Yup! The highest level plan is in Kevin Esvelt’s “Delay, Detect, Defend”: use access controls and regulation to delay worst-case pandemics, build a nucleic acid observatory and other tools to detect amino acid sequences for superpandemics, and defend by hardening the world against biological attacks.
The basic defense, as per DDD, is:
Develop and distribute adequate PPE to all essential workers
Make sure the supply chain is robust to ensure that essential workers can distribute food and essential supplies in the event of a worst-case pandemic
Environmental defenses like far-UVC that massively reduce the spread and replication rate of pandemic pathogens
IMO “delay” has so far basically failed but “detect” has been fairly successful (though incompletely). Most of the important work now needs to rapidly be done on the “defend” side of things.
There’s a lot more details on this and the biosecurity community has really good ideas now about how to develop and distribute effective PPE and rapidly scale environmental defenses. There’s also now interest in developing small molecule countermeasures that can stop pandemics early but are general enough to stop a lot of different kinds of biological attacks. A lot of this is bottlenecked by things like developing industrial-scale capacity for defense production or solving logistics around supply chain robustness and PPE distribution. Happy to chat more details or put you in touch with people better suited than me if it’s relevant to your planning.
can you spell out the clear plan? feel free to DM me also
Yup! The highest level plan is in Kevin Esvelt’s “Delay, Detect, Defend”: use access controls and regulation to delay worst-case pandemics, build a nucleic acid observatory and other tools to detect amino acid sequences for superpandemics, and defend by hardening the world against biological attacks.
The basic defense, as per DDD, is:
Develop and distribute adequate PPE to all essential workers
Make sure the supply chain is robust to ensure that essential workers can distribute food and essential supplies in the event of a worst-case pandemic
Environmental defenses like far-UVC that massively reduce the spread and replication rate of pandemic pathogens
IMO “delay” has so far basically failed but “detect” has been fairly successful (though incompletely). Most of the important work now needs to rapidly be done on the “defend” side of things.
There’s a lot more details on this and the biosecurity community has really good ideas now about how to develop and distribute effective PPE and rapidly scale environmental defenses. There’s also now interest in developing small molecule countermeasures that can stop pandemics early but are general enough to stop a lot of different kinds of biological attacks. A lot of this is bottlenecked by things like developing industrial-scale capacity for defense production or solving logistics around supply chain robustness and PPE distribution. Happy to chat more details or put you in touch with people better suited than me if it’s relevant to your planning.