Atlantic Council Braces for Opportunities of Potential Bioterror Attack
Bill Gates' prediction that the next threat to humanity will come from a
bioterror attack is giving war hawks and corporate America a reason to get
excited.
Mint press News
by Raul Diego
February 12th, 2021
By Raul Diego
Less than a month away from the one-year anniversary of the pandemic's
official declaration, policy wonks at the Atlantic Council together with
former and current government officials are dissecting the "lessons" of the
Covid-19 epidemic to advise the Biden administration on the steps to take in
order to avert the next disaster.
Following a report by the Atlantic Council's "Forward Defense" program
housed within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security published in
October, a panel comprised of the report's author Franklin D. Kramer and
others, including former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Jane Holl
Lute and Jaclyn Levy, Director of the Infectious Diseases Society of America
(IDSA), discussed Kramer's "key findings" and how these should influence
White House policy moving forward.
Right from the top, Atlantic Council Vice President and Director of the
Scowcroft Center, Barry Pavel introduced the proceedings by establishing
that the American "homeland" is "a theater increasingly under threat," which
is facing a broad "spectrum of non-kinetic risks to U.S. critical
infrastructure and national security, such as cyberattacks, industrial
espionage [and] potentially bioweapons."
The last point squares with Bill Gates' prediction that the most imminent
threat to the U.S. will come in the form of a bioterrorist attack - a topic
he most recently broached during an interview with "Veritasium" in early
February. "Somebody who wants to cause damage could engineer a virus," Gates
warned, adding that "the cost, the chance of running into [such a virus] is
more than just the naturally-caused epidemics like the current one."
Gates has been spreading the idea of a bioterrorist attack since 2017 when
he revealed to a group of Redditors that he was "concerned about biological
tools that could be used by a bioterrorist." He also told The Telegraph that
same year that engineering a new strain of the flu would be "relatively
easy."
Despite buttressing his image as a supervillain in popular Internet culture,
such warnings did not originate with Gates and have been fueling the rise of
the biosecurity state in the U.S. since the late 1960s, when the father of
bioterrorist plots Joshua Lederberg and his cohorts in government were
sounding the alarm over Soviet bioweapons and imminent bioterror attacks
that called for more robust policies, laws, and new federal agencies to deal
with the purported threat.
Not out of nowhere
Those efforts yielded significant changes, culminating in the Blue Ribbon
Study Panel on Biodefense, which produced the first comprehensive policy
directive to address these questions on a legislative level through the
National Blueprint for Biodefense in 2015 and the establishment of the
Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, co-chaired by former Homeland Security
Secretary Tom Ridge and former Senator Joe Lieberman.
The pillars of biodefense outlined in the 2015 Homeland Security
Presidential Directive
The pillars of biodefense outlined in the 2015 Homeland Security
Presidential Directive
In September of last year, the Commission announced the creation of the
Apollo Program for Biodefense. As its name suggests, the promoters of the
biosecurity state want to liken their renewed zeal to space missions by
tackling the challenges "with the same ambition and ingenuity that put the
first human on the moon in 1969," in the words of co-chair Ridge.
Just this past January, the Commission published the program's first report,
subtitled "Winning the Race Against Biological Threats," which closely
aligns with the thrust of the Atlantic Council's approach to its policy
recommendations for the Biden administration, and uses the COVID-19 pandemic
as the jumping-off point to push for things like a "national pathogen
surveillance and forecasting center" and the full implementation of the 2015
Study Panel's recommendations.
Pavel, who is also the Director of the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center
for Strategy and Security, echoed the sentiment by exhorting Biden to adopt
what the think tank is calling strategies of "resilience" to safeguard the
"health, economic and security sectors" of the United States, warning that
"if the U.S. is to avoid and mitigate major systems shocks like Covid-19 in
the future, the President will need to prioritize and expand its focus on
resilience in the early days of this administration."
They're all in it together
The Forward Defense panel discussion centered on the requirements for a
national strategy based on the findings of the October report, which the
author summarized in the following five points: First, to "undertake major
research and development programs"; second, to "enhance public health";
third, to use artificial intelligence "to predict epidemiological trends";
fourth was the development of "a national pandemic plan and, finally
"prepare US biodefense for bioterrorism threats."
Jaclyn Levy from the IDSA referred to the progress made in these matters
over the years, conceding that "the U.S. government [had] developed already
prior to 2020 a number of pandemic preparedness programs and resources. But,
operationalizing them during the pandemic proved to be a challenge." She
further expressed her belief that "federal coordination and federal support
are absolutely critical to mounting a successful response [to biological
threats]," and going as far as attributing the spread of Covid-19 to "the
lack of a coordinated, centralized testing strategy funded by federal
dollars."
Levy was also keen on expanding the collection of genomic data from the
population, extolling the efforts to advance "precision medicine" through
public-private partnerships like the All of Us Research Program which set
out to collect and sequence the genomes of one million people "stored in a
biobank, which is housed by the Mayo Clinic," as well as other "true sort of
public-private partnership[s]" with Google and it's parent company Alphabet,
cautioning against turning away from such endeavors over potential privacy
concerns.
Franklin Kramer followed that with his own stamp of approval, stating that
"with the right incentive. we really can bring the private sector and the
innovation capacities, both in the United States and with allies and
partners to work on these issues," proposing that institutions like Fauci's
NIAID approach Congress with a five or ten-year plan, similar to how the
Pentagon does to procure funding for public-private partnerships in regards
to these programs.
The final piece
In 2008, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated the seed funding for
the creation of the IDSA's Center for Global Health Policy (CGHP), which
bills itself as "a trusted leader in shaping and advancing international and
national policies and investments in global HIV, TB, health security and
antimicrobial resistance."
Through the CGHP, IDSA is a regular "non-state" participant in World Health
Organization executive board meetings and is a strong advocate for global
immunization campaigns, which along with the vaccine development and
surveillance, remains one of the top priorities of the Gates Foundation.
In a section titled "Lessons From The Pandemic- Underprioritizing
Resilience" from his report, Kramer highlights the GAVI foundation - a Gates
initiative - as an example of how the private sector was better prepared for
a pandemic than most governments were, quoting from the organization's own
website describing it as "an elegant solution to encourage manufacturers to
lower vaccine prices for the poorest countries in return for long-term,
high-volume and predictable demand from those countries."
It seems that as the COVID-19 pandemic approaches its first year
anniversary, all of the previously scattered tactics and methods employed to
deliver a true biosecurity state are consolidating. The only thing missing
is the military defense component, which is the principal focus of the
Scowcroft Center. Conveniently, Bill Gates' bioterror prediction could put
that final piece into place.
Feature photo | A member of the Maryland National Guard sits in a