Dark winter: why the risk of unnatural pandemics is an existential threat | Devcon SEA

[Music] to tell you about what we've done with um funding from bvy but first I want to explain the context and why I'm so concerned about um the risk of unnatural pandemics these are just my declarations I'm a physician and infectious disease researcher from Australia um so we hear about epidemics all the time right we hear in the news about Aven flu about impo um we know that these things are never ending there and actually the data shows the risk of new emerging infections is increasing really important to understand the past and the present in order to look at what the risk is in the future and this case is a really good one because it illustrates all the problems with the medical community accepting the possibility of unnatural epidemics and this is bagwan Raj Nish whose cult perpetrated the biggest documented biot terrorism attack in the US in 1984 uh the public health authorities including the CDC judged that it was a natural outbreak and there was a politician who said no I think the Raj Nishi did it and he was ridiculed and shouted down uh and even 6 months later when Raj Nish confessed that they'd done it he wasn't believed so if you even a confession isn't enough to identify an unnatural outbreak where does that leave us and then a full 12 months later the FBI was doing a raid on the ranch of the Raj Nishi and came across their illegal biolab which had far more dangerous pathogens in it than the one they used for this attack there's just so many examples that I don't have time to give you about the inability of the medical and Public Health Community to ask the question even about what is the origin of this epidemic let alone identify unnatural ones San Francisco in the 1950s the US military sprayed bacteria over from a ship in the ocean over the a of San Francisco to see how far they could disperse a biological weapon and people did get they thought the bacteria was harmless but people did get sick and one person died no one knew anything about this until 30 years later when a journalist uncovered the truth um and the medical community did not recognize that it was an unnatural outbreak then in the 60s the US military dropped light bulbs into the subway system filled with trillions of bacteria that were a proxy for Anthrax it wasn't actual Anthrax but a similar related bacteria to see how the spores would disperse in the um tunnels um in the Soviet Union an island called vros Dena was used as a biological weapons testing facility and in 1979 they exploded a small pox bomb on this island there was a ship passing by 15 kmet away uh where someone got infected and it set off a big outbreak of small pox a highly fatal outbreak in the town of Aral and there's numerous other examples including um a a pandemic of flu that occurred in the 70s which was traced back to an improperly inactivated vaccine strain of the virus and for 30 years scientists kept saying denying that it was an unnatural outbreak um this man Ken albeck was the deputy director of the Soviet Union's bioweapons program bio preparat and he wrote defected to the US and wrote this book which really details some of the pretty mindblowing things they were trying to do in the 60s and the 70s when the tools were much more clumsy than what we have today so they were trying to engineer even more fatal versions of small pox shorten the incubation period and to combine genes from small poox with other deadly viruses like Lassa fever and if they were doing that today it's just so easy to do it whereas back then fortunately it was much more difficult basically anything with DNA can be edited um whether it's a virus a plant a human being and of course Human Genome editing started in 2016 in 2018 a Chinese scientist caused an uproar by not only editing two embryos but bringing them to B those children being born he presented the results at a conference and there was this enormous faux outrage by the whole Global Community uh but very soon afterwards the all the superpowers jumped on board into what I think is the new arms race which is engineering of human beings um in the UK and of course the objective is to engineer super soldiers um in the UK you can't even uh request a Freedom of Information you can never find out what they're doing so you can bypass mandelian inheritance you can insert hereditable characteristics you can Prim a whole population in the type of attack that could be done today includes um you know releasing something that would prime a population to make them more vulnerable and then a second attack with uh a biological weapon so like every type of Technology whether it's robotics or AI biological research has dual use potential so mostly it's used for good um but it can also be used for harm and and we could be living in a Jurassic Park of viruses and not even know it in the first synthetic virus was made in 2020 and it was uh in 2002 sorry 20 25 years ago about 25 years ago by some American scientists who created a synthetic version of um polio and then some Australian scientists created a version of um a Rel a virus related to small poox that was 100% resistant to the vaccine and universally fatal and that all that research is open source which means someone else can read it and copy those methods in 2018 Canadian scientists created uh aox virus very closely related to small pox called horse pox and if you can make one you can make any of those orthopox viruses um and there's been a range of other quite scary research including syn Ebola um and ever since the SARS outbreak in 2003 scientists have been fascinated with creating a SARS version too and there's numerous Publications prior to the covid pandemic detailing This research so the the the guys who um developed the can you put