Hi, everyone. My name is james matheny, the new ceo and president of the Rand Corporation. A nonprofit nonpartisan Research Organization committed to the public good. This is my first public event in my new role and i am grateful that its on biodefense. This is probably the topic i lost the most sleep over the last 20 years. I expect i will be losing more sleep tonight but but i thit will be worth it. The covid 19 pendant has shown a devastating impact can be due to a moderate pandemic, and we can imagine the impact of biological threats that are either here or on the horizon that have more thann a 1 infection the county rate. The biological threats that are enabled by advances and Synthetic Biology make possible to design pathogens that are evenre more severe, that are evn more deadly than what we find in nature. The capabilities are accessible not just to state biological weapons programs that unfortunately persist today but also to individuals. To help us understand the threats we face and what we can doca about them we are fortunate to have two congressional leaders on National Security issues and a distinguished panel of experts including dr. Borio has been oneof of my mentors on this topic for 15 years or im honored to first welcome our two distinguished guest from congress, representative mike turner who represents ohios tenth Congressional District in southwestern ohio which includes dayton and Wrightpatterson Air Force base. And in addition to serving a asn Ranking Member of the house intelligencege committee he is also Senior Member of the House Armed Services committee. And representative Brad Wenstrup who represent ohios second Congressional District which include part of cincinnati and counties east of the city. He is on the House Intelligence Committee where he serves as the Ranking Member of the Defense Intelligence subcommittee. And hes a doctor and serves in the Army Reserves and his Service Included a tour in iraq as as a combat surgeon. I now welcome representative turner to get his remarks. Thank you jason. Take you for having us here today and want to thank the Rand Corporation for hosting us. This is an effort on the part of the members of the Intelligence Committee to engage with the think tank and academic communities for purposes of gaining information and understanding about the topics within our jurisdiction make sure we focus on National Security. Its been one of our main goals to refocus the Intelligence Committee back to National Security actual threats that are posed to our nation by adversaries. This session today which your hosting fits greatly into our ability to get information from those individuals who are experts and have expertise to be able to take it back to congress which we can translate into actual policies. Want to thank doctor Brad Wenstrup for coordinating this and for being the lead on this. As you indicated jason the topic today is biological threats of biological weapons. Dr. Wenstrup in addition to incredible career in the army in which which you can decorate for heroism is of course known for his heroism in congress where he sayed Steve Scalise life as result of a shooting that occurred and perpetrated against the republicans in the baseball game, team. In addition on our Intelligence Committee his expertise as a doctor and having served in combat has been incredibly important. His focus and his ability to advocate for these issues as an Intelligence Community focused and as a threat to our nation has caused us to give more problems to these issues and, of course, the pandemic focused us all once again on the threats we have here. I want to thank dr. Wenstrup for his leadership, for his contribution to the Intelligence Committee and for his being the convener for this today with his experts and we look forward to this his continued leadership of the get the experts from these rand experts today. Dr. Wenstrup . I want to thank Ranking Member turner, thank you mike for this kind words but also thank you for your efforts to drive this committee to a further engagement with experts and leaders in the National Security field. I think congressman turner and i and at least those members on the Intelligence Committee that are engaging in these events, we all sit there and we are focused on willing to work with the Intelligence Committee. Yes as congress with t oversight roles but we are really determined to do more than just that. More than just an okay, we will find you. We want to be engaged with the conversation. Weag want to be engaged with our National Security risks and to be able to move forward. Asan legislators its important that we now not only engagee Broader Community to learn from them but have the opportunity to inform the public about the work we do on the e Intelligence Committee to the extent that we can, considering we deal with so many things that are classified and secret or i want to thank Rand Corporation for hosting this event. Its a great opportunity for us, you are leaders on so many issues so it was a natural fit for us to want to engage with rand on this National Security issues and the topic youre today, which is biodefense. You heard some of my background. Im a a physician, iraq war veteran, been in resource for 255 years and in congress for ten years. So with that background when the covid pandemic yet it was take the eyeopening because we saw in real time where we might be with preparedness for biologic event. And maybe a lack thereof as far as preparedness. But throughout my time in focus oni have been National Security and National Health security at everyat leve, whether its access to care in our communities or some situation like this that affects our national t security. One of the things that we have as physicians in the military is we have two missions. Went to have a Ready Medical force any medically ready force. Its extremely important that we do engage in these types of issues across the board. We see rapid Technological Advancements that can enable novel biological weapons perhaps and complicate detection and attribution and