I think you made a mistake in calculating summary statistic #3, claiming that the US government makes up the bulk of government biosecurity spending globally. Using a yearly rather than the 5-yearly figure you seem to use for US government spending, the US share in global biosecurity government spending seems closer to 25% rather than the 90% you suggest.
It seems that you used the $88.2bn figure from this White House source you quote below as an estimate for the US government annual biosecurity budget. However, the source explains that the $88.2 billion is a ‘request for mandatory funding available over five years’, not annually. Further, this is only the requested budget by the Biden administration, not the final spending figure. Not exactly sure on this, but the actual levels of funding are (likely?) to be (significantly?) lower after the budget passes Congress.
A better figure would be the estimates by the Council on Strategic Risks on biosecurity spending in past years—e.g. $23bn for 2023 (which also include DoD spending in addition to HHS, NIH, ASPR, FDA, USAID and CDC from the White House Source).
Taking your very rough estimate of $100bn global annual government spending on biosecurity as given, this would result in the US only making up ca. 25% of global biosecurity government spending rather than 90%. Intuitively, the 25% figure perhaps underestimates the role of the US government—perhaps as the $100bn global sum seems a bit high, but low confidence on both of those statements, further research here would be very interesting.
However, correcting the 90% figure downwards seems like an important correction to the piece and its conclusions, as the GCBR policy community is arguably already disproportionately focused on the US/UK, with biosecurity policy in other parts of the world still neglected.
Thank you so much for flagging this! Very much agreed this is an important correction; the update that the US doesn’t dominate the biosecurity spend this way is indeed important and I think a welcome one. Will certainly amend.
I think you made a mistake in calculating summary statistic #3, claiming that the US government makes up the bulk of government biosecurity spending globally. Using a yearly rather than the 5-yearly figure you seem to use for US government spending, the US share in global biosecurity government spending seems closer to 25% rather than the 90% you suggest.
It seems that you used the $88.2bn figure from this White House source you quote below as an estimate for the US government annual biosecurity budget. However, the source explains that the $88.2 billion is a ‘request for mandatory funding available over five years’, not annually. Further, this is only the requested budget by the Biden administration, not the final spending figure. Not exactly sure on this, but the actual levels of funding are (likely?) to be (significantly?) lower after the budget passes Congress.
A better figure would be the estimates by the Council on Strategic Risks on biosecurity spending in past years—e.g. $23bn for 2023 (which also include DoD spending in addition to HHS, NIH, ASPR, FDA, USAID and CDC from the White House Source).
Taking your very rough estimate of $100bn global annual government spending on biosecurity as given, this would result in the US only making up ca. 25% of global biosecurity government spending rather than 90%. Intuitively, the 25% figure perhaps underestimates the role of the US government—perhaps as the $100bn global sum seems a bit high, but low confidence on both of those statements, further research here would be very interesting.
However, correcting the 90% figure downwards seems like an important correction to the piece and its conclusions, as the GCBR policy community is arguably already disproportionately focused on the US/UK, with biosecurity policy in other parts of the world still neglected.
Thank you so much for flagging this! Very much agreed this is an important correction; the update that the US doesn’t dominate the biosecurity spend this way is indeed important and I think a welcome one. Will certainly amend.