The U.S. policy landscape for countering biological threats is split into two main groups: 1) biosecurity, which specifically focuses on preventing theft, diversion, or deliberate malicious use of biological sciences knowledge, skills, materials, and technologies to cause harm; and 2) biodefense, which involves the development of capabilities and knowledge to assess, detect, monitor, respond to, and attribute biological threats. This project involved the first ever systems-based analysis of the entire U.S. biosecurity and biodefense policy landscape, which enabled greater understanding of the functional relationships between policies as of 2017. These analyses, along with reviews of methodologies for measuring policy implementation and historical case studies to better understand factors that lead to opportunity costs, informed the development of a roadmap for implementing biosecurity and biodefense policies that leverages science and technology advances and minimizes security risks. In addition to the roadmap, this study presents two analytic frameworks for evaluating policy implementation and analyzing opportunity costs.
Supplements:
Opportunity Cost Analysis Framework
Historical Case Studies for Opportunity Cost Analysis
Policy Case Study: Synthesis of the Horsepox Virus
The Pandora Report 