We remain reliant on other nations, including countries of concern, like China, for critical intelligence needed to defend against biological dangers - whether naturally occurring, mistakenly released, or purposefully engineered.
A sophisticated bio surveillance or "Bio radar" network would include collection points where pathogens are most at risk of emerging or being identified as threats - including airports, borders, conflict zones, labs, and farms.
Once bio radar systems leveraging DNA sequencing have detected a threat, we can create a digital fingerprint of the suspect pathogen's genetic material and begin analyzing the level of risk and mitigation options.
This creates true bio intelligence, or BIOINT. Artificial intelligence tuned to biological information like this can quickly begin analyzing the data collected from bio radar systems.
Today, nodes in this bio radar network are already at work.
In other words, existing bio surveillance tools can find dangerous or novel pathogens before we would otherwise know they exist.
We should be building a sophisticated bio radar, bio intelligence, and biosecurity system now before the next pandemic - engineered or otherwise - is at our doorstep.
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