By Joe Murphy at Brownstone dot org.

Last week, Dr. Steven Quay published recommendations to improve the integrity of the nation's biosecurity research following the Covid-19 crisis. Dr. Quay is a prominent figure in the resistance to the Covid-19 origins coverup in addition to his medical and academic pedigrees.

His recommendations complement those of James Erdman, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence and CIA professional, who articulated before Congress in April that the government's biosecurity apparatus is convoluted, clumsy, and unaccountable. I echoed similar comments in a prior piece from my perspective as a military officer also involved in countering the coverup. In the vein of Dr. Quay and Mr. Erdman's recommendations, I offer further comments towards America's Covid-19 post-mortem.

Dr. Quay makes five recommendations, two of which I'll expand upon.

1. Review high-risk research through a federal "Life Sciences Research Security Board." Any such board should include military officers (non-doctors) who are familiar with the overarching threat picture to the United States (to the highest classification), especially if the researchers propose to do this research for national security reasons, which is commonly the pitch. Uniformed officers can provide a degree of measure to the rationale for the research as compared to the entire threat picture. In the case of Covid, they would have assessed whether it was worth applying resources to risky research like that of the DEFUSE proposal in lieu of resourcing capabilities to counter China's anti-access/area denial capability so the military can actually operate inside the first island chain in the Pacific. We do not need a SARS-related-CoV vaccine for troops in the western Pacific if we cannot even get our troops inside the threat ring to fight China.

In hindsight, placing biodefense beneath NIAID in the early 2000s isolated it from uniformed military rigor, realism, and accountability. This board representation is probably the Joint Staff J3 himself or the J3 staff.

Before a new board is considered, perhaps placing biodefense back inside the military with military officer corps (not civilian DOW employee) oversight will be a more effective instrument. A comparable matter is that of autonomous weapons, which must be approved through the chain of command and ultimately by the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before operational use is authorized. This process ensures that uniformed officers are the decision-makers and also that there is ultimately a single decision-maker who owns the decision, owns the risk, is responsible for execution, and is accountable if there are screwups.

Like the Covid-19 response, where there is no single individual decision-maker responsible for the response (in violation of the nation's principle of Unity of Command and every other intelligence and military operation that the United States conducts), a board cannot be held accountable if there are mistakes made with the approved research. This especially applies if the intelligence community intends to leverage foreign research for collections, which again raises the appropriate resourcing questions, as well as induces operational risk to assess (in the case of Covid, the risk being that the IC contributes to the coverup possibly because it is so intertwined with the research it leveraged but failed to supervise).

2. Build targeted surveillance where risk concentrates: airports, seaports, city wastewater systems, live-animal markets, and communities near high-containment laboratories. I do not disagree with this point. I do disagree with the biosecurity community's near-obsession with doing surveillance everywhere. We do not need to know everywhere the pathogen is. We need to know how to treat it. The problem is not that it exists and spreads. The problem is that it can potentially make some people sick. Spread is not a tangible thing and therefore cannot be a tangible threat...