been made in predicting the general magnitude and timing of epidemics, but there is still room for improvement in forecasting peak times.

  • U.S. Gun Violence Increased 30 Percent During COVID-19 Pandemic

    Gun violence increased by more than 30 percent in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers said that stress, domestic violence, lack of social interactions and greater access to firearms might have contributed to the increase.

  • Targeted Interventions: Containing Pandemics, Minimizing Societal Disruption

    COVID has so far infected 21 million people, with more than 4.5 of them dying. Nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as case isolation, quarantining contacts, and the complete lockdown of entire countries, often come at the expense of economic disruption, harm to social and mental well-being, and require costly administration costs to ensure compliance.

  • What Can Masks Do?

    Facemasks have been a contentious issue since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic, and the discussion of whether or not the wearing of facemasks should be required – and who has the right, if any, to mandate the wearing of facemasks – has become thoroughly politicized. Lisa M Brosseau and colleagues write that the urgency of responding to the pandemic led to many poorly constructed studies, and the circulation of studies before they were peer-reviewed. “Endless unrealistic expectations, along with gross misinterpretation and overconfidence, have been evident, including claims that masks alone would ‘flatten the curve,’ ‘end the pandemic,’ or ‘reduce the clinical severity of COVID-19’.” They write. “Now, one and a half years into the pandemic, if masks were as effective as many believed them to be, we should have seen significant impacts. But that has not been the case anywhere on the globe.”

  • FEMA’s Initial Response to COVID-19

    During the first months of FEMA’s response to the spreading COVID-19 pandemic, the United States faced a debilitating shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare personnel and ventilators for seriously ill patients in hospitals. DHS IG examined the effectiveness of FEMA’s response.