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The Economist April 25th 2020 United States 19
2 To show the opposite now, the Trump will oblige cars to become 1.5% more effi- dual-use research. Toxins like ricin have
administration is employing funny maths. cient each year (measured by miles per gal- also been bought and sold on shady recess-
The direct benefits of mercury-pollution lon) instead of 5%. Electricity utilities have es of the internet known as the dark web.
reduction are counted very narrowly (only rangedfromreceptivetooutrighthostileto Germ warfare briefly rose to promi-
for the children of recreational freshwater the mercury-rule decision—in part be- nence in September 2001, when letters
fishermen), while the side benefits of pol- cause they have already implemented the laced with anthrax spores were mailed to
lution controls (such as reduced emissions costly pollution controls. American news organisations and sena-
of particulate fine matter which is espe- The benefits of these rules, which the tors, killing five people. That was a
cially damaging to human lungs) are not epa maintains should not be considered, wake-up call. Public health became part of
counted. Similar head-scratching assump- are also of unfortunately topical impor- national security. BioWatch, a network of
tions plague the justifications for reduced tance. Scientists at Harvard have noted that aerosol sensors, was installed in more than
car-emissions standards. In both cases the increased exposure, of one microgram per 30 cities across America. But in recent
epa’s own scientific advisory board wrote cubic metre, to the fine particulate matter years threats from chemical weapons, like
long critiques of the methodologies used, generated by cars and power plants in the sarin dropped by Syria’s air force and
which seem to have roundly ignored. American counties is associated with a15% the Novichok smeared on door handles by
Carmakers have tepidly welcomed the rise in covid-19 deaths. The consequences Russian assassins, took priority.
reduced fuel-economy standards, which add up, even if the epa does not. 7 Though the Trump administration pub-
lished a national biodefence strategy in
2018, it shut down the National Security
Council’s relevant directorate and pro-
posed cuts to the laboratories that would
test for biological threats. Funding for ci-
vilian biosecurity fell 27% between fiscal
years 2015 and 2019, down to $1.61bn—less
than was spent on buying Black Hawk heli-
copters. “It’s the kind of thing that’s very
easy to cut where you don’t see the damage
you’re doing until you’re in a situation like
this,” says Gigi Gronvall of the Johns Hop-
kins Centre for Health Security.
Biological weapons are now likely to
rise up the agenda, though the lessons
from covid-19 are not clear-cut. The Depart-
ment of Homeland Security warns that ex-
tremist groups have sought to spread the
virus deliberately, and Mr Pilch says that it
“has challenged some long-standing as-
sumptions regarding what biological agent
may be used as a weapon”. Yet many patho-
gens used as weapons tend to differ from
respiratory viruses in important ways.
Those like anthrax, caused by bacteria
which form rugged and sprayable spores,
Biodefence but do not spread from human to human,
have the advantage of minimising the risk
Spore wars of rebound to the attacker. With the nota-
ble exception of smallpox—a highly conta-
gious and lethal virus that was eradicated
in 1979 but preserved by the Soviet Union
for use against America (but not Europe),
and now exists only in two laboratories, in
America and Russia—most biological
The havoc wrought by covid-19 will spark new concern over bioweapons
weapons would therefore have more local-
he coronavirus that has killed over cerns are prompting renewed interest in ised effects than the new coronavirus.
T180,000 people worldwide was not the threat from biological weapons, a lurid Even so, the slow and stuttering re-
created with malice. Analysis of its genome corner of warfare that normally languishes sponse to the pandemic has exposed great
suggests that, like many new pathogens, it in happy obscurity. weaknesses in how governments would
originated by natural selection rather than In theory, bioweapons are banned. Most cope. “This outbreak has put stress on
human design. But if sars-cov-2 had been countries in the world are party to the Bio- pretty much every element you need to re-
deliberately engineered or launched into logical Weapons Convention (bwc) of 1975, spond to a biological attack,” says Gregory
the world by malefactors, the conse- which outlaws making or stockpiling bio- Koblentz of George Mason University, “and
quences might have been much the same. logical agents for anything other than yet what we’re seeing is every part of our
“Covid-19 has demonstrated the vulnera- peaceful purposes. But some countries public-health infrastructure is either bro-
bility of the us and global economy to bio- probably make them secretly, or keep the ken or stretched to the max.” The centre-
logical threats, which exponentially in- option close at hand. America accuses piece of America’s biosurveillance pro-
creases the potential impact of an attack,” North Korea of maintaining an offensive gramme, a network of laboratories
says Richard Pilch of the Middlebury Insti- biological-weapons programme, and al- designed for rapid testing, failed, says Mr
tute of International Studies. Those con- leges that China, Iran and Russia dabble in Koblentz, while the national stockpile of 1