treatment, and with covid just remember it was named immediately a novel coronavirus. It certainly was. This discussion with the experts is timely and hopefully going to be informative and helpful and we will have an opportunity at the inn for people to ask questions either virtually or from here in the audience. I will just go into that a little bit. For those participating virtually if youd like to ask a question we will be using the platform slido. Go to webmac slido. Com and enter the hashtag biodefense. Im excited to have the panel we have today will be offering unique experiences and research to the table. I want to start with dr. Borio, senior fellow for Global Health at the council on Foreign Relations pictures also a venture partner at arch, a Venture Capital firm that provides earlystage Venture Capital for Technology Firms in Information Technology like sciences in physical sciences. She specializes in biodefense, emerging infectious diseases, medical Product Development and complex Public Health emergencies. She was formerly the Vice President at inqtel, and independent nonprofit strategic Investment Firm that works to identify, adapt deliver Innovative Technology solutions theupport the missions of United StatesIntelligence Community. She previously served assl director for medical biodefense preparedness at the National Securityct council answered as e acting chief scientist of the u. S. Food and drug administration, and the assistant commissioner for counterterrorism policy at the fda. You are going to be able to tell, we have some very qualified people here today. Doctor asha george is a public Health Security professional Whose Research and emphasis has been on practical academic and political. So she served in the u. S. House of representatives as senior professional staffer and subcommittee staff director on Homeland Security in the 110th and 111th congress. She has worked for variety ofs organizations including government contractors, foundations and nonprofits here as a contractor she supported and work with all federal departments especially the department of Homeland Security and the department of health and Human Services. Dr. George also served on active duty in the United States army in the military officer and a paratrooper and shes a decorated desert storm veteran. Dr. Daniel gerstein is a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation previously served as aor u. S. Department of Homeland Security they are as undersecretary. And deputy undersecretary in the science and technology directorate. He has extensive experience in security and defense while serving as a Senior Executive civilian in uniform and in industry. Before joining dhs doctor gerstein was a principal director for counter wmd in ost. He also served on the delegation that negotiate the peace settlement in bosnia, establish cybersecurity facility following 9 11 and developed a Surveillance System for dod. Dr. John parachini azucena International Defense researcher and from director of the rant intelligence policy center. His primary research included intelligence, counterterrorism, weapons proliferation and he has led rand projects on terrorist interest and an acquisition of chemical, biological, radiological and Nuclear Weapons. Opensource intelligence and emerging technologies. Previously dr. Parachini served as the executive director off te Washington Office of the Monterey Institute of International Studies center for nonproliferation studies. Before that he was a senior associate at the Henry Stimson center where he focused on nonproliferation and arms control issues. Doctor Tricia Stapleton a political scientist at the Rand Corporation, a Research Interests include science and technology policy, risk, Risk Perception and regulation of emerging technologies and Risk Assessment in communication. In particular dr. Stapleton Academic Work is focused on the adoption and regulation of emerging technologies and Food Production and assisted reproductive technologies with recent attention tono crispr and human gene and. Before rand stapleton was director of the Society Technology of policy program an assistant professor of Political Sciences at worcester policy institute. With that i think ive covered everyone, and i do want to say if you hear those long introductions its important because you get an understanding of where everyone is coming from. What i would like to do is start with 60 seconds or so have each of you characterize the threat we face when it comes to bioweapons and her own biodefense, and what you focus on when it comes to studying the issue. Lets go down the line. Thank you for having me. Its a pleasure to be here today. I spent my career working on biodefense both on the deliberate site as well as nationally occurring naturally occurring site. Sadly both continue to grow as a threat. Naturally occurring side were getting right now with still covid and then monkeypox and then polio, so i remember when i worked at the nsc i used to have this global map with all the hotspots and and i would prt every day and it was covered. Around the globe with t hotspots of things i was tracking. I did it on purpose i i used o line my binder with that map with the hotspots because it was so easy for the folks to forget about the biothreat. There so many matters and these sets are invisible, sometimes they go way but i remember that the advisor would glance at the think its a oh, my god is that what youre tracking today . It was important to keep that i think on the top of the binder. On the deliberate side they continued to grow as well. I would argue w the u. S. Has an unparalleled capability to respond and to address this. We had technology, and a vibrant science and technology infrastructure, a vibrant biotechnology infrastructure and i think our covid vaccines are good examples. No country is been able to develop such incredible vaccine no matter how imperfect they are but we have a fundamental problemnd in how we organize and leverage in those capabilities. Its a very complex enterprise to maintain and to adapt and