Two recent grants supporting next-gen PPE policy advocacy

In the event of a biological catastrophe like a severe pandemic, many people can avoid getting infected by staying at home, but many others don’t have that option. In particular, vital workers need protection so they can do their jobs safely. Otherwise, we risk the breakdown of critical societal functions, including food production, healthcare, and electric power distribution.

Traditional PPE, like N95 masks, may not be effective enough to protect vital workers in a highly contagious pandemic. Instead, we need to ensure that vital workers have access to next-gen personal protective equipment (PPE). Next-gen PPE includes more sophisticated respiratory protection like powered air-purifying respirators (PAPRs) and elastomeric half-mask respirators (EHMRs), which are sometimes known as reusable respirators.

We recently made two grants from our Global Catastrophic Risks Fund that focus on policy advocacy for next-gen PPE, which would be critical in the event of an extreme pandemic. Advocating for next-gen PPE could be a particularly high-impact intervention for mitigating the threat of global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs).

In this blog post, we’ll:

• Outline the challenges in combating biological risks
• Discuss what makes next-gen PPE policy advocacy a potentially high-impact intervention
• Explain the goals of our two recent grants
• Explore the unique impact of the GCR Fund in this space

The challenge of combating biological risks

Catastrophic biological events could pose a critical threat to global well-being. A key challenge in combating GCBRs is that it’s hard to predict where the next pandemic will come from. There are many reasons this is true:

• Biological threats, both natural and engineered, can involve a large variety of different pathogens.
• Rapid advances in biological technologies are continuously changing the threat landscape, and it’s difficult to predict which advances will pose the greatest threats.
• Unlike many other risks, biological risks are adaptive. The dynamics of natural selection and mutation make natural pathogens more difficult to contain, and people aiming to create biological weapons can shift their research to adjust for the defenses we build.

In other words, the risk of biological catastrophe is a large and ever-changing threat. All of this raises the question: How can we construct an effective strategy for combating a threat when we don’t know what that threat will look like?

Governments devote a large chunk of their resources to health security, but only a small fraction of these resources are relevant to catastrophic pandemics and other worst-case scenarios. This means that philanthropists interested in making a high impact on global well-being have an important role to play in this space.

Philanthropists can focus on supporting highly effective funding opportunities that excel at the impact multiplier heuristics in GCBR. Identifying relevant impact multipliers in each cause area is a crucial focus for our research team, as we can use these heuristics to quantify the impact of high-uncertainty funding opportunities. In GCBRs, we find that it’s most effective to support:

1. Interventions that are threat-agnostic. Instead of trying to guess what the next pandemic will look like, we should support approaches that are robust to many kinds of pathogens and threats.
2. Interventions that are robust to worst-case scenarios, such as extinction-level pandemics. Disease outbreaks follow heavy-tailed distributions, where the worst pandemic outweighs several average pandemics combined, so there’s a high expected value for anticipating the worst-case scenario even when it’s low in probability.
3. Interventions that leverage existing societal resources, such as government funding. Governments often have a large budget for health security, but neglect to spend it on the most high-consequence threats. By supporting policy advocacy, we can help ensure that existing resources get allocated to higher-impact goals.

Why next-gen PPE policy advocacy could be a high-impact solution

There are many promising interventions we’ve identified that fulfill key impact multipliers, which you can find in our full report. One of these interventions is policy advocacy for next-gen PPE (sometimes referred to as pandemic-proof PPE or P4E). A major report examining the parametric requirements for next-gen PPE was recently released by Gryphon Scientific (now part of Deloitte) and Blueprint Biosecurity.

