When scientific advisers informed the White House that the novel coronavirus might be spread not just in sneezes and coughs but by talking or even breathing, it was the result of a new, rapid response effort that matches the country’s finest brains with a daunting array of evidence.
It demonstrates how the business of turning science into policy has been turned upside down in a matter of weeks as the world battles a deadly pandemic.
That has catapulted the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier, to the center of a collaboration that has made research freely available to anyone who needs it, deployed artificial intelligence to analyze tens of thousands of papers, and established a committee to parse the latest findings in a matter of days or even hours.
“It’s extremely important when you’re making policy decisions, that in our country affect 330 million people, that you have the authoritative science and the best in the world advising you,” he told the Washington Examiner.
The result is an unprecedented effort to sift answers from an estimated 45,000 papers on the novel coronavirus and COVID-19 and to establish an apparatus for identifying and responding to future threats.
The Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats met for the first time three weeks ago. Established by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, it brings together 20 experts in molecular biology, epidemiology, and a host of relevant disciplines.
Droegemeier said, “They essentially are a standing army of people that we can go to at a moment’s notice to ask — and get answered — questions on a whole wide array of topics.”
Answers have covered the ability of the coronavirus to survive on surfaces, the time frame during which patients shed virus particles, and the efficacy of masks for the general public.
One such question resulted in a letter submitted to the White House on Wednesday, laying out the answer to Droegemeier’s request for information about whether the coronavirus could be spread by conversation.
“While the current [coronavirus] specific research is limited, the results of available studies are consistent with aerosolization of virus from normal breathing,” wrote committee chairman Dr. Harvey Fineberg.
It is that sort of granular progress, said Droegemeier, that will inch the world towards therapies and protective measures.
“There’s no silver bullet to this thing,” he said.
While Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx have become overnight media sensations with starring roles in the president’s daily coronavirus briefings, they are the public face of a huge effort. Droegemeier sits on the White House Coronavirus Task Force and marshals an army of scientific minds to answer questions as well as helping direct research funding where it is needed.
Critics have accused the Trump administration of reacting too slowly to warning signs of a pandemic and ignoring recent information that suggested the United States was ill-prepared for an infectious disease emergency. In return, the president said he had inherited a broken system.
Droegemeier said the work done now by the committee would help prepare for future pandemics.
“We named it infectious diseases and 21st-century health risks in the sense that it will continue well beyond this particular crisis,” he said. “So, one of the things that’s important about that is that they’re capturing the lessons learned that will help inform a thoughtful way forward.”
As part of his work, Droegemeier speaks regularly to other government science advisers around the world. Together, they issued a plea to journals to make all COVID-19 publications and data publicly available in machine-readable format. The result is a treasure trove of research that can be sifted by A.I. programs.
“The power of artificial intelligence is really critical here for bringing those articles and the information together and processing it in a way that synthesizes it, organizes it in ways that we can get our hands around it rather than read hundreds of individual journal articles,” he said.
He compared the effort with other huge multinational scientific enterprises of recent decades, such as the Human Genome Project or the Large Hadron Collider. But neither came with the urgency conferred by a deadly, infectious disease.
“It is certainly unique in our lifetime,” he said.
