The world must take the threat of pandemic terrorism more seriously, a leading geneticist has warned. Kevin Esvelt at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says the ability to take the DNA sequence of a virus from a database, turn it into a living virus and intentionally infect people with it is an extremely serious threat. He has now published a roadmap to help counter this kind of bioterrorism.
It is just a matter of time before an individual or group wanting to cause mass deaths deliberately starts a pandemic this way, he says. 鈥淚 think it definitely will happen.鈥�
Esvelt began thinking about the risks of biotechnology in 2013, when he used gene-editing to create the first artificial , a technology that . He came to the conclusion that gene drives aren鈥檛 a serious bioterror threat, as they spread slowly and are easy to counter, but that intentional pandemics are a very real threat.
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He gives the example of the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, which in the 1990s killed 8 people in Matsumoto and 13 people in Tokyo with the nerve agent sarin. Its members included a virologist. 鈥淚f he lived today and had a list of pandemic-capable viruses, he would absolutely have both the skill and malicious intent to assemble infectious samples and deliberately release them,鈥� says Esvelt.
What鈥檚 more, an intentionally started pandemic could be much worse than a natural one, he says. Deliberate releases at major airports would result in much faster international spread and give us less time to respond, for instance. A virus might also be engineered to be more lethal, or several different ones released at once. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 a potential civilisation-ending catastrophe,鈥� says Esvelt.
He thinks smallpox is about the only virus we know about that could definitely cause a pandemic if released, and a number of countries have vaccine doses stockpiled as protection. But with researchers trying to identify animal viruses that could cause human pandemics, the list of pandemic-capable viruses is going to grow over the coming decades. So is the number of people capable of recreating them from their DNA sequence alone, which Esvelt estimates at 30,000 people today.
A deliberate pandemic isn鈥檛 likely to start tomorrow, says Esvelt, who doesn鈥檛 think the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was purposely released from a lab. But he does think we aren鈥檛 doing nearly enough to address the risk of an intentional release.
鈥淚鈥檝e been trying to draw attention to this emerging issue, but what I鈥檝e found is that, especially at the highest levels, once people understand the magnitude of it, they tend to just freeze,鈥� says Esvelt.
This is why he wrote the roadmap, which was published on 14 November by the Geneva Center for Security Policy. 鈥淭he message is, this is serious but this is totally solvable,鈥� he says.
There are three parts to his roadmap: delay, detect and defend.
At present, many biologists are trying to find out which animal viruses could cause a human pandemic, and sometimes also what would make them more dangerous, known as gain of function research. There has long been a debate about the wisdom of such efforts, and Esvelt says it could aid attackers. 鈥淔rom a security perspective, is there anything you could do to make a homicidal bioterrorist happier?鈥�
He compares publishing such work to publicly releasing critical software vulnerabilities before there is a patch, and should be banned. This is a controversial view, given that many virologists think this kind of work is needed to help prevent animal viruses naturally jumping to humans, as probably caused the covid-19 pandemic.
Another delaying tactic is to ensure that all DNA-synthesising equipment 鈥� the machines needed to assemble viral genomes from scratch 鈥� automatically scan for potential threats. Esvelt is working with cryptographers to develop ways of doing this without revealing what sequences the machines are scanning for.
If these kinds of delaying tactics fail, any released pathogen must be detected as early as possible. This could be done by, say, untargeted sequencing of sewage at airports looking for anything growing exponentially.
Finally, preparing for another pandemic would greatly reduce its impact. For instance, we should develop better protective equipment and stockpile enough for all essential workers so they can keep society going even during a serious pandemic, says Esvelt.
We should also be installing in as many buildings as possible, he says. Unlike standard UV lights, these rapidly kill viruses without harming people. They are expensive, but a wide rollout would dramatically improve public health by preventing common infections as well as slowing the spread of any pandemic virus, he says.
Esvelt says his roadmap is intended for defence and security agencies, not for biologists and health departments. 鈥淣ations do not expect their firefighters to prevent an invader from burning their cities, and we should not expect our health agencies to defend us against adversarial biological threats,鈥� he says.
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