I am often asked by those concerned about the future what keeps me up at night. While nuclear war concerns me every single day, it’s the threat of bioterrorism that leaves me sleepless. Warheads can be tracked and intercepted, but pathogens can spread silently, are monitored by the rate of infections, and require dynamic efforts to neutralize. Even after the COVID-19 pandemic, America struggles with the ability to grapple with the horrors of germ warfare.
In November 2010, I served in Haiti as a medical missionary in response to the worst cholera outbreak in the country’s history. Following a catastrophic earthquake earlier that year, Nepalese peacekeepers, deployed to the country by the United Nations, were unknowing carriers of Vibrio Cholera, the bacterium that sparked the epidemic. The disease was initially twice as fatal as COVID-19 worldwide, taking the lives of young and old within hours of contraction. Every Sunday morning, at the small church where I attended mass, caskets filled with the deceased lined the edges of the sanctuary. With limited resources in a country ravaged by despair and facing a multidrug-resistant strain, we were tasked with developing a mitigation strategy from scratch.
When the coronavirus pandemic emerged the United States, while much better resourced, faced a similar challenge, needing to develop a response from the ground up. This time, I had the opportunity to provide guidance on mitigation and treatment strategies in my own country. As a leader of the GOP Doctors Caucus, I was called upon to provide regular updates to my constituents and colleagues on the evolution of the emergency and our response. While America made tremendous strides to overcome the crisis at home and abroad, our country remains enormously vulnerable to future biothreats.
Foreign entities seeking to destabilize the United States can look to the destruction and upheaval caused by the virus as a model. The pandemic not only resulted in the tragic loss of life, but also damaged the fabric of the nation. We became radically divided, trust in our institutions plummeted, and unscrupulous actors exploited the crisis through the media ecosystem.
Biotechnology has come a long way since the human genome was mapped over 20 years ago, and the possibilities for its offensive use continue to expand. Although the Biological Weapons Convention has reached near-universal membership, the treaty has not stopped covert operations. China’s interest in its sinister uses is growing, and suspicious actions by the communist regime demonstrate its intent. Beijing has made enormous investment in research and development, enacted stringent regulations against foreign entities acquiring Chinese genetic data, conducted forced experimentation on Uyghurs, and accumulated data from millions of pregnant women with a product developed in collaboration with its military.
For decades, America has been involved in joint allied efforts to prevent legacy threats of biological weapons in former Soviet states from falling into the wrong hands. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, both Moscow and Beijing accused the United States of operating biological weapons labs within the beleaguered nation. Such charges amount to little more than propaganda intended to justify their own bioweapons programs.
The United States devotes significant resources to threat monitoring and response, but our agencies’ ability to work coherently and cogently in a crisis remains limited. The pandemic exposed major bureaucratic challenges in the intelligence community, the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response. Congress must address these shortcomings by expanding oversight and carefully assessing the needs of our agencies tasked with protecting the nation.
In Haiti, despite limited resources and poor sanitation, our coordinated efforts to disseminate reliable information and expand treatment opportunities contributed to a 75 percent reduction in the mortality rate of the cholera epidemic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Operation Warp Speed helped deliver multiple vaccines and treatments that drastically reduced hospitalizations and deaths. Our vaccine deployment not only saved millions of lives around the world but built tremendous goodwill with countries critical to maintaining global security. America has demonstrated its ability to mobilize quickly and save lives, but in an increasingly bellicose world, it’s time we double down on our efforts to prepare for future threats.
Greg Murphy, M.D., represents North Carolina’s Third District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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