I served as the White House’s top biosecurity official. Here’s what I’m watching for with AI

In the White House Situation Room, the hardest calls were never the obvious emergencies.

What kept me up were the nights when a fragment of information came in and the debate wasn’t about what to do.

It was about whether anything concerning was happening at all.

In 2023, my team and I were assessing the nation’s pandemic influenza plans when the Situation Room notified me that H5N1 influenza had infected a father and killed his daughter in a remote Cambodian village.

Was the virus spreading between people – the start of a pandemic that could kill millions? The national security adviser asked whether to brief President Biden immediately.

If these cases were the first signs, we would need to commit billions of dollars to vaccines and treatments within days.

I told him to wait.

Not because I thought it was nothing, but because we had already agreed, before the alert came, on what would tell us it was something: sustained human-to-human transmission.

We worked with health officials to pull surveillance data from nearby emergency rooms and compared it against prior years.

The cases were not unexpectedly high.

The President did not need to be alerted, I told him, and I would let him know if the ground truth changed.

That trigger did two jobs at once.

It kept us from dismissing a real emergency, and it kept us from escalating one that wasn’t.

In almost every crisis I have worked, the decisive moment arrived before anyone agreed there was one.