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Biodefense, lessons learned from the COVID-19 war
The pandemic has awakened the world to the devastating potential of a pandemic and has shown us what a biological war could look like.
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A microbiologist with a tube of biological sample label COVID-19. (Shutterstock/angellodeco)
The world, including Indonesia, was not unprepared. We had been warned, repeatedly and in detail.
“There is a very real threat of a rapidly moving highly lethal pandemic of a respiratory pathogen […] The world is not prepared."
Those words were written in September 2019 by Gro Harlem Brundtland and Elhadj As Sy, joint chairs of the World Health Organization's Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB).
Even the United States, which has the world’s most advanced biodefense regime, has failed miserably in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. This is in spite of initiating the Global Health Security Agenda in 2014, taking the top spot in the 2019 Global Health Security Index and holding two biosecurity exercises in 2019, Crimson Contagion and Event 201. The last one took place in October 2019, four weeks before the actual outbreak.
COVID-19 has shaken the national and international health, economic, social and political order. Biodefense as a defense against biological warfare, bioterrorism and pandemics has been underemphasized in national, regional and international security agendas.
The pandemic has awakened the world to the devastating potential of a pandemic and has shown us what a biological war could look like. With more than 200 million infections and more than 4 million deaths (3.8 million cases and 115,000 deaths in Indonesia), the COVID-19 pandemic has been labeled a quasi-biological war, or “World War by Other Means”, in scale, scope, duration and impact.
A WHO team wrote in March that a laboratory origin of COVID-19 was “extremely unlikely”. United States President Joe Biden has ordered a new 90-day investigation by the Intelligence community to determine whether the virus emerged naturally or was accidentally released.
