Never Again: A Blue-Ribbon Panel on COVID Failures
Biorisk, Epistemic Institutions
Since effective altruism came to exist as a movement, COVID was the first big test of a negative event that was clearly within our areas of concern and expertise. Despite many high-profile warnings, the world was clearly not prepared to meet the moment and did not successfully contain COVID and prevent excess deaths to the extent that should’ve been theoretically possible if these warnings had been properly heeded. What went wrong?
We’d like to see a project that goes into extensive detail about the global COVID response—from governments, non-profits, for-profit companies, various high-profile individuals, and the effective altruism movement—and understands what the possibilities were for policy action given what we knew at the time and where things fell apart. What could’ve gone better and—more importantly—how might we be better prepared for the next disaster? And rather than try to re-fight the last war, what needs to be done now for us to better handle a future disaster that may not be bio-risk at all?
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion and not the opinion of Rethink Priorities. This project idea was not seen by anyone else at Rethink Priorities prior to posting.
Minor note about the name: “Never Again” is a slogan often associated with the Holocaust. I think that people using it for COVID might be taken as appropriation or similar. I might suggest a different name.
Are you thinking of EAs running this themselves? We already have an informal sense of what some top priorities are for action in biosafety/pandemic-preparedness going forwards (ramp up investment in vaccines and sterilizing technology, improve PPE, try to ban Gain of Function research, etc), even if this has never been tied together into a unified and rigorously prioritized framework.
I think the idea of a blue-ribbon panel on Covid failures could have huge impact if it had (in the best-case) official buy-in from government agencies like the CDC, or (failing that) at least something like “support from a couple prestigious universities” or “participation from a pair of senators that care about the issue” or “we don’t get the USA or UK but we do get a small European country like Portugal to do a Blue Ribbon Covid Panel”. In short, I think this idea might ideally look more like “lobby for the creation of an official Blue Ribbon Panel, and also try to contribute to it and influence it with EA research” rather than just running it entirely as an internal EA research project. But maybe I am wrong and a really good, comprehensive EA report could change a lot of minds.
It would be worth considering the right balance between putting resources toward conducting an original analysis vs. mustering the political will for implementing recommendations from retrospectives like those above.
The Lessons from Covid-19 Research Agenda offers a structure to study the COVID-19 pandemic and the pandemic response from a Global Catastrophic Risk (GCR) perspective. The agenda sets out the aims of our study, which is to investigate the key decisions and actions (or failures to decide or to act) that significantly altered the course of the pandemic, with the aim of improving disaster preparedness and response in the future. It also asks how we can transfer these lessons to other areas of (potential) global catastrophic risk management such as extreme climate change, radical loss of biodiversity and the governance of extreme risks posed by new technologies.
Our study aims to identify key moments- ‘inflection points’- that significantly shaped the catastrophic trajectory of COVID-19. To that end this Research Agenda has identified four broad clusters where such inflection points are likely to exist: pandemic preparedness, early action, vaccines and non-pharmaceutical interventions. The aim is to drill down into each of these clusters to ascertain whether and how the course of the pandemic might have gone differently, both at the national and the global level, using counterfactual analysis. Four aspects are used to assess candidate inflection points within each cluster: 1. the information available at the time; 2. the decision-making processes used; 3. the capacity and ability to implement different courses of action, and 4. the communication of information and decisions to different publics. The Research Agenda identifies crucial questions in each cluster for all four aspects that should enable the identification of the key lessons from COVID-19 and the pandemic response.
Never Again: A Blue-Ribbon Panel on COVID Failures
Biorisk, Epistemic Institutions
Since effective altruism came to exist as a movement, COVID was the first big test of a negative event that was clearly within our areas of concern and expertise. Despite many high-profile warnings, the world was clearly not prepared to meet the moment and did not successfully contain COVID and prevent excess deaths to the extent that should’ve been theoretically possible if these warnings had been properly heeded. What went wrong?
We’d like to see a project that goes into extensive detail about the global COVID response—from governments, non-profits, for-profit companies, various high-profile individuals, and the effective altruism movement—and understands what the possibilities were for policy action given what we knew at the time and where things fell apart. What could’ve gone better and—more importantly—how might we be better prepared for the next disaster? And rather than try to re-fight the last war, what needs to be done now for us to better handle a future disaster that may not be bio-risk at all?
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion and not the opinion of Rethink Priorities. This project idea was not seen by anyone else at Rethink Priorities prior to posting.
Minor note about the name: “Never Again” is a slogan often associated with the Holocaust. I think that people using it for COVID might be taken as appropriation or similar. I might suggest a different name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again
Sorry—I was not aware of this
No worries! I assumed as such.
Are you thinking of EAs running this themselves? We already have an informal sense of what some top priorities are for action in biosafety/pandemic-preparedness going forwards (ramp up investment in vaccines and sterilizing technology, improve PPE, try to ban Gain of Function research, etc), even if this has never been tied together into a unified and rigorously prioritized framework.
I think the idea of a blue-ribbon panel on Covid failures could have huge impact if it had (in the best-case) official buy-in from government agencies like the CDC, or (failing that) at least something like “support from a couple prestigious universities” or “participation from a pair of senators that care about the issue” or “we don’t get the USA or UK but we do get a small European country like Portugal to do a Blue Ribbon Covid Panel”. In short, I think this idea might ideally look more like “lobby for the creation of an official Blue Ribbon Panel, and also try to contribute to it and influence it with EA research” rather than just running it entirely as an internal EA research project. But maybe I am wrong and a really good, comprehensive EA report could change a lot of minds.
This is a great point. Also worth noting that there have been some retrospectives already, e.g. this one by the WHO: https://theindependentpanel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/COVID-19-Make-it-the-Last-Pandemic_final.pdf
It would be worth considering the right balance between putting resources toward conducting an original analysis vs. mustering the political will for implementing recommendations from retrospectives like those above.
Note that CSER is running a project roughly in this direction.
An early output from this project: Research Agenda (pre-review)
Lessons from COVID-19 for GCR governance: a research agenda
The Lessons from Covid-19 Research Agenda offers a structure to study the COVID-19 pandemic and the pandemic response from a Global Catastrophic Risk (GCR) perspective. The agenda sets out the aims of our study, which is to investigate the key decisions and actions (or failures to decide or to act) that significantly altered the course of the pandemic, with the aim of improving disaster preparedness and response in the future. It also asks how we can transfer these lessons to other areas of (potential) global catastrophic risk management such as extreme climate change, radical loss of biodiversity and the governance of extreme risks posed by new technologies.
Our study aims to identify key moments- ‘inflection points’- that significantly shaped the catastrophic trajectory of COVID-19. To that end this Research Agenda has identified four broad clusters where such inflection points are likely to exist: pandemic preparedness, early action, vaccines and non-pharmaceutical interventions. The aim is to drill down into each of these clusters to ascertain whether and how the course of the pandemic might have gone differently, both at the national and the global level, using counterfactual analysis. Four aspects are used to assess candidate inflection points within each cluster: 1. the information available at the time; 2. the decision-making processes used; 3. the capacity and ability to implement different courses of action, and 4. the communication of information and decisions to different publics. The Research Agenda identifies crucial questions in each cluster for all four aspects that should enable the identification of the key lessons from COVID-19 and the pandemic response.
https://www.cser.ac.uk/research/lessons-covid-19/