Pandemic Ready
The global built environment stands at a critical juncture in biosecurity, caught in a chronic cycle of post-crisis complacency where political will and capital investment evaporate precisely when proactive defense systems should be codified. In this episode of Air Quality Matters, I sit down with Brian Renda , Programme Director for the Built Environment, and Victoria Slaughter PPE Director, both representing Blueprint Biosecurity . Operating as an independent, philanthropically funded nonprofit, Blueprint Biosecurity approaches biological risks without the quarterly financial constraints of commercial enterprise or the political inertia of state agencies.
Rather than viewing airborne epidemics as unpredictable acts of nature that necessitate purely reactive emergency responses, the organisation operates on the operational principle that while pathogen outbreaks are biologically inevitable, their escalation into devastating global pandemics is structurally preventable. By developing and roadmapping pathogen-agnostic countermeasures across both personal protective equipment and indoor built infrastructure, both are advancing a systems-engineering model designed to protect spaces before novel viral threats emerge.
Their perspectives offer an authoritative roadmap for facility managers, building physicists, and public health strategists seeking to convert hard-won pandemic lessons into permanent, verifiable indoor environmental resilience.
How Can the Built Environment Justify Infection-Resilient Ventilation Investments Against Chronic Endemic Disease?
Brian argues that facility managers and institutional operators cannot sustain capital investment or operational discipline by relying solely on the fear of low-frequency, catastrophic biological emergencies, particularly when balancing immediate maintenance budgets against future hypotheticals. To establish durable, infection-resilient infrastructure, ranging from enhanced outdoor air dilution to upper-room germicidal ultraviolet (GUV) fixtures and far-UVC arrays, the primary commercial justification must be anchored in continuous, daily mitigation of endemic pathogens such as influenza, rhinovirus, and RSV. By demonstrating that improved clean air delivery rates systematically suppress seasonal illness, reduce workplace and educational absenteeism, and protect cognitive performance, building owners can realise an immediate return on investment during peacetime operations. This dual-purpose economic strategy aligns continuous indoor air quality baselines with ASHRAE Standard 241 criteria, establishing a permanent operational baseline that automatically delivers heightened biosecurity during an emerging outbreak without requiring disruptive behavioural interventions.
Why Does Scalable Pandemic Preparedness Require Inverting the Traditional Hierarchy of Hazard Controls for Respiratory Protection?
Victoria explains that while conventional industrial hygiene frameworks relegate personal protective equipment to the lowest tier of hazard controls beneath elimination and engineering interventions, widespread airborne epidemics fundamentally invert this hierarchy for mobile populations navigating uncharacterized public environments. Because individuals move fluidly between public transit, commercial workplaces, educational facilities, and private residences where ventilation rates and air-cleaning efficacy remain unverified, high-performance respirators serve as an individual's sole reliable, autonomous point of exposure control. Realising this protective capacity, however, requires eliminating the widespread conflation of loose-fitting barrier coverings, such as surgical and cloth masks designed primarily to block ballistic droplets, with certified filtering facepiece respirators like N95 or FFP3 devices that guarantee stringent aerosol filtration and verified facial seals. The discussion assesses the systemic mechanics of national supply resilience, outlining why strategic stockpiling must transition away from short-dated, disposable inventories toward multi-decade shelf-stable hardware, scalable domestic production models, and standardised community fit-assessment protocols.
Perspectives
The technical dialogue cuts directly through public health assumptions by exposing systemic vulnerabilities in national stockpile management and real-world indoor air quality verification. They both deliver a pointed critique of post-pandemic procurement strategies, highlighting that regional stockpiles across the globe are currently expiring and being discarded because authorities procured short-shelf-life consumables during the crisis rather than investing in durable, rotation-ready inventories engineered for multi-decade storage. Victoria argues that the societal division and misinformation surrounding masking during COVID-19 was largely an artefact of product scarcity and variable quality: "The benefit of working from a framing of respiratory protection with a known level of efficacy means that you don't have to wonder if something is protecting you." On the built environment front, Brian details the critical measurement challenge paralysing environmental infection control: unlike carbon dioxide or particulate mass, viable airborne pathogens cannot currently be quantified in real time within occupied rooms. This absence of immediate feedback complicates empirical proof of intervention efficacy, prompting Blueprint Biosecurity to evaluate emerging air-treatment modalities, including far-UVC at 222 nanometers, conventional 254-nanometer upper-room fixtures, and vaporised glycol solutions, through a rigorous tripartite framework balancing quantified microbiological kill rates, secondary air chemistry risks, and real-world installation feasibility.
