The coronavirus pandemic has exposed a structural vulnerability to biological attacks in the U.S. and Europe that requires urgent government action, experts say. (1/7) NBCNewsThreads
"They do take security seriously," Phillips said. But referring to the damage COVID-19 has wrought, he added,"This has just shown you can never be secure enough." During his work at the terrorism office, he visited many of the U.K.'s university-operated or privately administered laboratories, and he said he was most troubled by the threat that an insider could walk out the door with a bioweapon.
"The fact that this has created such a toxic shock around the world will be a neon advertisement to these people," he said."We are also trying to make sure that this doesn't become a weapon of the future," the U.S. ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, said of the potential for enemies to repurpose the coronavirus."We need to deter and we need to be ready to defend, to save people's lives if there is such an attack," she told NBC News.
"It should give us pause," said Dr. Alexander Garza, who oversaw biodefense efforts when he ran the Office of Health Affairs as the Department of Homeland Security's chief medical officer from 2009 to 2013. The technology, including a type of gene editing known as CRISPR, provides fresh context for changing assumptions about what could be used as a biological weapon — changes that have been accelerated by COVID-19, according to Richard Pilch, who heads the biological weapons program at the Middlebury Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies, the world's largest nongovernmental non-proliferation research and education organization.
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