to execute against the capabilities and we still have not found a way to properly organize effectively so that we can actually use this tremendous capabilities we have to limit the threat. The sad part is we dont get to choose what parts of this enterprise we attend to because it doesntt work unless all the parts are working together and to their capacity. We can talk more about that later. So i am. The executive director for the Bipartisan Commission on biodefense, and we look at all of the biological threats as well across the entire spectrum that have National Security implications which sadly is most of the now have a National Security implication. For us when it comes to biological weapons we have been focusing quite a great deal on what the state department is saying in a completely open source. They released a Compliance Report last year that was complying or describing compliance with biological Weapons Convention and other convention for that matter reckoned in that report baystate clearly completely unclassified the russia and north korea have active biological weapons programs and that china and the rent are close behind with their dual use technology andte abettg else they are involved in, china especially with their work and their investment in the bio economy. So thats fine and were looking at those countries likeng everybody is looking at those four country for a variety of reasons but i would say that from a Public Health perspective what we usually say is whenever youu have one case or a a numf cases you are aware of that are six more out there that are definitely out there but you just dont know where they are. And by the way homicide detectives think the same thing. So its an interesting pseudomathematical observation. That being the case we have to look at s this now and say for these four countries that we know about there are 24 others out there just doing their thing, pursuing for whatever reasons they are pursuing. Some of it has to do with competitiveness. Youve got some so we have got to have some too. Some of it has to do with real fear. Some of it has to do with the pursuit of asymmetric advantage battlefield. Some of it has to do if your talk about terrorist organizations with their philosophy on what kind of weapon would be the scariest and the worst toe accomplish their motive. Thats what were focusing when it comes to bw. At one of the thinker i was talking to jason right before the start about attribution. It is unfortunate that we have, we are in a position to we just are not ever sure. Is it or isnt a weapon . Theres nothing wrong with asking that question from a scientific perspective, from a congressional perspective, and intel perspective lets ask it but we cant answer it in a logical and relatively short time frame is not great. We need to make some more investments and get similar direction to the Intelligence Community and other communities, health care and Public Health as well, all of them to get us to the point where we can answer these questions more quickly. Otherwise from a prepared his perspective were going to be stuck trying to do something impossible which would be to prepare for everything as if it is a bw event or to treat everything like it is not. Thats not going to help us with our National Security. I would say is it or is it not, or could it be, right . It certainly is tough to go after lou and ill ship it i was taking off in my mind, my talking points and you hit them all so, let me put this in a little bit of the way i like to think about the framework. When youou talk about the spectm of biological risks it encompasses the things on one side that are naturally occurring such as a pandemic, and on the other side we talk about the deliberate use of weapons whether its from a state or a terrorist. But in the center is also something very interesting and thats where you things like negligence and Lab Accidents and all of the different things. Whats common about everything i just named . They are all related to human activity. We know, for example, k not only that the pandemic has some relationship to humans getting exposed whether in a lab, you know, im not taking that on here but its interesting as part ofer human activity. And the farther that we encroach upon native lands where humans havent been before, the more likely we are to find ourselves encroaching and giving attacked eye diseases. Thats a really important part. Human activity is something we need to think about. Obviously the accidents, the misuse, the sabotage our human activities as well. Having come from running a lab, biological safety lab, thats something we worried about on a daily basis. Despite our best efforts there were times when accidents did occur. Hopefully we were doing the right thing. We were doing the reporting period but what if people are not doing that reporting . We have to think about that. Now lets turn to that other part of the spectrum and that is the deliberate use. So putting this in a bit of historical c context, when we think about state biological programs, over the course of Human History there have been some 25 nations that have at some point had some sort of biological program. I being a little cagey here because some of them were only doing Early Research and development, some of them were doing a little bit further. They mightve done some testing on animal models and such pics on even went further in terms of openair testing and stockpiling. Stockpiling. We know, for example, the soviet union had Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles fitted with smallpox thatwi had been aerosolized. Wouldve been devastating. That something that i think we need to consider in terms of the history but where are we today . Asha said it was some four nations or so. Thats what the state Department Says right now. I think thats a decent number but the question really comes down to could a state, any state, create a biological weapon . And advanced state, absolutely. Even smaller states now have that capability. Lets turn to the act we havent talked about and that the