Part 2: One Take Podcast
In this One Take analysis, I examine a two-year field study from Madrid, published in Atmospheric Pollution Research, investigating how manual ventilation protocols and occupant routines influence indoor environmental quality across primary school classrooms. Primary schools present an extraordinary engineering challenge because of their extreme occupant density, often packing thirty active children into fifty-square-meter spaces, resulting in less than two square meters per person, coupled with children's elevated metabolic respiration rates and developing respiratory systems. While the researchers attempted to resolve this high-density loading through a structured, seasonally adapted manual window-opening schedule, the empirical findings demonstrate the profound limitations of relying on human behavioural compliance to overcome fundamental building physics deficits in naturally ventilated educational estates.
Why Does Behavioural Window Management Fail to Solve Structural Air Quality Deficits in School Classrooms?
The Madrid study demonstrated that manual ventilation schedules suffer from systemic behavioural failure, as teachers frequently abandoned scheduled window openings during freezing winter periods to avoid unbearable cold drafts or kept windows shut during exams and quiet periods to exclude intrusive outdoor traffic noise. Even during intervals of rigorous protocol compliance, passive natural ventilation proved physically incapable of controlling metabolic accumulation, with carbon dioxide levels routinely surging past 1,500 ppm and exceeding 2,000 ppm within thirty minutes of class commencement. Furthermore, manual airflow provided zero control over volatile organic compound (TVOC) spikes generated by solvent-based glues and cleaning chemicals, while physical student movement actively drove coarse particulate (PM10) resuspension that was exacerbated by the ingress of urban traffic soot through open windows. These physical and behavioural realities illustrate why relying on teachers to function as manual environmental controllers is unviable, pointing toward continuous mechanical ventilation with heat recovery and dedicated particulate filtration as the only engineered baseline capable of safeguarding classroom air quality.
The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with
MANN+HUMMEL - Particles Plus - Eurovent- Aico - Lindab - S&P
The One Take Podcast in Partnership with
SafeTraces - Inbiot - Farmowood - Ei Electronics - iAir Group - Zehnder
Charity Partner
Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website.
If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here. Do subscribe if you can; lots more content is coming soon.
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0:00 - Welcome back to Air Quality Matters.
0:02 - I'm Simon Jones and coming up a conversation with Brian Render and Victoria Slaughter from Blueprint Biosecurity.
0:10 - Brian is Programme Director for the Built Environment and Victoria is PPE Director.
0:17 - Both come from cell and molecular biology and are now at the center of a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening society's ability to prepare and respond to pandemics.
0:29 - It's interesting this, we often cover the topic of pandemics from the perspective of science and academia, from policy and even industry.
0:39 - But I don't think we often see this problem from the perspective of an organisation driven by philanthropy.
0:46 - Imagine what that does from the perspective of freedom to research, how you communicate the problem and even engage with supply chains.
0:56 - We talk about all of this, where we are post-COVID, how you plan at scale for something with an undefined timeline, the details of the tech and logistics of pandemic preparedness and so much more.
1:13 - It's a really interesting insight, this, from the perspective of a non-profit organization.
1:20 - This podcast is brought to you in partnership with Man Hummel, Particles Plus, ECO, Eurovent, Lindab and S&P Ventilation, along with our charity partners, The Safer Air Project.
1:32 - These podcasts simply would not be possible without them.
1:36 - Please do check them out in the show notes and at airqualitymatters.net.
1:40 - This is a conversation with Brian Render and Victoria Slaughter.
2:00 - So as an organisation who's kind of focused on this, what's your perspective on where we are right now and the kind of trajectory going forward and more broadly, your kind of hopes for what you can bring to that challenge?
2:15 - Yeah, I think, you know, if you look at the history of sort of, you know, biosecurity, you have these cycles of, you know, interest and lack of interest.
2:22 - And, you know, in general, for anybody, it's really hard, I think, to plan and respond to things that are not just right in front of you all the time.
2:31 - So during the pandemic, we have this top of mind, it was largely destructive, right?
2:35 - you know, to what we're doing.
