With the national security slots in the incoming Trump administration filling up quickly, it’s unclear whether Matt Pottinger, who was deputy national security adviser in Trump’s first term, will return to government work. But I noticed that a few days ago, Pottinger co-wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, warning that “researchers around the globe are tinkering with viruses far deadlier than covid-19.” 

A recent Post investigation showcased Russia’s reopening and expansion of a military and laboratory complex outside Moscow that was used during the Cold War to weaponize viruses that cause smallpox, Ebola and other diseases. In China, senior military officers have been writing for years about the potential benefits of offensive biological warfare. One prominent colonel termed it a “more powerful and more civilized” method of mass killing than nuclear weapons. An authoritative People’s Liberation Army textbook discusses the potential for “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”

At the same time, breakthroughs in gene-editing technology and artificial intelligence have made the manipulation and production of deadly viruses and bacteria easier than ever, for state and non-state actors alike.

Pottinger and his co-authors — Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and a White House Covid-19 response coordinator in the Biden administration, and Matthew McKnight, the head of biosecurity at Ginkgo Bioworks and a Belfer Center fellow at Harvard Kennedy School — argue that the threat is serious enough to require a new category of intelligence collection:

Biological surveillance, detection and attribution must become a core national security function, and not merely a public health activity, of the United States and friendly nations. Congress, working in consultation with the Defense Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, should immediately establish and fund a new intelligence discipline: biological intelligence, or BIOINT, to mobilize allied governments and private companies to detect and assess high-risk scientific research and incipient biological threats. . . .

Techniques of molecular forensics mean a newly detected pathogen can also be sequenced and analyzed to determine whether it occurred naturally or through the machinations of scientists. As data libraries grow and AI models improve, analysts will become far less likely to be stumped by the origins of a new disease such as covid-19.

Readers of Hunting Four Horsemen will recall my post-lab-leak-reporting concerns about someone someday developing an “ethnic bioweapon” — a virus or bacteria that targets only those with particular genes but leaves others with different genes unscathed. The world has no shortage of maniacs who dream of genocide, and biological weapons, even genetically engineered ones that aim to target particular ethnic groups — are a lot easier to assemble than nuclear weapons.

We’re coming up on five years since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The world’s reaction to the pandemic once it passed — and the jaw-dropping lack of curiosity about how a deadly novel virus most similar to those found in horseshoe bats just happened to pop up down the street from where a Chinese-government-run laboratory was conducting gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats — indicates this is one of those problems the general public, and certain elected officials, prefer not to think about too much.

Until, of course, it’s too late.