Partnering with local health authorities not only helps prevent the next epidemic, but it also makes sure that these virological samples are kept secure—“so it’s not accidentally going to leak out of these public health facilities or not be stolen by a terrorist,” Robert Pope, director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at DTRA, explained in a 2022 interview.
DTRA’s staff operate as an “early warning system,” a congressional staffer tells WIRED, ahead of any deployment of the US military, they say. While it may not be a traditional kind of military power, they add, it should still fit into this administration’s priorities. “It secures our border from pathogens.”
An independent analysis conducted for the Pentagon in 2022 found that these threat reduction programs are “well-positioned to respond quickly to emerging [weapons of mass destruction] threats; its authorities are unique and fill an existing gap.”
Programs like DTRA ought to be expanded, not cut, says Gigi Gronvall, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. These are primarily national security programs, she says, designed to “give ourselves the eyes and ears around the world to put out those fires, or prevent them from happening in the first place.”
If you don’t put out the fire—whether it’s a novel infectious disease or a chemical weapons program in a rogue state—it will keep growing, Gronvall adds. “We have areas of the world that don’t have fire departments,” she says. “By helping them help themselves, we are helping them step up.”
‘A Fire Sale on Expertise’
The Pentagon’s threat reduction efforts, and the DTRA itself, stem from the work of former US senators Sam Nunn, a Democrat, and Richard Lugar, a Republican, to secure weapons of mass destruction after the fall of the Soviet Union. America, through their work, destroyed thousands of ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads, disposed of tens of thousands of pounds of chemical weapons, and dismantled Soviet bioweapon laboratories. In 1998, DTRA was formally created and given a more expensive mandate to both track and destroy chemical and biological threats while also helping other nations do the same.
For its work, DTRA has been targeted by Russian disinformation efforts, with Moscow accusing America of producing biological weapons in these DTRA-funded labs. Following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, conspiracy theorists in America picked up that thread, suggesting the invasion was cover to destroy these bioweapons labs.
Fears about DTRA’s work have since been raised by Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Russia itself. Republican senator Rand Paul has repeatedly issued subpoenas to the DTRA looking for evidence that it has been engaged in dangerous virological research and suggesting that it may have had a hand in creating Covid-19.
“When Russia was attacking that program, it was doing so because it wanted to erode our national security,” Gronvall says. Russia may not believe these lies, she adds, but “they have been enormously successful in getting people with power to believe these things.”
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