bioterrorism. I think its very interesting to understand what has happened. It doesnt take very much biological material in order to have a very potent biological weapon, one that could kill on the order of what weve seen through this pandemic but do it in a single attack. What i want to leave you with here is biological weapons do not actually function the same way that naturally occurring diseases do. If you are in a biological attack in the main plume you are goingn to get tan, 100, 1000, 10,000 times the lethal dose. The normal incubation times will not apply to those sorts of attacks. And so when i think about this problem we need to look at the entire range and thats t really what it want to leave you with. I hope to be able to answer your questions. So dan has laid out the entire range which i think is a useful. The empirical record of use biological weapons is very small. So while the potential is great, the actual empirical record of the state or nonstate actors, terrace, is small. As the congressman knows before theel intelligence and Armed Service committee there are allr sorts of demands and our nation faces a wide range of security threats. So how to calibrate that threat i think is the real challenge that we face. And particularly in light of our having experienced a global pandemic. Which we talk about as a once in the sentry event but if we look over the last 20 years there have been more and more fool like viruses that have struck the global community. We have not been very effective, United States, as a country in handling the most recent. And yet we have terrific capabilities. So how do we need to think about that in a different way . How can we harness the potential of the biotechnology revolution that isch upon us for good and o mitigate those dangers . So the challenge of going last, everything has been i want to follow on to threats that ive heard from several of my colleagues here. One is representative wenstrup discussed this a little over in the introduction, or interest in crispr. These changes in gene editing tools, crispr being one that allows us to easily do gene editing experimentation. What does m that mean for the speed of research and experimentation atnt we might s . Its comparatively cheaper, more accessible. So sort of holding on that thread of who has the capabilities and what that might mean and how challenging that cann be then are surveillance ad into who is working on those things and how theyre working on them. And for different purposes as weve heard that necessary for the creation of bioweapons medicago all sorts of things. Also as a political scientist who is interested in risk regulation is what does a Regulatory Environment look like and what are the challenges we might have come to some global consensus around some of the risks associated with this kind of work, with this kind of development where we can collectively agree Nuclear Weapons are bad, and we know why they are bad, but we may begin to see very different responses to the types of experimentation that might happen around gene editing and how that can be very challenging globally to come up with a regulatory approach, to come up with a set of shared values or norms around that kind of experimentation. The questions of accessibility, who has access to these tools and techniques for creating new materials, what that might mean for a regulatory approach and understanding, and then what can we as the United States do to position ourselves as a leader in some of the global decisionmaking around it . You can tell we have a very well educated panel here, but also what i appreciate is actually a 360degree approach, as youre looking at the situation at hand. Not just focused necessary on one particular thing. This is a group of people up here you can tell that dont go through the process of heres what we know is a fact, heres our hypothesis and now lets try to verify it or not, and be able to say what we do know and what we dont know, and now were trying to find those answers, thats the key to success is we try to prepare for the threats we face. Im going to throw out a couple questions at one time. This is more of a roundtable. You can feed off of each other, thats fine but lets take the approach that way, any think you did that already in the first round so appreciated. The first question, however emerging technologies potentially changed capabilities and the Threat Landscape in safe the past tenap years . And what does the Threat Landscape look like for nonstate actors to utilize biological weapons in the future, whether its an organized or a terrorist organization or even individuals, lone wolves. I might start by observing you would think after this pandemic we would see greater interest on the part of terrorist to pursue dialogic weapons because look at what the pandemic has done, and yet ironically we havent seen that. Producing and appalling biological weapons is very difficult. Terrorist have expressed an interest in that, isis and alqaeda by given alternatives what weve seen is they had moved toey other means for conducting their dastardly violence, burning people in cages, beheading them, driving large trucks into crowds of people, crashing airplanes into tall buildings, often things we wouldnt have imagined before. We need to make sure we are not pursuing what we fear the most that we think they will do as opposed to what they have done. The empirical record is just a benchmark. The future is hardrk to foresee that we shouldnt overdraw the threat. We should make sure we understand how to calibrate it. Because in theal 1990s there was a time when homer secretary of defense colon held upse a a bf sugar and said if this were anthrax it could cover the whole washington metropolitan area. A screenshot of that was found in an alqaeda safe house and they said we didnt really focus on biological weapons until we saw how afraid the americans were of them. So we need to think carefully about how we calibrate this threat and what we say about it. Interesting when you say that because my mind goes how we have very