It’s pretty clear that the world needs some kind of surveillance or inspection regime to monitor both biological weapons and natural disease outbreaks. This Wired article goes into some of the possibilities.

• The WHO is an obvious possibility, but requires full cooperation of member states so this limits what it can do, even if it were well funded.
• Something like the International Atomic Energy Agency is a possibility. It would have to be established by a treaty and would have the ability to swoop in and inspect advanced biological labs (these are called “biosafety level 4” or BSL-4) on short notice.
• There is an existing treaty called the Biological Weapons Convention which might have the authority to create this body, but the article says it is somewhat ineffective and a new treaty wouldn’t need to have as many parties, just starting with the major players and letting others sign on over time.
• Another model is the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is similar to IAEA.
• The UN Security Council would also have the authority to establish a new inspection body, kind of like it did for Iraq in the 1990s (which turned out great… and this is the problem, the UN lost a lot of its previous credibility in that debacle.)

The BSL-4 labs are proliferating around the world according to the article, and this seems like a scary situation to me.

My modest proposal would be to fund the WHO fully right away and have it investigate natural disease outbreaks with member state cooperation. Then have the Security Council establish the heavy-duty biological weapons inspection program with the heavies right away. Like it or not, we also need surveillance to find the hidden labs or even just people messing around with dangerous stuff in their garages and basements. This will be much easier for the little guy to do than, say, getting your hands on some enriched uranium or Novachok.

This is an existential risk – we may not get many chances to make mistakes and learn from them. The risk will keep increasing and under any kind of moral or responsible government framework it has to be dealt with right away.