Compared to traditional PPE, next-gen PPE like EHMRs:

• Have higher reusability
• Achieve better fit
• Provide better protection
• Have a longer stockpile shelf life
• Are more sustainable
• Are less vulnerable to supply chain shocks
• Are more cost-effective in the long run
• Are better-suited to the parametric requirements of extreme pandemics

We believe interventions related to next-gen PPE can be highly impactful for philanthropists to support, because they excel at multiple impact multipliers:

• Unlike vaccines and drugs, which tend to be pathogen-specific, next-gen PPE is a more pathogen-agnostic solution that protects against a wide variety of pathogens. Ensuring that critical workers have adequate access to next-gen PPE can help protect us from natural pandemics, engineered pandemics, viruses, bacteria, and any airborne biological threat.
• Next-gen PPE can be useful in a worst-case scenario. In theory, according to the Gryphon/Blueprint Bio report, next-gen PPE could work even under the extreme parameters of “a virus that is as infectious and hardy as measles, spreads as rapidly as SARS-CoV-2, and is as harmful to vital workers as the 1918 pandemic.”
• Policy advocacy related to next-gen PPE leverages societal resources to ensure that governments are using their existing health security budgets to effectively mitigate the threat of a high-consequence pandemic. This type of work also functions as a form of market shaping; rather than directly funding new technology, we can create more demand for an existing technology that has been proven to be high-impact. The more we create government demand for next-gen PPE, the more we’ll drive further technical improvements.

The goals of two recent GCR Fund grants

We recently recommended two grants from the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund: one to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS), and one to Blueprint Biosecurity. We worked with both of these organizations to develop proposals that we believe support high-impact work in the next-gen PPE policy advocacy space.

Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

Our $539,800 grant to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security supports expanded research and advocacy to ensure that the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) stocks Next-Gen PPE.

The SNS, which sits under the Administration for Strategic Preparedness & Response (ASPR), has the warehousing and distribution infrastructure to distribute next-gen PPE in the event of a biological disaster. The exact contents of the SNS are not fully disclosed to the public, but after speaking to experts, CHS believes that they rely heavily on single-use disposable masks, rather than pandemic-proof equipment.

Our $539,800 active grantmaking will essentially triple CHS’s resources devoted to this goal. This grant will fund a policy advocacy effort with the objective of convincing Congress to champion and support the stockpiling of next-gen PPE in the SNS. If this grant succeeds, it will ensure that the U.S. has a stockpile of pandemic-proof masks that can allow healthcare workers and others to continue to work even through extreme pandemics, which will help prevent the collapse of healthcare systems and critical infrastructure.

Blueprint Biosecurity

Our $84,000 grant to Blueprint Biosecurity supports the funding of an international workshop in Southeast Asia on next-gen PPE policy proposals.

This workshop, which will be held in Singapore, will bring together several high-population countries from East and Southeast Asia, which collectively include a population of over 700 million people. These countries are also central in the supply chains of many types of PPE, meaning that their pandemic preparedness may directly impact the rest of the world.

Earlier this year, Gryphon Scientific and Blueprint Bio released a report called Towards a Theory of Pandemic-Proof PPE, the first clear roadmap with concrete policy proposals to develop next-gen PPE. Essentially, the workshop funded by our grant will function similarly to a track 1.5 dialogue to share the policy proposals in this report, helping multiple countries better prepare themselves for future pandemics.

How the GCR Fund makes a unique impact

All of our grantmaking is “research-first.” Our research team functions as an internal think tank that develops detailed technical reports about biological risks, advanced AI, and other global catastrophic risks. The impact multiplier heuristics we identify in each cause area can serve as a set of principles to guide decision-making both for our work and for other charity evaluators, philanthropists, and grantmakers.

Furthermore, much of what we do involves active grantmaking: when our researchers identify gaps in the existing philanthropic landscape, we can catalyze new projects to fill those gaps. In this case, after we identified next-gen PPE as a high-impact intervention, and our lead GCR researcher, Christian Ruhl, attended a Gryphon workshop on next-gen PPE in 2023 and talked to experts and other funders, we chose CHS and Blueprint Bio as promising organizations to implement these policy advocacy strategies.

Going forward, we’ll continue to track the impact of these two specific grants, which we’ll share in future updates. We’ll also continue identifying high-impact funding opportunities for the GCR Fund in the hopes of building a world resilient against biological threats.

If you want to support more active grantmaking to help prepare the world for extreme threats like engineered pandemics, consider donating to the GCR Fund.