Great questions—my colleagues and I (at 1Day Sooner) have actually spoken to representatives from HERA and BARDA (which is under HHS) who are very interested in the potential of far-UVC. What we’ve seen is that policymakers are genuinely concerned about the effectiveness and safety of widespread far-UVC use, and want to see greater research in the field, without necessarily being able to guarantee that funding themselves. We, and other organizations, have been advocating for and trying to organize research and pilot programs. (I don’t have a good sense of the international advocacy field around pandemic prep, though; most of our partners are based in the US.) I think that generally advocacy has actually been fairly specific, or at least been targeted at understanding specific concerns from policymakers, but it’s not surprising that this doesn’t necessarily come across at a glance. The more detailed and specific the plan, the more technical it gets and the more it’s being communicated person-to-person or through gigantic reports. Our report does contain specific recommendations in the “Bottlenecks and Funding Opportunities” section if you’d like to check it out!
We (the biosecurity team at Convergent Research) also have curated a number of specific, tarmac-ready far-UVC projects with teams and timelines attached, that range from a few 100k to a few million and address various bottlenecks in far-UVC adoption. We’ve got a whole catalogue of 1-pagers if any funders reading this are interested :P
I think I have a slightly different read on USGOV’s interest in far-UVC than Gavriel does. ~Every agency we’ve spoken to so far has gone “cool, but not our problem,” which I understand to mean that far-UVC is not being prioritized even within the already-deprioritized category of pandemic funding. Hell, even NIAID isn’t interested. This might change, of course...but no real idea of what might be a turning point. That being said, the CDC doesn’t seem actively unfriendly to the tech, so there is hope?
Great questions—my colleagues and I (at 1Day Sooner) have actually spoken to representatives from HERA and BARDA (which is under HHS) who are very interested in the potential of far-UVC. What we’ve seen is that policymakers are genuinely concerned about the effectiveness and safety of widespread far-UVC use, and want to see greater research in the field, without necessarily being able to guarantee that funding themselves. We, and other organizations, have been advocating for and trying to organize research and pilot programs. (I don’t have a good sense of the international advocacy field around pandemic prep, though; most of our partners are based in the US.) I think that generally advocacy has actually been fairly specific, or at least been targeted at understanding specific concerns from policymakers, but it’s not surprising that this doesn’t necessarily come across at a glance. The more detailed and specific the plan, the more technical it gets and the more it’s being communicated person-to-person or through gigantic reports. Our report does contain specific recommendations in the “Bottlenecks and Funding Opportunities” section if you’d like to check it out!
We (the biosecurity team at Convergent Research) also have curated a number of specific, tarmac-ready far-UVC projects with teams and timelines attached, that range from a few 100k to a few million and address various bottlenecks in far-UVC adoption. We’ve got a whole catalogue of 1-pagers if any funders reading this are interested :P
I think I have a slightly different read on USGOV’s interest in far-UVC than Gavriel does. ~Every agency we’ve spoken to so far has gone “cool, but not our problem,” which I understand to mean that far-UVC is not being prioritized even within the already-deprioritized category of pandemic funding. Hell, even NIAID isn’t interested. This might change, of course...but no real idea of what might be a turning point. That being said, the CDC doesn’t seem actively unfriendly to the tech, so there is hope?