To credibly identify a virus as capable of causing a pandemic – of inflicting more casualties than any nuclear warhead – is to give thousands the power to wield it as a weapon. Let's not. #PandemicNonproliferation
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Kevin Esvelt
@kesvelt
Sculpting evolution & safeguarding biotechnology, MIT Media Lab.
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When in doubt, try them all. In this case, all 20 known flu H antigens. This is a major advantage of nucleic acid vaccines. Key question: can it generalize to hundreds of antigens in order to cover dozens of viruses?
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We developed a new multivalent mRNA vaccine against all known influenza virus subtypes. Our study describing the vaccine was just published in @ScienceMagazine. 1/n
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc
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Anyone who prefers a more condensed scientific style manuscript over the policy version, you can find it here:
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Thanks to G. Epstein, R. Casagrande, G. Lewis for reviews, , + more in my lab, and , , , , , , , , and others for highlighting the threat
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How likely is pandemic terrorism?
We know of one mass murderer - Seiichi Endo - who, if he lived today and pandemic blueprints were available, would have both the skills and the intent.
That’s a 2% risk per year since the dawn of biotech.
Best we prepare our defenses.
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To those weary of pandemics, this may seem excessive.
Consider that the detection and defensive investments will also work for natural and accidental pandemics.
Nature isn’t trying to kill us, but it could still crash civilization if we're unlucky.
Let's not take the chance.
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One thing I hope to arrange: comprehensive safety studies of much higher levels of low-wave light. Skin, eyes, wounds, ozone, VOCs, everything.
Let’s invite the world to share suggestions/concerns, listen, design experiments together, & run pre-registered studies in replicate.
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Better still, preliminary experiments suggest that much higher levels of low-wave light are safe.
If we could inactivate most viruses in the air or on surfaces within a second or two, that would be the end of pandemics. And the flu, and common cold, and most infectious disease!
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The recently raised its safe exposure limit for 222nm light to a level that can eliminate 90% of viruses per minute. That’s nearly 10x better than the best aircraft or hospital ventilation system… and they stack.
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Go low enough in wavelength, and light starts to be absorbed by proteins, meaning it can no longer penetrate our skin and eyes. But it’s still germicidal to tiny viruses and bacteria. That means our light fixtures might save us from the next pandemic.
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But the best pandemic defense would block transmission without people having to do anything at all. Ventilation is great, but expensive. Upper-room germicidal needs high ceilings and fans. We need to cleanse the air passing between two people in conversation. And we can.
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The idea, first pioneered by , is to tell you how many 1-degree (your contact), 2- (friends’ contacts), 3-, 4-, and 5-degree contacts have been infected, so you know how at-risk you are before you get exposed… and can take precautions.
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But we don’t want to wear PPE all the time. To handle the early and late stages, when we’re stamping out brushfires, we want people to take precautions only when needed. The solution: personalized early warning based on social connections.
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A list of all essential workers (w/supply chain analysis), a stockpile of enough P4E units, and reliable delivery within a week would completely defuse the threat of a highly transmissible + lethal pandemic.
Cost? Less than a new aircraft carrier.
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That’s why we need pandemic-proof PPE (P4E). It needs to be ~100% protective without requiring fit-testing, so we can send it to all essential workers within days of a new pandemic. The Atlantic’s wrote about this in depth:
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Defend
Imagine you work in food production in close contact with others. A new pandemic, 50% lethal, is as transmissible as omicron. Do you keep going in with only a mask offering 95% protection?
If many decline to risk their lives for inadequate pay, societies will collapse.
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Once we spot an emerging threat, targeted wastewater monitoring () and rapid diagnostics - such as Cas12/Cas13-based methods - can determine which communities have been affected, and within those communities, who has been infected.
sherlock.bio/sherlock-biosc
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Detect
Suppose a new pandemic respiratory virus has effects similar to HIV: no acute symptoms, long incubation period, but lethal years later. It would infect most of the world before we knew it was there. The end.
Solution: a Nucleic Acid Observatory.
arxiv.org/abs/2108.02678
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Finally, we can ensure that all DNA synthesis providers and next-gen benchtop devices screen orders, with immediate updates to cover newly identified pandemic genomes. In short, fully automated screening with cryptography to protect trade secrets.
secureDNA.org
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To conduct research with a nontrivial chance of such a catastrophe, like pandemic virus identification (but almost nothing else), institutions would have to pay to cover the downside risk as determined by expert insurance risk assessors.