educated scientists in mexico creating fentanyl, right . Its not for good reasons, you know, surgery, its wonderful if used in the right dose but not for good reasons. So how do we keep our eyes open for anything that looks like the beginning of taking people with the expertise . John mentioned the issue of imagination, what we imagine happening before. There are lots of things happeningg now. People are dreaming stuff up. Were going, a new age now, and combination of weapons of possible comp taking advantage of all of those like well roll abilities have been revealed across the world like covid. Now. Things are possible what people are doing and why theyre doing it are questions we have to answer. I dont think we should be studying National Policy of what happened before all by itself. Not every committee onom capitol hill and that every part of the white house should be focusing on future possibilities and endless imagination but some of them have to. Some of them, it has to be somebodys job to predict what could happen. It doesnt mean we take the entire National Budget and put it all into one place, but preparedness, military readiness, those two things are about not just probabilities are also possibilities and making sure people are prepared when something unusual something we havent seen comes down the pike. We are at a place in terms of science and technology were many more things are possible and went to figure out how were going to prepare and be ready. I would completely agree. I think theres been bio revolution in the last ten years with convergence of science and computing and ai and Data Sciences and acquisition of those technologies and tools have proliferated the barrier to the position those tools are lower now. We are in a very dangerous situation. It would be misguided to think that to minimize our wish the threat away. I dont think we should be wishing it away because it is very real. Saran did a study on the half of the department of Homeland Security where we were asked to think about how does biotechnology affect what up bioterrorist can do . We look at five different types of tears from effectually called one guy, a state sponsor terrorist we look at the range and thought about it. We started out with Safety Technologies and we quickly got down to 21 different technologies including crispr and some of the ones that get a lot of press. Frankly at the end of that study we came to some conclusions that were fascinating. We looked at time. The year 2000, 2018, and 23. What we expected to see was a lot on crispr and some of the new but what is fascinating is theti democratization of capabilities that become readily available. And by that what im really talking about here is if you think about the steps to develop a biological weapon, they entail getting the pathogen and growing the pathogen, shira find it, harvesting it and then moving it forward. So there are steps you have to accomplish. Whats happened in the community now is the first three steps after you acquire the pathogen are in a single desktop configuration. If you set the concentration, you put it in the proper feed, you turn it on, you can have 24 7 harvesting and thats just on the front end. On the backend it will take it in another desktop equivalent and it will do the drawing and the milling into the perfect respirable size. We have de skilled a lot of these four legitimate purposes. We have aerosol delivered insulin which is a a wonderful thing but on the other hand, that same technology could be used to develop, if you will, a tabletop approach to bioterrorism. And so we have to think about not necessarily all the high end and combining. Those are really high inn skills and theres still a lot of hurdles associated with that. Theres less hurdles associated with getting the pathogen and then running it through that kind of machine. I would say one note, on the front and it has proven historically to bee very difficult for terrorists to get a pathogen, and they generally have settled for something other than what they were originally going for. They tend to be, they will call it morbidity but not necessarily mortality as with thinking about at the highend. Johns point is well taken that we dont want to be so focused in one area, that we of these tried and true of the methods taken when we talk about terrorism or other types of ways to inflict violence on a population. But i think were in in a pef very high uncertainty and danan touched on this and blue as well where theres an intersection of different types of technologies. Everything is movingdihn at the speed that were notha quite sue yet how these things will work for how they can be leveraged in different ways. Its important to sort of i think imagine some of these possibilities, these intersections between these types of technologies, how they can be leveraged to do new and terrible things, sometimes good things like insulin as a aerosol, but sometimes bad things as well. Some the things we w have seen y with some of the impacts on society of social media we didnt anticipate. We didnt effectively anticipate risk and advance advance appropriately going into it. At least thinking for some of these issues to start think about what our approach might be, until we understand what the risk might be in support. I dont think the right maybe we canhey, fly these into buildings someday and kill people come right . So good intentions often people would find that there is used for it. My next question, some of the questions i had had kind of been answered in your answers here already but what role should publicprivate partnerships or the private sector more broadly have in helping the United States government prepare for and respond to biological threats . Our commission came up with an idea called the Apollo Program for biodefense. Its a grand project. We think like many of the other Grant Programs like going to the moon we can as a world, but within the United States in leadership position, take pandemics of the table in ten years with the correct amount of funding and everything else. When