DID DONALD EVEN EXIST?:

The Biden administration announced its third major climate effort on Thursday, February 11, rolling out initiatives to accelerate innovation in clean energy and climate technology.

The White House has formed a working group to help set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Climate (ARPA-C), which Biden pledged to create during the campaign. Its mission will be to accelerate progress in tough technical areas, likely including technologies that can capture, remove, and store carbon dioxide as well as heating and cooling products that don't rely on highly potent greenhouse gases.

In addition, the Department of Energy plans to provide $100 million in funding for low-carbon energy projects through the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a group funded in the first Obama administration to support clean energy technologies that aren't far enough along to form businesses or attract traditional venture capital.

The move could help revitalize a favorite target of the Trump administration, which repeatedly tried to eliminate ARPA-E's budget during the last four years. Congress, however, consistently maintained or even slightly raised its funding.

The race to develop COVID vaccines has roots stretching back to the terrorist attacks on September 11 and the anthrax attacks that followed in the subsequent weeks. The events led the National Academy of Sciences to convene a set of committees to examine the twin threats of terrorism and pandemics. The committees "concluded that we were enormously vulnerable and we had to do a lot of different things [to] protect the country," said Bloom, who co-chaired a bioterrorism panel for the National Academy of Sciences at the time.

In 2002, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) first appeared in China and took hold internationally within months. Effective public health interventions prevented SARS from becoming a pandemic.

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) established the National Pandemic Influenza Plan to provide a blueprint for pandemic response. "At some point in our nation's future, another virus will emerge with the potential to create a global disease outbreak," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt at the time.

The pandemic plan stressed the importance of antiviral drugs and vaccines. "It is a wonderful plan," Bloom noted. But before COVID-19 hit, the report had "disappeared in a drawer somewhere in Washington," he added.

But the U.S. government's focus on vaccines to combat pandemics likely played a role in spurring further research into novel vaccine platforms.

Government agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) would play a role in vaccine development. DARPA "invests in very long term science and technology [projects] that will pay off in 20 years," Bloom said.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) developed a stabilized SARS-CoV-2 spike immunogen (S-2P) that Moderna would later use in its messenger RNA platform.

DARPA was instrumental in the development of RNA vaccines and provided $25 million in financial support to Moderna in 2013 to pursue messenger RNA-based antibody drugs and vaccines. DARPA announced it was committing up to $56 million in additional funding to Moderna this October.

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