Good Ventures granted $300,000 to the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense (“the Study Panel”) to host a series of meetings on U.S. biodefense. The Study Panel convened four meetings in which current and former policymakers, academics, and security experts discussed the state of U.S. biodefense efforts. The Study Panel released a report assessing current efforts and recommending changes to U.S. policy and law in October 2015.
We made this grant as part of our investigation into biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, a space we’ve found to be highly complex. Despite large amounts of government funding (relative to many other potentially catastrophic risks), there is little philanthropic spending and many valuable activities seem to remain underfunded.
We think that providing funding to the Study Panel is a promising giving opportunity because we see it as having a reasonable chance of leading to improved U.S. biosecurity policy and because it will gather experts to conduct needed prioritization work in the area of biosecurity. Without our support, we believe that this project would have been unlikely to meet its full funding needs or would have been substantially delayed.