2:37 - And therefore, it was very easy to respond to.
2:39 - But now that everyone wants to sort of look on to the next thing or, you know, focus upon the challenges of today, I think it's very hard for, you know, to keep that attention on, you know, thinking about the next pandemic when you don't know if it's happening in one year, in 10 years or 100 years.
2:55 - And so, you know, we really see our sort of role as helping to
2:59 - advance our overall state of readiness and protection so that we can ensure that whereas we maybe can't stop outbreaks from happening, maybe we can stop them from progressing into pandemics in the future.
3:13 - And where do you think we
3:15 - Like mentally, where do you put yourself in this cycle?
3:18 - Because, you know, it's very hard to predict a pandemic, right?
3:22 - Do you see this as an emergency readiness?
3:25 - Are you trying to do stuff as quickly as you can for something that might be here next year?
3:30 - Yeah.
3:31 - Is this an AI emergency where we're talking about, you know, wiping out the human race in 10 years time?
3:38 - You know, you see yourself with a kind of a framework over a five or 10 year period to do something.
3:45 - And as you say, we have endemics, we have, you know, flus and colds and other viruses that come around every year that don't quite make it to a level of pandemic, but they cause a lot of harm in the process.
3:57 - Mentally, where do you put yourself in a place with where you are as an organization?
4:05 - Yeah, I'll start with that.
4:06 - I'd love to have Victoria comment here too.
4:08 - We just don't know when the next large event will be.
4:10 - I think we're not able to predict that.
4:12 - I think history has shown that we're unable to predict these things.
4:15 - And so I think we're really focused upon sort of general solutions, regardless of when it comes.
4:20 - And so if there's something that happens next year or in 10 years or 100 years, I think we need to be ready.
4:25 - And so mentally, I think we're in preparation mode, but I don't think that, you know, we have the perspective of, you know, we have infinite time to prepare.
4:34 - The earlier you're able to have preparations done, the better protected you are from, you know, whatever event gets to happen in the future.
4:40 - Yeah, and I guess, Victoria, there's co-benefits that come with that as well.
4:45 - You know, in trying to put yourself in a position for the worst case scenarios, you're also putting yourself into better places for the near misses, right?
4:58 - I think in a lot of ways.
4:59 - I mean, you look at, I think there's a few things to unpack here.
5:03 - I mean, first we have what is in some ways a pretty good opportunity after we've all lived through the COVID pandemic and we saw how disruptive it was and we saw how
5:15 - I mean, everything from like lives lost to economic impacts.
5:18 - I mean, this is truly, it was truly impactful to every single person in the world.
5:22 - And so I think my sense is that there, there were clearly some lessons learned.
5:27 - And at the same time, I think that there's often a broad perception of like, oh, these things must've just gotten solved.
5:33 - You know, there were, you know, obviously I work a lot on respirators.
5:35 - And so there were respirators that were not available in the first month of a pandemic.
5:40 - But then, you know, by 2024, you could just buy these anywhere.
5:43 - So clearly, these problems are solved.
5:46 - And so I think a lot of what we're doing is really trying to understand to what extent are these problems solved and continue to push forward that progress.
5:54 - And I mean, so much of why we focus on pathogen agnostic countermeasures, these things that would work for essentially any infectious disease, as long as it's spreading through a respiratory route.
6:08 - You know, I think it's important to consider for some of the respirators, for example, a respirator is going to have a role in essentially any pandemic.
6:17 - And they're also going to have a role in everything from, you know, wildfires to, you know, there's lots of situations in which a person would need to be able to filter the air that they're breathing.
6:30 - And so I think so much of what our role is, is really just being able to give this message that,
6:35 - You know, just because you can buy a respirator on the shelf right now does not mean that there are going to be enough of them in a very wide scale emergency.
6:43 - And so, you know, you look at COVID and it was, like I said, enormously devastating.
6:47 - Do not want to downplay this, but it also it also could have been even worse.
6:52 - And I think it's important to not, you know, not to make this sound like a doomsday scenario, but even a very, very slightly worse case than COVID, you would have seen probably much more disruption and supply chains would have been incredibly strained.
7:08 - And so I think it's important to say, it's important to prepare for all pandemics.
7:11 - So much of the work that we're doing is preparing for all pandemics, but for something that is, you know, worldwide and incredibly, you know, affecting everyone,
7:21 - you need to be doing dedicated work to prepare for those scenarios.
