Working with local health authorities not only helps prevent the next epidemic, but it also ensures that these virological samples are kept safe – “therefore it will not accidentally leak from these public health facilities or not be stolen by a terrorist,” Robert Pope, director of cooperative threats at DTRA, explained in a 2022 interview.

The staff of DTRA functions as an ‘early warning system’, says a staff member of the congress to Wired, before any deployment of the US Army, they say. Although not a traditional type of military force, it adds, but it must still fit into the priorities of this administration. “It secures our border against pathogens.”

In an independent analysis performed for the Pentagon in 2022 [weapons of mass destruction] threats; The authorities are unique and fill an existing gap. “

Gigi Gronvall, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, should not be cut programs like DTRA, Gigi Gronvall says. These are mainly national security programs, she says, designed to “give ourselves and ears around the world to put out the fires, or to prevent them from happening in the first place.”

If you do not protrude the fire – whether it is a new infectious disease or a chemical weapon program in a rogue condition – it will continue to grow, Gronvall adds. “We have areas of the world that do not have fire,” she says. “By helping them help themselves, we help them act.”

‘A fire sale on expertise’

The Pentagon’s attempts to reduce threat, and the DTRA itself, stem from the work of former US Senators Sam Nunn, a Democrat, and Richard Lugar, a Republican, to ensure weapons of mass destruction to the fall of the Soviet Union. Through their work, America has destroyed thousands of ballistic missiles and nuclear power heads, disposed of tens of thousands of pounds of chemical weapons, and broken down Soviet bio -laboratories. In 1998, DTRA was formally created and given a more expensive mandate to detect and destroy chemical and biological threats, while other countries also help the same.

For his work, DTRA was targeted by Russian disinformation efforts, with Moscow accusing America of producing biological weapons in these Dtra-funded laboratories. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, conspiracy theorists in America picked up that thread, indicating that the invasion was covering to destroy these biaweapons laboratories.

Fear of DTRA’s work has since been raised by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Health and Human Services, Director of the National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Russia itself. Republican Senator Rand Paul repeatedly issued summonses to the DTRA in search of evidence that it was involved in dangerous virological research and suggests that it may have had a hand to create Covid-19.

“When Russia attacked the program, it did it because it wanted to erode our national security,” says Gronvall. Russia may not believe these lies, she adds, but “they were very successful in getting people with power to believe these things.”