Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How Well-Funded is Biosecurity Philanthropy?, published by Conrad K. on April 4, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Many thanks to Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Sella Nevo, and Joshua Monrad for their feedback during this project. This project was completed as part of contract work with Open Philanthropy, but the views and work expressed here do not represent those of Open Philanthropy. All thoughts are my own.

My full spreadsheet with results and calculations can be found here.

Summary Statistics

I adopt a loose and arbitrary definition of biosecurity where I am primarily concerned with interventions aimed at preventing or mitigating the effects of disease outbreaks. This especially includes interventions targeting or suitable for global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs).

Given this definition, biosecurity roughly represents 1.3% of the global spend on public health or about $130bn of $10tn a year.

Of this $130bn, governments likely make up roughly $100bn (80%), with the US government funding the bulk of government funding globally (close to 90% of the biosecurity spend). Private philanthropy is likely about $1bn (1%). The rest comes from private spending, private philanthropy, and public-private partnerships that aren't independent foundations (e.g., universities).

However, the vast majority of biosecurity spending goes towards vaccine development, disease surveillance, and pathogenesis research. My impression is that areas such as next-gen PPE, far-UVC, and research into GCBRs do not receive much philanthropic funding at all outside EA. EA players likely represent roughly 4% of biosecurity philanthropic funding.

See 'Results' for more information.

This was scrappily put together in no more than 40 hours of work and very little expert consultation, so I note extremely high levels of uncertainty in these figures, although I would estimate they are correct within a factor of 2-3 given the conception of biosecurity with a reasonable degree of confidence (~70%).

However, my uncertainties are much wider when I factor in uncertainties about what constitutes 'biosecurity' to begin with (closer to a factor of 5 with the same degree of confidence, with the upper tail being much higher).

About

I've spent some time recently trying to understand exactly how well-funded is 'biosecurity' philanthropy.

An important caveat is that 'biosecurity', in its broadest sense, is "the prevention of disease-causing agents entering or leaving any place where they can pose a risk to farm animals, other animals, humans, or the safety and quality of a food product".

Under this definition, the space of biosecurity interventions is exceptionally broad: safe food handling and storage practices, screening imported produce, waste management, proper sanitation, and the use of HVAC systems are all biosecurity interventions.

Instead, I'm mostly interested in a subset of interventions largely aimed at preventing or mitigating the effects of disease outbreaks. This especially includes interventions targeting or suitable for global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs) such as pathogen-agnostic early detection, vaccine platform technologies, and regulating the use of nucleic acids through methods such as DNA synthesis screening.

However, a number of interventions not primarily targeting GCBRs may still have quite large consequences for them. Antimicrobial resistance likely contributes towards millions of deaths a year; is a desired property of any maliciously designed pathogen, and techniques for detecting antimicrobial resistance are essentially the same techniques we would use for detecting novel pathogens.

I think it is plausible that much work on influenza, research into the pathogenesis of pathogens, and a number of national security interventions are additionally relevant to pandemic prevention and ...