The Department of Homeland Security has paused a next-generation biological threat detection program pending a capabilities assessment, says the official that oversees the department’s efforts to counter weapons of mass destruction.
The hold on the Biodefense in the 21st Century (BD21) effort was directed in June by the DHS under secretary for management, Gary Rasicot, acting assistant secretary of the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD) Office told a Senate panel in mid-July. He said the program’s milestones are on hold “until we understand what the technology can provide [and] what other capabilities are out there.”
The under secretary also directed that the BD21 program focus only on “agent agnostic detector solutions and to pursue technology maturation,” Rasicot told the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The closer examination of the BD21 program is part of an ongoing strategic review of the CWMD Office’s bio-surveillance programs Rasicot said he launched in Jan. 2022.
Another key aspect of the review is finding near-term improvements in the BioWatch program, which BD21 is supposed to replace. Rasicot described three areas of improvement for BioWatch, which includes greater stakeholder engagement by himself and his headquarters team with local BioWatch coordinators, working with the national laboratories and other federal partners to “validate” that the program is focused on the right threat agents, and finding ways to improve financial support to assist state and local officials in their exercising programming of BioWatch.
The BioWatch program is deployed in more than 30 major urban areas in the U.S. and is designed to provide warning of airborne bioterrorism attack. A key challenge with the program is that it is manually intensive and can take at least a day between the time an incident occurs and local health officials have confirmation. BD21 is supposed to reduce the time to detect a potentially life-threating biological event.
It Oct. 2021, the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense issued a report calling the BioWatch program a failure and the same for the various attempts to replace it, including BD21. The report, Saving Sisyphus: Advanced Biodetection for the 21st Century, said that much of the technology for BD21 is unproven and that the polymerase chain reaction technology that is planned to be used to confirm an event is the same used in BioWatch and would not allow for rapid threat detection.