we did this research to come up with this report and our recommendations in it, we looked at all the other Grant Programs that have occurred to see what were the success factors, what made them successful, why is that we were able to call the what we were able to accomplish. There are six factors and you can tell again we are all scientists, we are all talking about factors that one of the most important is publicprivate partnerships and whether the private sector is partnering with the Public Sector or not, having the private sector involved is extremely important. We did not go to the man just because the United States government decided we are going to moon. We did not map the human genome because some government person said were going to map the genome. And so forth. I think its critically important, we have seen it demonstrated over and overr and over again. When we look at what happened with covid lets face it we could not have gotten to where we work without the private sector being involved in not just inma a small weight or wrie partway or 50 weight but in a leadership position position to get us where we needed to be with that. If we have any event occur or if were trying to prepare our military forces and our citizenry and our allies and everybody, were going to have to do that hand in hand with the private sector. If i can jump in on this, just to make sure im interpreting this correctly. You are not saying then government is involved. No. What were really talking about, let me finish and this thought, i think wey are really talkings about is government has a role and that role is really important early on in trying to identify funding and resources and help promote, and even to identify areas where there a are interests for broader technology. Thenre we have this sort of enterprise across the science and technology, i will call it an enterprise again, but we have this thing and its a bit of, it was characterized back in 1993 and is still the same way, im nonsystem. Nonsystem. We kind of a allout to organically fight itself. Part of that are Venture Capitalists who come in and help stimulate. Where the government has a Critical Role is to be able to identify in broad terms, not in specific terms, what is it we seek to do. Ive heard like e even in the apollo they talked about time frames for being able to have medical countermeasures. Thats a broad goal. How that gets done and how it gets run through Venture Capital and then onto industry, thats something that can grow organically. Av corn ig that seed think is really important. If you look at space today it is for me a very important demonstration of how the government can lead early on but then move out of the way and allow industry to continue to move forward. As asha said we wouldnt be where we are today had the government not invested in things like the human genome project and encode the encyclopedia dna elements, all the other genomic work thats gone on. It ushered in an entire new era that we are going to be the beneficiaries of long time in the future. Thats very important that government has a role with values and resources setting the goals and actually providing especially for the fundamental science, yousc know, that is people realize that but the reason why we had such effective vaccines is a lot of the research that was done before in government labs or murderers d before that before the hiv protein so there is this cross polymerization. We have accepted that. And defense we rely heavily on the private sector that we have integrate a lot into our national defense. For Public Health and response to bio still have this mindset that the private sector will only be called upon if needed, and i think its a mistake. I think the private sector especially nowadays, its going to grow its importance in the future where it should be the default tools that we rely on because its where the innovation is. We should not be rely on Public Health labs to provide diagnosis. They should be pushed out to commercial labs and these labs should be supported by our government to be able to be part of this response system. There are sose many other examps that we can talk about but its very critical and we are not doing enough in bio to include the private sector in the comments part of our national defense. They should not be an afterthought to d come in only when government capabilities, the demandca exceeds what we can provide. There is an Important Role for congress in that the u. S. Government since the 1990s has spent billions and billions on various preparedness and biodefense measures, and the question is whats been the return on that investment by the taxpayers of dollar . Particularly in operation warp speed which was hugely successful, although the pfizer virus, the Pfizer Vaccine was developed without the government support. So its a legitimate question about whats the return on the taxpayers dollar, and how do we ensure that going into the future we learned lessons from experience we just had with the pandemic . No doubt about i think we did learn a lot and its bleeding into other areas of the government to say like maybe we dodo have too much red tape, or whatever, and they do want to emphasize we are very much involved in operation warp speed talking to the scientists on a regular basis and understandingg the technology and how the trials were done. And honestly we knew that it didnt prevent anyone from getting covid but the results were tremendous and in a time when nobody predicted pics a lot of Lessons Learned there by think what i will do know is i do have a question thats come in and it probably parlays with what we were just talking about. I will go ahead and ask, though this one out there. What has the pandemic taught us about our institutions and organizations in the International Community . And not just the u. S. But as well as national stateel and lol levels. I would like to take a first shot at this. After the covid was discovered and it sort of perked pei wasnt too long until we saw calls for w. H. O. Reform. In fact, the World