7:24 - And I don't see these as being out of the question.
7:28 - Yeah, that's a really good point.
7:29 - And, you know, and I would say in addition to not knowing whether something could be slightly worse, frankly, I don't even want anything that was slightly less.
7:38 - Yes.
7:39 - Than the pandemic, you know, like this was this was very, very bad, you know, and, you know, we've got great, great ability to kind of shuffle bad stuff to the back of our heads.
7:49 - But I mean, this was unbelievably disruptive to society and health and well-being, you know, across the board.
7:56 - So frankly, even something 50% of that is still going to be devastating to many, many people.
8:02 - You know, this is the thing that we forget.
8:05 - I mean, I think, you know, the first thing I'll say is if you look at, in my perception of this, if you look at the early phases of the COVID pandemic, so much of the confusion and misinformation was in some way stemming from a lack of access to high quality products.
8:22 - like there's an enormous difference between a mask and a respirator.
8:25 - And I think so much of what people are thinking about when they're thinking about masking are all of, you know, so many things that we all had to do of having to make our own masks, not knowing if something we made was actually protecting us, not knowing, you know, maybe is the goal of this to protect me, is the goal of this to protect you from me?
8:44 - Am I protected if you're not protected?
8:46 - And it created a very, a very strange atmosphere for the general public.
8:50 - And so I think,
8:51 - you know, what I would say is that it's important to have access to high quality respirators.
8:58 - It's important for people to have access to NIOSH approved products.
9:02 - And the benefit of working from a framing of like respiratory protection with a known level of efficacy means that you don't have to wonder if something is protecting you.
9:13 - And I truly do think that so much of that confusion was because there were just simply not enough respirators.
9:19 - There were not enough
9:21 - and you had to make so many compromising decisions and behaviors.
9:26 - I think, yeah.
9:29 - It's such a great point.
9:31 - And I think, you know, if you look at something like the hierarchies of control, we were poorly prepared right across the hierarchies, you know, and I remember speaking to Kath Noakes,
9:45 - at the beginning of the pandemic.
9:47 - And she was saying that, you know, one of the things that they learned was that governments were turning around to them and saying, can you tell us what do we know about the buildings that we occupy?
9:59 - What is the state of ventilation?
10:01 - What are the risks associated with classrooms and offices and homes?
10:07 - And the truth was, is that we didn't have a clue.
10:10 - You know, there was a huge gap in knowledge in how our spaces performed and whether or not they were going to protect us or be a vector or not.
10:24 - And that I think, you know, I guess that's why when you look at what you're doing in totality, it's what you're looking at as a whole is this.
10:32 - this whole hierarchy of infection risk control and saying, right, how do we bring this all together to create spaces and protect people in these kinds of, these kinds of environments?
10:45 - Yeah.
10:45 - And we do think that these areas stack, you know, there's not probably just one, especially technological solution.
10:51 - There's not one easy fix.
10:52 - We think that, you know, it will be a combination of things like respiratory protection and building ventilation and other types of mitigation measures.
11:01 - And that the more of these tools you have to sort of stack on top of each other, you know, the more likely you are to get to an appropriate level of protection and get in space.
11:10 - So, I mean,
11:11 - Before we get too deep into the conversation, I think it'd be a useful juncture to tell the audience a little bit about what Blueprint is, why it came into existence and the kind of framework of stuff that you're looking at.
11:28 - And I think that will set a good context for the conversation in general.
11:33 - Great.
11:33 - Well, you know, I think Blueprint's role is to strengthen humanity's ability to be resilient against the next pandemic.
11:42 - We're a 501c3 philanthropically funded nonprofit really focused upon how do we sort of advance these different areas that we think will be highly impactful in preventing the next pandemic.
11:52 - Currently, our major areas are, you know, under Victoria, we have, you know, the PPE program, really focused upon personal protection.
11:58 - And we have the built environment program that I run that's really focused upon how do we protect spaces and make them more resilient, you know, for airborne pathogen infection.
12:07 - And when this was set up,
12:11 - Where did those ideas come from?
12:13 - Because if you were looking at bioscooter, you could have found yourself in pharmaceuticals.
12:17 - You could have found all sorts of things, I guess.
12:22 - Why did you find yourself looking at these areas?
12:26 - Was this a strategic piece of work?
