Our picksNavigating the World that COVID-19 Made | Federal Agencies’ Cyber Flaws | Conspiracists & Science, and more

Published 5 November 2021

·  Syrian Chemical Weapons Conspiracy Theorists

·  How Conspiracists Exploited COVID-19 Science

·  Navigating the World that COVID-19 Made: A Strategy for Revamping the Pandemic Research and Development Preparedness and Response Ecosystem

·  Operation Warp Speed: The Interagency and Public-Private Collaborations that Drove It

·  Newly Released FBI Tapes Show White Supremacist Members of ‘The Base’ Plotting Terror Attacks

·  A Ransomware Gang Shut Down After Cybercom Hijacked Its Site and It Discovered It Had Been Hacked

·  Biden Administration Orders Federal Agencies to Fix Hundreds of Cyber Flaws

Syrian Chemical Weapons Conspiracy Theorists  (Brian Whittaker, Newslines Magazine)
A collection of non-mainstream bloggers has been paid by a murky organization to parrot Assad regime and Kremlin falsehoods

How Conspiracists Exploited COVID-19 Science  (Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Nature Human Behavior)
During the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theorists have exploited the provisional nature of scientific consensus and the realities of how science is conducted to paint scientists and public health leaders as malign actors.

Navigating the World that COVID-19 Made: A Strategy for Revamping the Pandemic Research and Development Preparedness and Response Ecosystem  (Thomas J. Bollyky et al., Center for Health Security, Johns Hokins University)
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that a true, end-to-end research and development (R&D) and response ecosystem—meaning, one that develops, produces, and delivers needed vaccines to global populations in a rapid and equitable fashion—remains an elusive goal. Most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have been unable to acquire and administer a sufficient supply of COVID-19 vaccines, and the dearth of vaccines and limited capacity to deliver them are prolonging the pandemic and contributing to destabilizing economies and societies around the world. Multilateral initiatives, bilateral aid, and vaccine donations, though useful, have been slow to arrive and insufficient to provide adequate vaccine coverage for LMIC populations. The consequences of this deeply inequitable global response extend beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Global initiatives to prepare for and respond to future pandemic threats cannot succeed if LMIC governments believe they will be the last to benefit from vaccines produced as a result of improvements in global disease surveillance, increased sample sharing, or expedited vaccine R&D.
In short, the actions being taken to respond to the COVID-19 crisis are writing the opening chapters to the story of how we will prepare for and respond to the next pandemic threat. To prevent the devastation that has accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic from happening again, we must not only identify the successes and failures that have emerged from the global response, we must also anticipate how our response has changed government, industry, and civil society priorities for the pandemic R&D and response ecosystem in order to confront to future threats.