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 logi