Building effective biodefense starts with understanding biological risk
With the announcements this Fall of the US Biodefense Posture Review and the UK Biological Security Strategy, it has been gratifying to see renewed attention to countering biological threats both within and beyond the United States. Global leaders are increasingly converging on two critical truths: that biological risk is accelerating, and that we need a better understanding of the new threat surface in order to manage and mitigate it. To this end, the epidemiology and risk analytics team at Concentric, the biosecurity business of Ginkgo, has spent years modeling the trajectory of global biorisk to help leaders understand how and how much the threat surface is changing. I wanted to share a couple of their recent findings, which I find both clarifying and, in some cases, tremendously motivating.
Here’s what they’ve found:
1. Zoonotic (animal-to-human) spillover of pathogens has been happening much more often and causing much more damage as time goes on. Specifically, the number of spillover events is increasing by about 5% each year, resulting in outbreaks that cause almost 9% more loss of life each year. This is “not an aberration or random cluster,” but rather “a multi-decade trend” of exponentially increasing frequency and severity. If it continues unchecked, we’re looking at a 12-fold increase in spillover-related deaths by 2050 as compared to 2020. These estimates are based on four disease types — SARS Coronavirus 1, filoviruses like Ebola and Marburg, Machupo virus, and Nipah virus — from 1963 to 2019. That means that this trend holds even without accounting for the COVID-19 pandemic, so it’s a conservative estimate.
“It’s not just that we are seeing more of these events but they are persisting longer and generating more fatalities. It points not just to the risk, but to the magnitude of the work needed to mitigate it.”
- Ben Oppenheim (Concentric’s Senior Director of data productization) in the Financial Times
2. Public health literature significantly and consistently underestimates the threat of severe epidemics and pandemics, like COVID-19. That means policymakers are too often operating under the seriously mistaken assumption that COVID-19 was a “once-in-a-lifetime” or even “once-in-a-century” pandemic, when in reality there’s a 50–50 chance that we’ll face another COVID-scale pandemic in the next 25 years. (Again, this is a lower-bound estimate.) This disconnect is happening because the vast majority of damage caused by epidemics lies in the “tail risk” of severe but infrequent threats and yet, public health infrastructure has been built primarily for relatively mild, frequent threats like endemic diseases, leaving us vulnerable.
What this tells me is that we don’t just need more infrastructure to mitigate and prepare for pandemics, but we need an entirely different approach than public health affords us. As my colleague Nita Madhav, the head of our epidemiology and risk unit, puts it, pandemics and epidemics “are not a foregone conclusion.” Biological threats have historically been a “neglected dimension of global security,” but they don’t have to be — we have the opportunity and the obligation to make biodefense an integral piece of national and global security.
“The key thing to understanding risk is that it is not immutable. An improved understanding of epidemic risk should compel us to action, to change the underlying calculus.”
- Sureka, Madhav, Oppenheim & Fan on the CGD blog
We need true early warning systems, like we build for hurricanes and other natural disasters, and rapid response capabilities that rival modern cybersecurity. “Early detection and intervention [have] been shown time and time again through research to be one of the most effective ways to limit the start of an outbreak,” my colleague Amanda Meadows, a data scientist, emphasizes. We’re making strides on monitoring sources of risk through spillover surveillance infrastructure alongside travel-based and conflict zone surveillance. I’m also excited that we’re working on new prediction tools that can enable earlier and more effective responses, with the support of national and international government partners. These are just the tip of the iceberg on our path to building the data and analytics infrastructure we urgently need to defend against biological threats of all kinds.
