Global Biodefense

A years-long outbreak has reshaped what public health officials know about monkeypox virus (MPXV) vaccination. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its recommendations for healthcare providers on monkeypox vaccine use in the United States, incorporating the latest data on vaccine effectiveness, booster dose policy, traveler risk, and population-specific considerations.

The history of transformative biology is also a history of governance arriving late: recombinant DNA, CRISPR, synthetic cells each provoked alarm before eventually settling into workable regulation. Now a more exotic frontier is emerging, one a new commentary argues demands oversight before the science matures, not after. Published in Health Security, the commentary by David R.

This week’s selections include the IAEA’s warning that Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant could face a station blackout within days without restored power. They also include new case counts showing the DRC’s Ebola outbreak has reached 6,250 confirmed cases as control efforts continue to fall short of international targets, and a warning that AI models can now design novel viruses as well as nature itself.

When a sitting president signs an executive order directing federal agencies to revisit childhood vaccine recommendations, the policy debate that follows is legitimate. The flood of medical misinformation that accompanies it is not. Both happened simultaneously last month, and the collision is doing measurable damage to one of the most effective public health tools in American history. On Aug.

A formal determination of military emergency signed this summer has set in motion a federal process that could fast-track new pain medications for U.S. troops wounded in combat or attacks involving weapons of mass destruction. The action, published in the Federal Register on Sep. 3, 2026, represents a significant activation of rarely used emergency legal authority that bridges national security and the federal drug approval system.

This edition includes new reporting on how simultaneous budget and staffing cuts across federal, state, and local agencies slowed this year’s response to a nationwide cyclospora outbreak. We’re also covering BARDA’s expansion of its SMART Antiviral Prize to $150 million as nine teams advance toward treatments for dengue, Zika, West Nile, and chikungunya, and new seroprevalence data showing a quarter of cats near California dairy farms carry H5N1 antibodies.

The United States has long been vulnerable to a quiet but serious structural problem in its infectious disease response: the ability to safely treat patients infected with the world’s most dangerous pathogens has been concentrated in relatively few, highly specialized facilities. When an outbreak occurs, that concentration creates bottlenecks, strains regional resources, and leaves patients in many parts of the country far from the care they need. A federal initiative is working to change that.

A lab working with an unmodified, naturally dangerous pathogen can currently sit entirely outside federal biosafety oversight, so long as nothing in the protocol involves recombinant or synthetic DNA. That gap has existed since NIH first wrote the rules governing laboratory biosafety in response to the emerging science of gene splicing, and most institutions have quietly patched over it for decades by voluntarily extending their internal review to cover unmodified pathogens too.

The moment a hemorrhagic fever virus crosses an international border, the margin for error collapses. Speed of detection, speed of notification, and speed of response are not abstract performance metrics. They are the difference between a contained outbreak and a regional emergency.

A new generation of influenza vaccines may be taking shape. GSK announced on Sept. 1, 2026, that it will advance its investigational mRNA seasonal flu vaccine candidate into a pivotal Phase III trial following positive Phase II results presented at the OPTIONS XIII Conference for the Control of Influenza in Washington, D.C. The trial is set to begin this month.