Health Organization has spent the better part of the you look at itself, and they have come to some conclusions and they developed, its thousands of pages of documentation. It does have an executive summary, but they recognized that reform is necessary. As we think about reform i would also like to say if we compare cov2 versus sars 2003, you get an interesting finding. The World Health Organization actually get about two months better in terms of calling for a Public Health emergency of international concern. We might not think about that given the angst that is been expressed and i understand that at the institutions that have to include the International Institutions have really been stressed by this. Part of what were seeing also is the World Health Organization perform the way it did because thats the level of authorities and funding and leadership capacity that we, the member nations, have given to the World Health Organization. So if we dont like how they are performing, then we can do something about it as one of the member nations of the 190 us who are part of that. So at the International Level we have work too do. At the National Level i have called in a recent oped for 9 11 Like Commission to look holistically at the entirety of covid. Not in in a partisan manner. In a completely bipartisan, not to try to point fingers but to identify solutions and really understand what occurred. We now have things ongoing in the community which i consider to be really detrimental. Just within health and Human Services you have the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, aspr, and have cdc centers for Disease Control prevention they are both guide reform themselves. From what ind can tell its largely uncoordinated. And they are in the same department. And likewise within the department of Homeland Security, fema is looking at itself and say well, since its going to fall to us, we have to be ready for the next pandemic. They dont really havehe that of that. To do some thist is why its not enough tht every Organization Reforms itself and we come up with the frankenstein. And we need to have some sort of approache where we think about what needs to be done and then do a wholesale reform of areas. Part of that means we need definitions. Why did the cdc underperform in some regards . Well, we have to ask. They were not operational. Into was that operational entity . We dont have one in the government for health and Human Services, for Public Health emergencies. We just dont have that. Ask yourself, thiss goes backo our last discussion, why is it that the cdc is trying to do and develop diagnostics . We have a vibrant industry. The ought to be told what it is were interested in being able to do and allow them to work through theor diagnostics. We have opportunities we need to take a hold of. Going down a level lower, we have underfunded Public Health and the United States dramatically over the course of the last three administrations. This is a purely bipartisan issue, from bush to obama to trump, it has been underfunded and weve seen reductions in the funding for nih and cdc. And this has been consistent cross all that all thes those reductions wound up taking out of state and local tribal territorial capabilities, finding. So when you say why didnt we do Contact Tracing . The answer is that people who do Contact Tracing are at the state and local level and there are no longer there because they are no longer on the payroll. And so we have the sort of overarching requirements to think differently about our institutions. I love you in direct Contact Tracing. I completely agree but i think its important to realize any Public Health is a state function, and we have to find a way ando a system looks beautifl weause its distributed and have innovation. Works great for creativity but in a crisis have to find a way to organize. We are so protective of the way things occur on day today that we are unwilling to do things differently and have a more central coordination and emergency. Its not possible the cdc can have access to data. It has to do with data use agreements with every entity that, it, its our achilles heel. The same thing with contract trace. Hnd we had the technology but we couldnt even talk about te of privacy issues and they are louder than reasonable people that say maybe we can find a way to at least do a pilot to access the technology and use the technology in a way that still protects our deeply heldur valus for privacy. But we cant even talk about it because so i think we need, you asked international, domestic, im not answering all the question what is the hard part of the response beyond the scientific technology, beyond the counter measures, how are they connected . One of the legal authorities . How do we plan on the national and International Arena . How are we working on the liability issues the sometime ss preclude the sharing of a product that is right there and available but we cannot use the product because we havent resolved these legal issues. They have to be attended to. One of the things we might have looked at differently, if there is a next pandemic, is the role at a local level, et cetera. We also needed more people at the table and discussing the pandemic, where it was beyond justd the virus, what are the other effects on peoples healtc that were happening, depression of things taking place in home, violence, we will eat this discussion here to go live to the senate floor for a brief session. No votes are expected today. The presiding officer the senate will come to order. The clerk will read a communication to the senate. The clerk washington, d. C. , september 30, 2022. To the senate under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable tina smith, a senator from the state of minnesota, to perform the duties of the chair. Signed patrick j. Leahy, president pro tempore. The presiding officer under the previous order, the Senate Stands adjourned until 10 00 a. M. On tuesday, october 10 00 a. M. On tuesday, october and the senate is holding his brief session between now and