Strategies for Effective Improvements to the BioWatch System Proceedings of a Workshop (2018) / Chapter Skim
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5 Overview of the Workshop
5 Overview of the Workshop
Pages 80-87
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From page 80... ...
biodefense. The Blue Ribbon Panel, she explained, is a foundation- and private-sector-funded organization that looks at biodefense across the entire spectrum of related activities, such as public health, prevention and deterrence, preparedness, response, attribution, recovery, and mitigation, in addition to those conducted by the intelligence community, the Department of Defense (DoD)
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From page 81... ...
"For something that has this much weight for the President of the United States to actually mention it in the State of the Union address, and for it to have made its way into policy documents starting at the White House and going down, the amount of funding that is being put toward it is simply not proportional, and it is not fair to ask the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and whoever else to try and produce detectors without sufficient funding to carry out that mission." One of the report's recommendations, which the Blue Ribbon Panel members discussed at length, calls for the Vice President to take up the issue of biodefense as a responsibility of the Office of the Vice President, in large part because the nation's biodefense efforts are spread out over many departments, agencies, and the private sector. George explained that the Blue Ribbon Panel concluded that because so many entities were involved, someone in the White House with an extreme amount of influence and power was going to have to take charge of the biodefense enterprise.
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From page 82... ...
Doing so, however, will require actions by Congress and the White House, and the Blue Ribbon Panel continues to have conversations with members of Congress and the Administration regarding those actions. What makes this effort more difficult, said George, is that the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security have to put biodetection high on their departments' priority lists.
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From page 83... ...
assay process. In Tom Slezak's opinion, it would be a good idea for the BioWatch public health community to examine closely the DoD system and identify features it likes and does not like.
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From page 84... ...
He also touched on the need for more discussions about cost, particularly the not-insignificant cost to state and local public health laboratories at a time of diminishing tax-levied funds to support public health departments. For Grace Kubin, one of the messages she heard throughout the workshop was how the BioWatch program has worked hard to create a collaborative community to work together on BioWatch.
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From page 85... ...
Given that, he would focus on optimizing PCR and shortening the time for analysis rather than finding a new system and having to convince public health to have confidence in it. Fred Rosa commented that he heard a great deal of positive feedback about the BioWatch program throughout the course of the workshop, in terms of both protecting the public and serving as the catalyst for increased collaboration, cooperation, and coordination among the many stakeholders involved in biodefense.
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From page 86... ...
DISCUSSION Adel Mahmoud began the open discussion by asking the panelists for their thoughts on expanding the list of targeted agents. Clements replied that the current list has 90-something things on it, and, in his opinion, "that list makes us less safe rather than more safe because it gives us permission to not think about some things that are probably just as pathogenic and weaponizable as things that are on that list." The current list, he said, has become a public health list rather than a select agent list because it contains organisms such as the SARS virus that cannot be grown, let alone weaponized.
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From page 87... ...
Kahn replied that so much of the information the intelligence community has is highly classified, so any discussions involving the intelligence community would be of limited value. He also repeated a comment he made earlier, which is that for the foreseeable future, the intelligence community will have very limited insight into what adversaries are doing with respect to the development of biological agents.
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