Witnesses assess US biosecurity infrastructure as inadequate

Senate Agriculture Committee members can’t say they weren’t warned. A panel of witnesses spoke to the committee on Wednesday and all essentially delivered the same message: the current defense against pests, pathogens, and biosecurity threats to the food system needs work.“If you were an enemy of the United States and wanted to strike us, nuclear weapons always get the most attention because they’re so terrifying to everybody, but when you think about the damage that would be done to our economy, to our country, to our people, it would create a real sense of terror if somebody successfully attacked with a pathogen our agriculture sector,” former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, co-chair of the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense, told the committee.