No more Chinese biosecurity

The reports out of China arrived just before Thanksgiving. A surge in respiratory infections among children in the northern part of the country triggered a sense of foreboding — and dejavu. Meetings between the World Health Organization and Chinese officials quickly followed.

This episode should be a wake-up call for the U.S. national security establishment. We remain reliant on other nations, including countries of concern, like China, for critical intelligence needed to defend against biological dangers — whether naturally occurring, mistakenly released, or purposefully engineered.

That needs to change.

Since COVID-19, we’ve all become familiar with the risk posed by novel infectious diseases with pandemic potential.

And, as we know from our experience with the last pandemic, time is essential to stopping the spread and minimizing danger to people. We need a strategy for the rapid identification and understanding of emerging threats, as well as timely countermeasures once a threat has been intercepted.

A sophisticated biosurveillance or “bioradar” network would include collection points where pathogens are most at risk of emerging or being identified as threats — including airports, borders, conflict zones, labs, and farms.

Once bioradar systems leveraging DNA sequencing have detected a threat, we can create a digital fingerprint of the suspect pathogen’s genetic material and begin analyzing the level of risk and mitigation options. This creates true

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Matthew Turpin Guest Commentary TURPIN

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biointelligence, or BIOINT.

Today, nodes in this bioradar network are already at work. We just need to connect the dots of this biosecurity infrastructure and expand its scale.

Take the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program, which swabs international travelers arriving at various international airports.

This same program identified the Omicron variant when it first arrived in the United States 43 days before it showed up in a clinical setting.

In other words, existing biosurveillance tools can find dangerous or novel pathogens before we would otherwise know they exist.

Acting on that information in a timely fashion could help save lives — or even eliminate outbreaks or biological threats.

In its 2023 Biodefense Posture Review, the U.S.

Department of Defense singles out four nations — North Korea, Russia, Iran, and the People’s Republic of China — as either having active offensive bioweapons programs or developing concerning dual-use capabilities in this area.

We should assume that countries the United States considers adversaries are already at work on genetically engineered pathogens and other violations of the Biological Weapons Convention.

And yet, public health experts have consistently downplayed biothreats.

The United Nations characterizes COVID-19 as a “once-in-a-lifetime pandemic” and the New England Journal of Medicine labels it a “once-in-a-century” event.

Biothreats are a much more immediate danger.

We build early-warning systems for hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. The public and private sectors spend billions each year around cybersecurity. Why isn’t there similar urgency around biosecurity?

There’s no time to waste in addressing this truly neglected dimension of global security. We should be building a sophisticated bioradar, biointelligence, and biosecurity system now before the next pandemic — engineered or otherwise — is at our doorstep.

Matthew Turpin is a senior counselor at Palantir Technologies and a visiting fel-low at the Hoover Institution specializing in U. S. policy towards the People’s Republic of China. Turpin served as the U. S. National Security Council’s Director for China and the Senior Advisor on China to the Secretary of Commerce.