New research and recommendations on catastrophic biological risks

Today, we released a new report on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness: Global Catastrophic Biological Risks: A Guide for Philanthropists. Like our recent nuclear report, this investigation is designed as a deep-dive into the cause area, to help guide philanthropists who want to do something about the growing and complex threat of extreme biological threats.

You can find the full report here and a short summary here. Additionally, two outside experts on philanthropy and extreme biological risks— Joshua Monrad (Effective Giving) and Andrew Snyder-Beattie (Open Philanthropy) — have contributed reviews of the report, which you can find on pages 9-11.

We believe that this is a critical area for private philanthropy, in part because governments have failed to act, even in the wake of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic. One senior policymaker who used to work on biological risks in the U.S. government summarized the problem bluntly in an anonymized interview for the report: “I just came away from that [i.e. government service on biosecurity] thinking, we're just completely fucked.”

Fortunately, there are many promising organizations working on this, and many tractable solutions to mitigate the risks of extreme pandemics. We are recommending two new high-impact funding opportunities: SecureBio and IBBIS, the International Biosafety and Biosecurity Initiative for Science, and are also evaluating various other potential funding opportunities and expect to release more funding recommendations soon. Additionally, we are working on an investigation into germicidal ultraviolet light (GUV) for pandemic preparedness, which will be released later this quarter.

Founders Pledge’s Global Catastrophic Risks Fund will also support critical work on these issues. If you would like to support this work, please consider donating to the Fund here.

To summarize the key points of the report:

• Pandemics have long been a scourge on humanity, from the Black Death to the 1918 Flu to COVID-19.
• But nature is not “the biggest bioterrorist.” Malevolent actors — of which there are many examples in history —could out-engineer evolution to create horrific pandemic pathogens.
• Such deliberately-released engineered pandemics could result in the collapse of modern civilization and pose an existential risk to humanity.
• Advances in the life sciences and enabling technologies like AI are shifting the risk landscape, creating a threat that is growing, complex, and adaptive to our risk-mitigation efforts, while at the same time proliferating powerful tools to thousands.
• Despite billions spent on health security, most government spending does not target the most extreme pandemic scenarios.
• Private philanthropists therefore need to fill this gap with funding for interventions that are threat agnostic and robust to the worst-case scenarios.

As one former senior U.S. policymaker interviewed for the report put it, “without philanthropists funding work in this area, it's not going to get funded.” If you are interested in supporting active grant-making in this area, please consider donating to the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund.