The Generic Biothreat, or, How We Became Unprepared

Andrew Lakoff, University of California, San Diego

Over the past three decades, a new way of thinking about and acting on infectious disease threats has emerged in the United States: it is no longer only a question of prevention, but also and perhaps even more one of preparedness. This talk asks: How did this shift happen? How did we become unprepared? By this question I do not mean that we were once prepared and are now less so, but rather, I mean to ask how a norm of preparedness has come to structure thought about biological threats. The talk proposes a way of understanding the current intersection of national security and public health not in terms of an encroaching process of militarization, nor simply as the continuation of an ongoing mutual entanglement, but rather as the recombination of existing elements into a novel apparatus.