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To enhance the safety and security of the US bioeconomy, a new public–private partnership should be established to facilitate information sharing and threat analysis among industry, government and academia, and to develop and deploy safeguards.

Despite the uncertainty raised by several studies regarding the practicality of Point-of-Care Testing (POCT) in hospital settings, the urgency prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic led many hospitals to invest in these rapid diagnostics

AI-enabled research might cause immense harm if it is used to design pathogens with worrying new properties. To prevent this, we need better collaboration between governments, AI developers and experts in biosafety and biosecurity.

In the absence of a treaty protocol or verification regime, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) instituted confidence-building measures (CBMs) as a mechanism to increase confidence in compliance by enhancing transparency and mitigating ambiguities regarding states parties’ biological activities.

We led the last large-scale exercise conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security before the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite COVID-19, pandemic exercises are more necessary than ever to prevent the loss of hard-fought gains achieved during COVID-19, keep policymakers from assuming all pandemics will be like COVID-19, and encourage continued engagement from policymakers in strengthening health resilience rather than returning to a cycle of panic and neglect.

The slow arrival of vaccines to the increasing number of countries ravaged by mpox shows that the COVID-19 pandemic did not result in the structural change needed to address global inequities. The absence of global arrangements to ensure access to health products during emergencies is a gap that governments are seeking to fill through recently agreed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) and continuing negotiations towards a Pandemic Agreement

COVID-19 highlighted the challenges of public acceptance of public health measures, including mask-wearing and vaccination. which has spurred interest in engineered approaches to reduce infections. Germicidal Ultraviolet (GUV) Energy has been used for decades in hospital rooms to limit TB transmission, but it is expensive to install in the upper part of rooms where it may be used safely

Biological events—including outbreaks and pandemics, biological-weapons use, and accidental laboratory release—have the potential to be extremely disruptive.

Because hospitals are spaces where life and death are routinely at stake, social hierarchies, pressures, and cultural norms are heightened. This was particularly true in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the dynamics in that era can provide insight into the nature of race and hierarchy in hospital structures.