november midterm elections with the exception of tuesday octobee chamber to proceed to 2023 defense programs and policy legislation. No votes are planned and a monday, november 14 as. As always lives then coverage is here on cspan2. You should were waiting for an update from Florida Governor ron desantis on recovery from hurricane ian. Ashes start and a couple of moments. In meantime we will take you back to the discussion on bio preparedness. So thats the challenge i think we can address. There must be ways that we can solve that and one of the ways is, dan mentioned a 9 11 Like Commission. One of the think this a look at how other countries responded. The other is thinking about data analytics. We are now in a data revolution. We ought o to be able to harness that power to analyze data in a way that helps us sequence faster, figure how to provide better information t for vaccine development. We may not get the warning we want but we may be able to shorten the time in which we respond. If anyone has a question from the audience, feel free to come up to the microphone and we will be glad to hear from you. To johns point it is interesting that we have done, Building Collapse overseas. Thats made the news in terms of ukraine but thats that under the Threat Reduction program. One of the things we did was install bioSurveillance Systems overseas. So there are countries that weve worked and that actually a better biosurveillance then we do because we put in automated system. They are smaller countries and it doesnt scale perhaps but lou is exactly right. State control of the Public Health is very problematic if youre thinking about a p natiol event. And so how we work our way through that is very important. When you look at operation warp speed it was also clear that one of the feelings come probably the only failing of operation warp speed was we had a hard time getting the vaccines below the state level because there wasnt a Public Health infrastructure. So it took kind of federal workers and national guard, and so you had a variety of people who are pushing forward. Once we got that going as a nation than you started to see the numbers of vaccines dramatically improve. Its really important to understand where these Pressure Point are and how to work through them. Lets not forget the private sector which was very new. I would also add though, we talk about federalism is an issue in whats happening at the states and everybody is separate. Iss only wish each state was totally squared away and knew exactly what was happening inside their states. Nevermind the fence or didnt information up to the federal government. Part of it has to do with infrastructure and part of it has to do with the differences amongst all the states and all the things they have to deal with and address. I would be thrilled if we could get each onene of the states to pay more attention to this and figure out if theyre going to address it. The difference between ohio and North Carolina is too great when it comes to biosurveillance and understand whats going on but there is no reason for that. Its not like the people in ohio arehe incapable. Theres just different approaches have been taken by h each of those two governors. I think we need to work with the states, local tribes and territories to help them, i do want to say help themselves like it to the point where they are comfortable leads and config at whats going onat with them. Then it becomes a a matter of communicating to the feds and have a Big Data Analytics issue coming to the fore. I dont think what we can do is just continued focus, not anyone is saying this, up at the federal level. And never get down to the states. Iowas thought we were lucky as ae country to have 50 labs ot there are working on things and say of greater opportunities. Sometimes maybe those decisions are based on what type of research is taking place in your state that may drive some of those differences. Thank you for the opportunity to ask the question. Preparedness is the key watchword for bio defense. For the bioethics and whether or not but prevents or enables the responses in the bio defense world. Thank you. A big piece of my interest that is what i was talking about earlier when we had different ethical approaches to what may happen, for example with Human Health Research into some of my work logging out research for human embryos and the differences across countries for this area of work and not just in the sense of when were talking about bioweapons, the type of work that might be happening, but the forms of experimentation and the testing of it and its a really its a really tough line of a tightrope to walk. Because we have the opportunity and theres been greatly in the experimentation and gene therapy is available for people who have blindness, deafness, heart issues, cystic fibrosis, all of these genes that are coming out and changing quality of life for some people so you have to be really careful how you might con strain the Regulatory Environment which would cut off some of that research that really can help, but, and i think it comes back to some of johns points that he was making earlier, that if you focus too much on this one thing, to the ignorance of other types of approaches, attacks that might happen, that youre focused too much on something that might never happen and that can really, really hinder the kind of research thats going on. But i would love to see more and within the scientific community, theres not agreement right now for some of these tools and techniques that are coming around so it can be really difficult to create Regulatory Environment when the scientists themselves arent in agreement on the approach and what should be allowed. So, trisha points to the challenge of preparing for a low probability event, but that could have very high consequences. And so, finding those dual use opportunities to explore the great power of biotechnology and hedge against the low probability, aalbeit well leave this to go live with Governor Ron Desantis for those affected by hurricane ian. And deanne