US releases biodefence strategy

WASHINGTON: In a sign of how Covid-19 has placed pandemics at the centre stage of national security, the Joe Biden administration released a National Biodefence Strategy and Implementation on Countering Biological Threats, Enhancing Pandemic Preparedness, and Achieving Global Health Security on Tuesday.

According to a senior administration official who briefed reporters in the run up to the release of the document, the plan directs all departments and agencies to prioritise biodefence in their annual budgets; it directs the “intelligence community to continuously track the evolving threat landscape in this area, providing critical information needed to address naturally occurring, accidental, and deliberate biothreats”; and it boosts US government’s ability to respond to these threats by ensuring it exercises annually emergency responses, reviews its ongoing responses, and adjusts federal priorities on a regular basis.

Laying the background to the document, a second administration official said that Covid-19 had “absolutely devastated” communities in America and the rest of the world, resulting in millions of death and trillions of dollars of economic losses, “And beyond Covid, the global community is concurrently fighting outbreaks of monkeypox, of polio, Ebola in Uganda, highly pathogenic avian influenza right here in the US, and other infectious diseases.”

The official added that the risk of another pandemic “as bad or worse” than Covid-19 is a real threat. The strategy document is based on a set of assumptions. These include the following principles - biological threats are “persistent”; they originate from multiple sources; they don’t respect borders; they impact critical infrastructure and supply chains; multisectoral and multilateral cooperation is essential for biodefence; a “one health approach” reduces the occurrence and impact of bioincidents; and science and technology will continue to advance globally.