Our biosecurity and pandemic prevention strategy in a nutshell

Here at Founders Pledge, we believe that work to prevent future pandemics is among the best uses of philanthropic funds. That’s why some of our recent research and grant-making has focused heavily on biosecurity:

• Our report Global Catastrophic Biological Risks, which outlines the reasons for focusing on this cause area, and suggests guiding principles for effective giving
• An investigation on germicidal UV-light, including far-UVC, a promising technology for blocking transmission of dangerous pathogens
• A $3 million grant to help launch the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science (IBBIS), a new international organization focusing on practical tools and solutions for reducing risks — including global catastrophic risks — from bioscience and biotechnology
• A $150,000 grant to Blueprint Biosecurity, a promising new organization seeking to tackle critical technology bottlenecks for pandemic preparedness
• Evaluating and recommending both IBBIS and SecureBio as high-impact organizations working on these issues

But biosecurity and pandemic preparedness is a complex topic at the intersection of many fields (public health policy, infectious disease medicine, epidemiology, security studies and more) and at 121 pages, our GCBR report is not exactly light reading. In this blog post, I’ll therefore try to briefly outline the key pillars of our biosecurity strategy in plain language — putting our “house view” in a nutshell. If you are interested in supporting this work, consider giving to one of our recommended charities, or to the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund, which will aim to disburse your philanthropic funds in the most effective ways possible — without any overhead or management fees.

The key factor driving our strategy is that the threat of future pandemics is large, growing, and complex.

The threat is large

The threat is large because we know that COVID was not nearly the worst pandemic possible. Not only is nature and zoonotic spillover constantly sparking new outbreaks, but humans are intentionally engineering pathogens to make them more dangerous, with both good intentions (“gain of function” research on enhanced pandemic pathogens that can lead to dangerous laboratory leaks) and bad intentions (terrorist groups and doomsday cults attempting to engineer the worst possible pandemic to bring down modern civilization). For an overview of the many historical terrorist groups and cults and just how bad engineered pandemics could be, we recommend this podcast by Kevin Esvelt, who leads our recommended charity SecureBio.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the very worst threats — extinction-level pandemics — are also among the most neglected. We explore this in detail in the GCBR report, but one former senior U.S. government official put it much more pithily in an interview for that report: when it comes to preparedness against the most extreme threats, “we’re just completely fucked.” This coinciding problem of importance and neglectedness is deeply concerning for humanity, but it is also a philanthropic jackpot; it means that we need to invest more money into preventing and defending against the very worst kinds of pandemics, because no one else will.

The threat is growing

Worse, this threat is growing, with dual-use advances in synthetic biology. Various developments in the life sciences are making progress and finding cures to diseases more effective, easier, more accessible, and simply cheaper.

These developments combine with a variety of emerging technologies, including AI-powered “biological design tools” and automated “cloud labs.” While technological progress is speeding along, however, our governance tools and policies are lagging behind, and most of these technologies remain completely unregulated. For example, with the recent exception of federally-funded projects, the U.S. does not mandate screening DNA synthesis orders either for customers (e.g. making sure Al Qaeda isn’t behind that PO Box) or for sequences (e.g. making sure that the user didn’t just order the building blocks of smallpox).

The threat is complex

The final feature of our threat landscape is its complexity. Although certain respiratory viruses seem like the most likely culprit of future natural pandemics, terrorists could engineer more surprising threat vectors, like unusual agents (e.g. fungal pandemics) or unusual disease profiles (like a “stealth pandemic” that causes no or only mild initial symptoms, lays dormant for a long time while it spreads around the world, and then causes debilitating symptoms and mass deaths). Artificial intelligence, the quick pace of progress and many known and unknown unknowns only add more wrinkles to this complex threat landscape.

This complexity drives another core pillar of our biosecurity strategy: pursue pathogen-agnostic and threat-agnostic interventions. Some philanthropic foundations — and the U.S. government — have traditionally focused on a “list-based” approach to pandemic prevention: identify a long list of possible threats and then develop countermeasures against them. But if we believe that the threat is both complex and adaptive, this starts to look like a game of whack-a-mole; for every new vaccine that we stockpile, our adversaries — rogue states, terrorist groups, AI-enabled agents, and nature itself — can think of a new threat vector.

Prioritizing interventions

This means that rather than list-based approaches, we ought to prioritize the kinds of threat-agnostic interventions that are robust to this complexity. Rather than targeted medical countermeasures, for example, we may wish to prioritize engineering-based interventions like pandemic-proof PPE and germicidal light, which can work against a wide variety of outbreaks.

On top of these large guiding principles, we can add some more common-sense guidelines, like prioritizing politically tractable interventions, avoiding weaponizable technologies, and preventing the spread of dangerous information, and we have the outlines of our pandemic-prevention strategy. (The report outlines the full list of “impact multipliers” that we use in our grant-making and research prioritization.)

This strategy guides our decision-making on otherwise challenging questions. For example, should we invest in a new vaccine for a known pandemic-potential virus in nature, or should we invest in new transmission blocking technologies like germicidal ultraviolet (GUV) lights? Both seem like good ideas at first blush, but our framework suggests that GUV might be the better bet: it is more pathogen-agnostic, more neglected, and potentially more useful against the worst kinds of engineered pathogens, no matter what they look like, and no matter how other technologies progress. That’s why my colleague Rosie and I recently dove deeper into the science of germicidal lights with our latest report, and it’s the kind of thinking that will guide our future recommendations and the grants of the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund.