Inevitable pandemics risk extinction---but early, rapid response contains the impact.

The devastating impact of COVID-19 has highlighted global vulnerabilities to high-consequence biological events. The international community was woefully unprepared for a pandemic that has led to millions of deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses, and has upended daily life. However, notwithstanding the severe damage caused by COVID-19, it should be viewed as a warning shot.1 It will not be the last pandemic humanity faces, and the next high-consequence biological event could be as destructive or substantially worse.

We define global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs) as biological events of tremendous scale that could cause severe damage to human civilization, potentially jeopardizing its long-term survival.2 The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security has also developed a working definition of GCBRs,3 and this term is part of a broader discussion about global catastrophic risks that could arise from a variety of sources, including nuclear war, anthropogenic climate change, and advanced artificial intelligence that has not been sufficiently safeguarded.4,5 GCBRs could be caused by a naturally emerging infectious disease outbreak, an accidental release of a pathogen, or a deliberate attack. Naturally emerging infectious disease outbreaks that can grow into pandemics are likely to increase in frequency due to urbanization, globalization, and environmental degradation, and the world faces an increasing risk of high-consequence biological events resulting from accidental or deliberate misuse of the tools of modern bioscience and biotechnology.6-8 Not all outbreaks or global pandemics will grow to the scale of a GCBR as we define it in this article and as others have defined global catastrophic risks more broadly, because the threshold for this type of event is extremely high.

Although COVID-19 does not rise to the level of a GCBR-scale event, it has demonstrated that a biological event can have a devastating global impact, and it should serve as a warning to global leaders that the world needs much more robust protections against high-consequence biological events that could emerge in the future and be substantially worse.

In our view, human-caused biological events involving the accidental or deliberate misuse of an engineered pathogen are more likely to lead to a GCBR-scale event than a naturally emerging pandemic.9 Scientists have the capacity to deliberately or inadvertently engineer pathogens that are more virulent and transmissible than what nature creates by chance, and the upper limit of damage that could be caused by a human-engineered biological event is unknown.10-12 Prevention, early detection, and rapid response are all crucial for guarding against GCBR-scale events. However, in this article, we focus on effective strategies for preventing biological events that could become GCBRs, specifically by disincentivizing development and use of biological weapons by states and other powerful actors.