Two years on, Britain's Biological Security Strategy makes strides

The report is candid about the direction of travel. It concedes that the risks the UK faces are becoming “more likely, diverse and intersect in new ways”, and the two years it covers bear that out across all three vectors that the strategy was built to address: natural, accidental and deliberate biosecurity risks. In the intervening years, Mpox clade Ib has reached British patients, Marburg outbreaks drew UK support to Rwanda and Tanzania, highly pathogenic avian influenza was detected in a sheep in England and in a poultry worker, and foot-and-mouth disease has returned to the European mainland. Joining this ‘illustrious’ cast has been the Andes hantavirus outbreak on board a cruise ship and, at the time of writing, the ongoing complex multi-dimensional outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus in Eastern DR Congo (as well as spread to other countries). The latter in particular, with its complex admixture of systemic conflict, violence, mismanagement, low-resolution biosurveillance and rapid, unforeseen spread to third-party countries, reflects the reality of a globally interconnected biothreat ecosystem. At the same time, the very technologies that make the UK a life-sciences power - engineering biology and AI-enabled design tools - are lowering the barriers to deliberate misuse. And hostile actors have shown, not least in Ukraine, that biosecurity itself can be weaponised through disinformation.

Against that backdrop, the report outlines several significant areas of progress playing to the UK’s strengths. The Biothreat Radar has moved from concept to a first working iteration, drawing open-source and official assessments into a single decision-making picture. The UK Microbial Forensics Consortium gives the country, for the first time, a coordinated capability to distinguish a natural outbreak from an accident or deliberate attack across the human, animal, plant and food sectors. Bedside metagenomics is now spreading from a handful of NHS trusts towards thirty - promising to identify novel pathogens in the first affected patients rather than once a significant outbreak has occurred. Add the Diagnostics Accelerator, voluntary screening guidance for synthetic nucleic acids, a standing capacity to test whether frontier AI could assist chemical or biological misuse, a second AMR action plan, and over a billion pounds committed to a network of national biosecurity centres including the transformation of the Weybridge APHA campus, and the developing picture is of a strategy being operationalised at some pace.

What the report makes clear, however, is that capabilities alone will not achieve the overriding goals of the strategy. Every one of these advances depends on partnership to convert impressive capability into enduring biological resilience. The three axes upon which the report turns drive this message home clearly: One Health, public-private partnerships, and international cooperation represent three critical areas of interaction poised to transform the UK’s technical capability into the substance of operationalised biological security. Amidst two years of great geopolitical instability, commitments to these domains require regular reinvigoration. For example, Britain’s advantage in biotechnology and genomics sits largely outside government; however, Westminster can do a great deal to ensure that industry is incentivised to partner closely on aspects such as the onshoring of diagnostics or building a more agile life sciences manufacturing sector. Internationally, UK partnership and engagement – both fiscal and technical – can leverage the UK’s strategic interests across domains such as the Biological and Chemical Weapons Conventions, the WHO Pandemic Agreement, and as strategic realignments shape security arrangements in settings such as NATO. Strengthening government mechanisms for the rapid establishment of partnerships and the contracting of diverse suppliers remains an important goal for facilitating this objective. The report is light on how to operationalise the strategy across multiple and siloed government stakeholders: UK Health Security Agency, Defence Intelligence, DSTL, FCDO, etc. This risks a missed opportunity. Fusion, parallel thinking and cross-governmental leadership are needed more now than ever. The UK has the breadth and depth to be world leaders in biosecurity if it can harness the civil-security sector as well as private sector partners. Nevertheless, the recent creation of the Defence Universities Alliance provides a unique opportunity to link government strategy with centres of excellence in health security.

Two years on and in the post-COVID-19 world, a critique of the initial strategy persists: it remains weighted towards technocratic solutions. The temptation to bet heavily on single technologies has not gone away, and the socio-behavioural research that biological emergencies invariably call upon is generally treated as second order. A survey of public attitudes to engineering biology is welcome but narrow in relation to the big picture. The social and behavioural sciences can be of particular use in determining whether countermeasures are effective in frightened, divided or even disinformed communities. Calling upon this expertise at the time of system design rather than as a mid-event crisis measure is critical to mission success and cost-efficiency. This is not a call to spend less on the industrial-technical, but a caution not to treat the sciences of the human terrain as an optional extra.

The 2030 vision of a UK resilient to a spectrum of biological threats and a leader in responsible innovation has always been ambitious. The implementation report shows a programme of work that has, for the most part, matched ambition with delivery, and has admirably done so despite a change of administration and challenging economic headwinds. The next stage of work will require government to drive forward an explicit agenda for partnership on biological security that includes research, industry, the public and international allies. It also requires these groups to become proactive actors themselves, aligning on the strategy's common goals and collapsing barriers to cooperation across one of the UK’s major domains of capability and global leadership.

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