Securing Civilization Against Catastrophic Pandemics

By Jeff Kaufman 🔸 @ 2023-11-03T19:33 (+30)

This is a linkpost to https://dam.gcsp.ch/files/doc/securing-civilisation-against-catastrophic-pandemics-gp-31

Executive summary

Pandemic security aims to safeguard the future of civilization from exponentially spreading biological threats. Despite the world's failure to contain SARS-CoV-2, the existence of far more lethal and transmissible pathogens that afflict animals and growing access to increasingly powerful biotechnologies, no analyses of worst-case scenarios and potential defenses have been published. Here we outline two distinct mechanisms by which pandemic pathogens transmissible between humans could cause societal collapse. In a "Wildfire" pandemic, the justifiable fear of a lethal and highly contagious respiratory agent released in multiple travel hubs leads to the breakdown of essential services. In a "Stealth" pandemic, a rapidly spreading virus with a long incubation period analogous to HIV infects most of humankind. We explain why current pandemic preparedness measures such as rapid vaccines and N95 masks will reliably fail against these threats and outline novel strategies and technologies capable of safeguarding civilisation.

Key takeaways


Ulrik Horn @ 2024-04-25T03:46 (+4)

I am surprised I only now discovered this paper. In addition to Jeff's excellent points above, what stood out to me was that the paper contained both likelihoods of different scenarios as well as what I think is some of the more transparent reasoning behind these likelihood numbers. And the numbers are uncomfortably high!

There is more detail on how the likelihoods were arrived at in the paper itself - the last column is only a summary.