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Perhaps best: catastrophic liability and insurance. Pass a trigger law: anyone causally linked to an event causing >1m American deaths, no matter how indirectly, can be held liable, and general liability insurance must cover this (up to a cap given the astronomical cost).
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We could go further and sign a pandemic test-ban treaty that would ban the narrow set of laboratory experiments required to substantially raise our confidence that a given virus would cause a pandemic (and aren't useful for anything else)
jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jf
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Again, write to and ask them to reform DEEP VZN to remove the laboratory characterization steps. Redirect funds to ensure vulnerable communities in hotspots can identify epidemics and sequence the responsible agent within 1 day (via nanopore).
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So what are the answers? We don’t have them ready yet, so we’d best delay.
To start, let's refrain from characterizing high-risk viruses in the lab to learn which ones are likely pandemic-capable, i.e. share blueprints for an arsenal of plagues.
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To credibly identify a virus as capable of causing a pandemic – of inflicting more casualties than any nuclear warhead – is to give thousands the power to wield it as a weapon. Let's not. #PandemicNonproliferation
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/
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Surprisingly, few of the solutions involve biomedicine. Omicron infected 26% Americans within 100 days of ID in Africa. The 100 Days Mission is epic and should be funded, but won’t be fast enough to combat multiple pandemics released in travel hubs.
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Leo Szilārd wrote: "science, which has created the bomb and confronted the world with a problem, has no solution to offer to this problem."
I'm certainly no Szilárd, but I do have experience inventing exponential biotech, and there are ways to obviate catastrophic bioterrorism.
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Imagine a future in which thousands can start new pandemics at will. It’s likely coming.
It’s also solvable.
To safeguard civilization, we need to delay misuse, reliably detect threats, and build defenses to prevent infection. A biodefense roadmap:
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dam.gcsp.ch/files/doc/gcsp
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Nuclear power plant operators are liable for damages from accidents or sabotage and must have insurance.
Why not require the same for institutions working with (or sharing blueprints for) potential pandemic agents? Let insurance analysts assess the risk and charge accordingly.
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This is why 's move might be transformative: a quasi-journal-independent way to get your manuscript reviewed for importance and technical correctness and disseminated to relevant audiences.
Time to replace journal name with DOI in slides... & eventually, everywhere.
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The (near) future of publishing:
Editors will be curators.
Peer review services will generate reviews (by paying reviewers?)
Your paper will be highlighted (“published”) in many places at once (for free/cash/displaying ads?) much like news stories are picked up by journals.
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Instead, let's do awesome science that doesn't pose concrete security risks to the lives of millions.
Like finding highly active integrases that work in mammalian cells, possibly obviating the inefficiency of lentivirus libraries. Excited to try them!
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What are those experiments? Measuring: growth in relevant primary human cells (e.g. airway epithelial cells), transmission in relevant animal models, & immune evasion of an extensively engineered circulating human virus.
Let's not share blueprints for an arsenal of plagues.
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So what to do? Since we can’t agree on what GoF means, let’s refrain from performing experiments that could identify a virus as pandemic-capable. That would address high-risk GoF and natural identification & leave the other 99.99% of virology unaffected.
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We’re talking about research that, if successful, would obviate decades of nonproliferation efforts seeking to keep tools capable of killing millions from falling into the wrong hands. And no one has bothered to make a model to see if it’s a good idea.
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Of course, that brings us back full circle: does it matter if the mutations are natural? Of course not. The key question: is the study likely to save lives, or kill people? Shockingly, I haven’t seen a cost-benefit model, or even a back-of-the-envelope.
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There’s a reason SARS-1/SARS-2 chimeras were added to the Select Agent list: someone proposed making them. We just have to hope they won’t create a new pandemic agent as transmissible as omicron and lethal as SARS-1.
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One could argue, “No, we can keep doing it with pieces of viruses that obviously won’t cause new pandemics, and just refrain from any experiments that might.” First, you’re making it more credible every time. And second… really?
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