the slide forward for me my pointer isn't working um the the scientists who developed the synthetic um horsepox virus they um uh so the two s the two ways in which unnatural pandemics can occur error or Terror and the picture on the left is the swlos anthrax outbreak um that was a town in which the Soviet Union had a bioweapons facility someone forgot to replace the filter on an air vent one night and all night long they were pumping weaponized anthrax into the town next door and at least 100 people died um but the Soviets said it was a natural outbreak they said it was due to the wet markets they made a big show of killing dogs in the markets to prove that it and they interestingly at the height of the Cold War the Americans agreed with them completely that it was a natural outbreak so from the medical and scientific Community the consensus was it was a natural outbreak and it wasn't until the fall of the Soviet Union that Boris yelson confessed that had been a lab leak um and in the case of um Terror one of the other examples of an anthrax outbreak is the one after 9/11 where it was pretty obvious because the anthrax was mailed in envelopes with threatening letters today you can uh anyone can create a biolab in their home um just as you can make a me lab in your kitchen so too can you do a do it yourself biolab and the um the possibilities are really endless the scientists um that made the synthetic pox virus said the advance of technology means that no disease-causing organism can forever be eradicated because you can always make it in a lab and that's the declining cost of Gene synthesis in that same paper showing how accessible it is today uh illegal biolabs in 2022 uh a code officer noticed a hose sticking out of a warehouse in redley California and uh very very slow and inadequate response from us authorities it took them 3 months to get a warrant by the time they searched it they found humanized about a thousand humanized mice vials labeled Ebola HIV SARS kv2 Etc and it was a biotech company that was proposed supposedly making covid rapid antigen tests for which you do not need animal or um live virus and that's still um being investigated as to how that happened but it just shows you how wide open the risk is in terms of current epidemics the cay one empo in Democratic Republic of Congo is a huge um problem 70% of the cases are in children 80% of the debts are in children this is much more highly lethal than the empo that caused the clay 2 epidemic in high inome countries in 2022 there's a long sting in the tail of SARS CO2 it's still causing substantial excess mortality and our research showed that long Co um has major economic impacts in 2022 alone we estimated long Co cost9 billion of losses in the Australian economy from people being unable to work at full capacity or not at or only at partial capacity and then h5n1 bir flu in the US 30% of commercial milk samples on the supermarket shelves are contaminated with the virus if it's pasturized milk it's probably not live virus but if you're into drinking raw milk it probably is and it's just a matter of this virus switching its preference from birds to humans which have different receptors in the upper respiratory tract and then we've got a pandemic now how do we detect these pandemics when they're Rising um the risk is there how do we detect them the traditional methods we use uh like lab Lab diagnosis that depends on having a test if it's a brand new disease there is no test these are the graphs showing these are data from wh showing on the top the date of symptom onset so that's the day people got sick and on the bottom the date of reporting so you can see there's a substantial delay so by the time you get official notifications it's usually spread which is exactly what happened in um Co so we've got evidence from blood tests showing that Co had spread through Europe and the US in November December 2019 so we developed an early warning AI system using open- Source intelligence called epatch now a true epidemic disease grows exponentially and that's why you go from zero to 100 in a short period of time and why Health Systems collapse and why critical infrastructure collapses because of this exponential growth so time is critical and we're trying to find the signals very early before governments are aware of it and literally the co response did occur in the Red Zone um so we use three different AI systems and we search in over 50 languages in fact 70% of all the intelligence we get is in non-english languages which tells you how important that multilingual intelligence is we visualize the data in a number of different ways and we do a pandemic watch looking for undiagnosed pneumonia we've published quite a bit of research on it including um looking at epidemic signals in Ukraine um that in 2022 all um formal surveillance ceased so there were no more reporting of covid cases of TB of HIV nothing so um we were able to give a very comprehensive picture of what was going on epidemic Wise from open- Source data uh we also looked at radiation signals in Ukraine using the same methodology um but ultimately a tool like this like epy watch and this is where bvy has helped us as well with the philosophy of bvy as well is that it's no good having a tool like Epi watch being used by an elite few in some building in Geneva or wherever really has to be used at the Grassroots by local health workers on their mobile phon so that aware of what's going on and they can connect the intelligence with what they're seeing on the ground and so we launched an app in Hindi in 2023 um working with the um government um the National Institute of epidemiology which is a government agency in India and we're continuing that work now uh looking at evaluating the use of this app hopefully next year so thank you very much