Open Philanthropy

In March 2020, “Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $250,000 to the Center for Global Development to support work led by Jeremy Konyndyk on developing COVID-19 response guidelines and decision support tools to disseminate to local leaders. The guidelines and tools are intended to help local leaders take appropriate measures to limit the spread of the virus.”¹⁾ Could this be an example of how local governments were able to respond in lockstep?

Nuclear Threat Initiative’s biosecurity programs

For most of human history, the greatest risk of mass fatalities has stemmed from pandemics. The poor health, deaths, and economic and political disruption caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic shows the scale of damage that pandemics can cause. Compared to the worst pandemics in history, however, COVID-19 is relatively mild. In the 1300s, the Black Death plague outbreak killed 30-50% of the European population.1 The 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ killed 50 million to 100 million people,2 more people than died in World War One. These events are outliers, but history is punctuated by episodes of mass death from disease outbreaks.

Improvements in biotechnology will bring great gains for human health, enabling us to cure genetic diseases, create new vaccines, and make other important medical advances. However, biotechnology will also allow humans to modify the features of pathogens. For example, Figure 1 shows that the cost of gene synthesis has fallen by many orders of magnitude in recent years.

Their institutional objectives address both nuclear and biological weapons6, but we are specifically recommending their work on risks from biological events, such as the outbreak of an engineered pandemic.

Open Philanthropy, our research partner, recommends NTI | bio as one of the highest-impact biosecurity organisations in the world.

The current CEO is Ernest Moniz, whose previous positions include US Secretary of Energy and Professor of Physics and Engineering at MIT. Among NTI’s advisors and directors are many prominent philanthropists, former politicians and experts.17 Connections to influential policymakers do not guarantee that NTI will influence policy in this space, but speaks to the organisation’s strong reputation.

NTI’s biosecurity efforts are led by Dr. Beth Cameron. Dr. Cameron previously served as the Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense on the White House National Security Council (NSC) staff. She also worked on Cooperative Threat Reduction in the Department of Defense and Global Threat Reduction in the Department of State. Other members of NTI | bio’s team include;

• Andrew Hebbeler, who was previously Deputy Director of the U.S. Department of State's Office of Science and Technology Cooperation and a Senior Science, Technology, and Innovation Adviser to the Secretary of State
• Jaime Yassif, who previously worked as a Program Officer at Open Philanthropy, where she led the initiative on Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness
• Jessica Bell, previously Senior Advisor to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program
• Jacob Eckles, previously a Global Health Officer in the Office of Global Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
• Hayley Severance, previously Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction at the U.S. Department of Defense.

NTI | bio is also advised by a prestigious Advisory Group headed by Margaret A. Hamburg, Foreign Secretary of the National Academy of Medicine. Overall, NTI | bio’s staff bring a wealth of past policy experience in influential positions. They seem well-placed to lead future efforts to reduce biosecurity risks.²⁾