The Center for Health Security began as the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies in 1998 at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. D. A. Henderson served as the founding director. At that time, the Center was the first and only academic center focused on biosecurity policy and practice. At one point around 2003, CHS had become part of a new umbrella organization called the Institute for Global Health and Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In November 2003, the leaders left Johns Hopkins to join the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and relaunched the Center as the Center for Biosecurity of UPMC. This move apparently split the organization in two, and it is unclear what happened to the old organization. On April 30, 2013, the Center changed its name from "Center for Biosecurity of UPMC" to "UPMC Center for Health Security". This name change reflected a broadening of the scope of CHS's work. In January 2017, the Center became part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Its domain name changed from upmchealthsecurity.org to centerforhealthsecurity.org.
Funding
In 2002, the Center received a $1 million grant from the US federal government. Before 2017, CHS was heavily reliant on government funding. In January 2017, the Open Philanthropy Project awarded a $16 million grant over three years to the Center for Health Security.
Publications
The Center for Health Security publishes three online newsletters:
Clinicians' Biosecurity News, published twice each month
Health Security Headlines, a daily news digest
Preparedness Pulsepoints, published weekly0
It maintains and edits a peer reviewed journal which is part of the Mary Ann Liebertpublishing group. It also provides editorial oversight for the journal Health Security, which was launched in 2003 and called Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science until 2015. CHS also publishes the blogThe Bifurcated Needle. The Open Philanthropy Project's grant writeup of CHS noted several publications:
The Center has published in journals including JAMA and The Lancet. A full list of publications is available on the CHS website., the list shows more than 400 publications.
From June 22–23, 2001, CHS co-hosted Operation Dark Winter, a senior-level bioterrorism attack simulation involving a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States.
On January 14, 2005, CHS helped to host Atlantic Storm, a table-top smallpox bioterrorism simulation.
Clade X
On May 15, 2018, the Center hosted Clade X, a day-long pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of National Security Council–convened meetings of 10 US government leaders, played by individuals prominent in the fields of national security or epidemic response. Drawing from actual events, Clade X identified important policy issues and preparedness challenges that could be solved with sufficient political will and attention. These issues were designed in a narrative to engage and educate the participants and the audience. Clade X was livestreamed on Facebook and extensive materials from the exercise are available online.
Event 201
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic tabletop exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York, NY. The exercise illustrated areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe coronavirus pandemic in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences. The exercise took place a few months before the World Health Organization announced the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the statement from Johns Hopkins specifically states that the exercise was not predictive of the current pandemic. In fact they say that "the inputs we used for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus are not similar to nCoV-2019".
Other
Improving Epidemic Response: Building Bridges Between the US and China. May 2012.
