The Open Philanthropy Project awarded a grant of $16 million over three years to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS) to provide general operating support, to support its domestic and international work on health security and public health preparedness, and to fund an initiative focused on potential global catastrophic risks (GCRs) posed by pandemic pathogens. This grant falls within Open Philanthropy's work on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.
Open Philanthropy sees CHS as the preeminent U.S. think tank doing policy research and development in the biosecurity and pandemic preparedness (BPP) space. (CHS was previously known as the UPMC Center for Health Security but recently moved to Johns Hopkins University.) This grant is intended to help address what Open Philanthropy sees as a two-part gap: (1) there has been little recent work in biosecurity focused explicitly on GCRs, and (2) there is limited independent policy research and advocacy in the field of biosecurity generally. The grant aims to provide CHS with stable and flexible support, maximize its ability to work on valuable projects, and enable it to build capacity to increase its effectiveness, especially in communications and advocacy.