Author: Marcus Bailey

MS. RAYMOND:  Good morning, everyone.  And thank you so much, Brad.  To all our participants, thank you for joining us for this embargoed briefing today.

     We will be providing an overview of the American Pandemic Preparedness Plan, also entitled “Transforming our Capabilities,” which will advance the President’s commitment to building back better for the next biological threat.

We’ll start with some comments from our speakers.  Today, we have the President’s Science Advisor and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as well as a member of the President’s Cabinet, Dr. Eric Lander; as well as the Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense, Dr. Beth Cameron.

After they both give initial remarks, we’ll open it up for question-and-answer.

     As a reminder, this briefing is on the record, but the call contents and the materials that we shared prior to the call are embargoed until 3:00 p.m. this afternoon.  

And with that, I’ll turn it over to our speakers, starting with Dr. Lander.

DR. LANDER:  Well, thank you very much, and good morning to everybody and thank you for joining the call.  So, my name is Eric Lander.  I’m the President’s Science Advisor and I’m the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

     And today, we’re releasing a plan for transforming U.S. capabilities to prepare for and respond rapidly and effectively to future pandemics and other high-consequence biological threats.

Digital Supply Chains (DSCs) are highly integrated global internet communities of customers, distributors, producers, and suppliers. DSCs have increasingly incorporated Internet of Things (IoT) innovations such as field sensors and real time condition monitoring; and have served as effective platforms for IoT technology diffusion. However, as IoT has become more pervasive, pushing the edges of networks further out, new cyber threat windows have opened everywhere. More recently, Cyber-Supply Chain Risk Management (C-SCRM) has emerged as a critical discipline combining expertise from cybersecurity, supply chain management and enterprise risk management; and designed to stem the proliferation of digital supply chain attacks seeking illicit access to corporate networks for competitive espionage, financial and intellectual property theft, and disruption of operations. Yet to date, there has been little evidence that C-SCRM practices are actually effective in containing all or even some types of breaches.

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This paper seeks to complement the supply chain risk monitoring literature by identifying analytics methods and the risk indicators being monitored for this purpose. This includes the underlying supply chain data used for short-term or even real-time monitoring of risks in supply chain risk management.

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A widespread shortage of liquid oxygen linked to the latest wave of the pandemic could affect SpaceX’s launch schedule, a company executive said Aug. 24.

Speaking on a panel at the 36th Space Symposium here, Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, cited difficulties in securing supplies of liquid oxygen as one of its biggest supply chain concerns.

“We’re actually going to be impacted this year with the lack of liquid oxygen for launch,” she said. “We certainly are going to make sure the hospitals are going to have the oxygen that they need, but for anybody who has liquid oxygen to spare, send me an email.”

Liquid oxygen is one of the most commonly used propellants in launch vehicles. It serves as an oxidizer in combination with fuels such as liquid hydrogen, kerosene and methane.

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An epidemic outbreak can cause huge impact not only on human lives alone but also on other sectors relying on it. Supply chain operations are also largely affected from these outbreaks. From the recent epidemic outbreak, severe disruptions affecting both the supply and demand of supply chains were observed. Supply chains being optimized for maximum profits, reduced inventories were less immune to epidemic outbreaks. As a result these firms were left with huge losses during the recent outbreak. This has forced executives to adopt resilience factors to their supply chains. Thus for redesign of supply chains, executives required clear knowledge of how impacts were going to affect their firms. In this paper, simulation modelling for impact analysis of supply chains during an epidemic outbreak is illustrated. This provided a detailed quantitative overview of the impact for executives. Also simulation results were further processed to generate datasets suitable for developing decision support tools using various machine learning algorithms.

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Over the last decade, we have witnessed many types of unpredictable disasters, including terrorist attacks, wars, earthquakes, economic crises, devaluation of currencies, SARS, tsunamis, cyber-attacks, and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Today’s global economy has made the world more interconnected than ever, and with the increasing trend to source globally, the COVID-19 virus has demonstrated the extensive impact that supply chain disruptions can have on a business. This has led to an increased need for global insurance coverage as one of the means to protect against supply chain disruptions – specifically, business interruption (BI) and contingent business interruption (CBI) coverage.

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From the coronavirus crisis to REvil ransomware attacks to the Suez Canal blockage, the volume of supply chain disruptions continues to grow, and businesses have their hands full with mitigating risk on multiple fronts. Jennifer Bisceglie, founder and CEO of Interos, said the damaging results of these events tendt o share one thing: “It’s a perfect storm coming together of physical, digital, human and natural disasters and mistakes,” Bisceglie told PYMNTS in a recent interview. “The common denominator for all of this is the utter lack of visibility. “As organizations prioritize supply chain risk mitigation and supplier management, firms are taking a more strategic look at how to minimize disruption. But there are some missteps that companies continue to make, Bisceglie noted, and as companies begin to hold their suppliers more accountable for their supply chain stability, they must also hold themselves to those high standards too, she said.

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A Department of Defense task force concluded in 2018 that DOD’s inventory management systems were potentially vulnerable to attack. These systems, run by the Defense Logistics Agency, are used to manage the defense supply chain. They reviewed efforts to reduce the risks in 6 inventory management systems. The agency has taken some prescribed risk management actions but could do more. For example, they found 69% of its plans to fix identified security weaknesses were not carried out on time. They made 5 recommendations to improve the cybersecurity of these systems.

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The recent massive cyberattack against government agencies and the private sector, suspected to emanate from Russia, has made the federal IT supply chain a front-and-center concern. In that incident, malware embedded in a software update of a technology product enabled hackers to roam undetected on customers’ networks, including federal systems, for at least nine months.

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