39Bloomberg Businessweek February 8, 2021
In January 2017, a lengthy proposal showed up at the offices
of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development
Authority in Washington. Running 112 pages, the document
described a strategy for stopping future pandemics. It outlined
a number of vaccine technologies to pursue, including mes-
senger RNA and adenovirus vectors, and recommended that
a team of 180 scientists, doctors, and other experts be created
to carry out the plan. There were intricate technical details,
an org chart, and an estimated cost: $595 million over 10 years.
Congress created Barda, a division of the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services, in 2006 for precisely this kind
of thing. It’s charged with developing and procuring drugs
and vaccines, and ensuring that the country is researching
countermeasures to combat bioterrorism and chemical war-
fare, as well as pandemic influenza and other emerging infec-
tious threats. The agency has historically been small, though,
and the proposal, which came from the pharmaceutical com-
pany GlaxoSmithKline Plc, would have entailed one of its more
ambitious efforts. Following the massive 2014 Ebola outbreak
in West Africa, which killed more than 11,000 people, Glaxo
researchers wanted to identify viruses likely to cause major
epidemics and tackle several of them at once. “The idea was to
just make vaccines against all the viruses,” says Moncef Slaoui,
who was then chairman of the company’s vaccines unit and
later served as chief science adviser to the Trump administra-
tion’s Operation Warp Speed.
Glaxo owned an underutilized lab and a decommissioned
biotech plant in Rockville, Md., and it was already relocating
vaccine researchers there as part of a corporate reorganiza-
tion. Under its Barda proposal, the company would have pro-
vided scientific staff and facilities at the Rockville site while
government agencies and nonprofits funded vaccine devel-
opment for multiple “platform” technologies through early
human trials and manufacturing. That way, if an outbreak
happened, Glaxo would have prototype vaccines ready for
final-stage trials.
A team from the company spent months refining the pro-
posal, according to a person familiar with the effort, and
had reason to believe it might get funded. Barda officials
met with Glaxo scientists on multiple occasions, toured the
Rockville facility, and urged the company to submit a formal
proposal, the person recalls. After it was submitted, Barda
quietly considered it for several months. Finally, in late 2017,
the agency suggested that Glaxo come up with a scaled-down
plan focused mainly on influenza. That proposal never got
funded either, leaving the world without a key weapon against
emerging viruses when the pathogen that causes Covid-19
was discovered.
Vaccines have since been developed using mRNA and
adenovirus vector approaches similar to those originally sug-
gested by Glaxo. Many of the vaccines benefited from grants
from Barda during the pandemic and from government-
sponsored basic research beforehand. Still, the failure to put
more extensive infrastructure in place ahead of time was a
lost opportunity to build up capacity that could be bolstering
its vaccine supply right now. It was a failure, even a refusal, to
fully plan ahead—a blunder that ranks with the White House
decision to disband the dedicated pandemic response unit
at the National Security Council in May 2018 and the inability
of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to quickly
develop a Covid test for wide distribution.
In late 2019 every infectious disease expert knew some-
thing like the novel coronavirus was coming sooner or later,
just as they know today that Covid won’t be the last pan-
demic. As depressing as the current situation is, though, the
next one—and there will be a next one—doesn’t have to be
this bad. Shortly before his inauguration, President Biden
proposed spending $20 billion to speed up vaccination roll-
outs. That’s a start. But a complete plan—one that can protect
the U.S. from mass death, catastrophic economic damage,
and (let’s hope) incompetent political leaders who squan-
der the public’s trust—will have to be more comprehensive. It
will likely involve at least five separate areas of research and
investment. Most of all, it will require careful preparation.- Pathogen surveillance
The world can’t eliminate emerging diseases. Too many people
live near animals, and there’s too much international air travel.
In the 21st century alone, humanity has contended with out-
breaks of SARS in 2003, H1N1 in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in
2014, and now Covid. Candidates to sicken the world in the
future include highly virulent filoviruses, which include the
Ebola and Marburg viruses; rapidly spreading mosquito-borne
flaviviruses, such as those that cause Zika and dengue fever;
and bat-borne paramyxoviruses, like Nipah and Hendra.
All of these are scary. Marburg and Ebola can lead to
severe vomiting, diarrhea, and bleeding; Hendra and
Nipah, to deadly brain swelling. More worrisome still, we
tend to wait for outbreaks to kill a few dozen people before
we do anything about them. “Our current strategy is we
really do let them happen,” says Peter Daszak, a veteran
virus hunter at EcoHealth Alliance in New York, a nonprofit
research group. Daszak suggests we approach emerging
viruses the way we approach terrorist networks: Track them
so we can intervene before they can wreak havoc.
Daszak, who’s spent years looking for bat coronaviruses in
China and elsewhere, estimates there are about 1.7 million