12:29 - Was this born out of where...
12:32 - the money came from to set this fund up.
12:34 - How did it work?
12:35 - So correct me, correct me if I'm wrong on this, Brian, but I think in a lot of ways, our first formal program was PPE and trying to understand what we can what we could take away from the COVID pandemic.
12:49 - I think it's an interesting kind of fact that the working title for our PPE blueprint was called Towards the Theory of Pandemic Proof PPE because it was it was not clear at the time
13:01 - what a blueprint for pandemic proof PPE, for creating a world in which we were resilient from the perspective of personal protection actually looked like.
13:11 - And so I think what we brought was a model that was a little bit different than maybe what others take on, where I would describe our work as first road mapping the solution and then executing that solution.
13:27 - And there's lots of orgs that obviously do incredible work in terms of they work on research.
13:32 - They write reports.
13:33 - They write white papers.
13:35 - This is what they do.
13:36 - But I think one of the biggest learnings and one of the things that shaped how Blueprint works is just that to actually write this Blueprint, what we were doing was we were building a lot of relationships.
13:45 - We were learning a lot that went beyond the factual reasons why there were shortages of respirators.
13:52 - And so I think the first point that I will make is that we...
13:57 - what we wanted to do was identify what are the most cost-effective solutions that are going to bring us to a state of progress?
14:05 - Because you look at, you know, you look at a topic as complicated as respiratory protection, as complicated as PPE, as any of these things.
14:11 - And there's, there's never, there's going to be hundreds of individual things that are all going to add value, but it's not necessarily clear of all of these things, what is going to solve the problem.
14:22 - And with limited resources across everyone, including governments,
14:25 - How are you going to make the most traction on these problems given that limited budget?
14:30 - And so we came in with that framing.
14:32 - But also, you know, along the way, talking to the experts, talking to policymakers, we learned a lot about how these systems work.
14:39 - And I think it put us in a particularly unique place to then start trying to solve these problems while we're also exploring new focus areas and, you know, new topics.
14:50 - So I think that's a little bit about, you know, what I would say, what makes Blueprint unique in our approach.
14:56 - And was this coloured in to some degree that the pandemic that we went through was a respiratory virus predominantly and that this was about respirators and masks and shortages of that equipment?
15:13 - And when you were looking at this, obviously we can't guarantee that the next one is good.
15:18 - The predominant vector is going to be a respiratory transmission.
15:21 - It could be something else.
15:22 - So are you looking at...
15:24 - When you look at this problem, are you looking at it primarily from a respiratory perspective?
15:28 - Or are you trying to think about PPE in a much more strategic fashion?
15:34 - I think we're generally thinking about respiratory pandemics, you know, not because we think respiratory pandemics are the only important pandemic to prepare for.
15:44 - I mean, obviously not by a long shot, but I think a respiratory pandemic has unique features, right?
15:50 - The first being that it can spread very, very quickly.
15:54 - You know, if you're thinking about what is a pandemic that is going to be in one place and then in a matter of weeks to months be all over the world, it's very likely that that's going to be a respiratory pandemic.
16:04 - And I think it also is, you know, Brian would be would be curious for your thoughts on this, too.
16:08 - In many ways, respiratory pandemics require something, you know, very important.
16:14 - very delicate, which is that they need to be able, you need to be able to protect the air that you breathe while also still breathing air.
16:21 - Like this is, this is something that you can't, you can't necessarily, you know, address.
16:28 - For example, you, you, you mentioned fomites before, you know, we have lots of tools to clean surfaces.
16:33 - We're not expecting that there are going to be massive shortages or disruptions in our ability to clean surfaces.
16:39 - But, you know, as we saw during COVID, there are very few options for reliably and effectively cleaning the air.
16:47 - And so a respiratory pandemic has, I think, a unique potential to be very, very disruptive in a way that other pandemics, while still very disruptive in their own way, aren't going to have those unique considerations.
17:01 - Yeah, maybe also adding upon that, for some reason, we all believe that we can get diseases from surfaces.
17:08 - We all believe that we can get diseases from touch or from bodily fluid transfer.
17:14 - But somehow when we have this conversation of, well, can I get sick from that person across the room?
17:18 - You know, we just have even within the scientific field, you have huge disagreements upon whether that's even possible.
17:24 - Yeah.
17:25 - And so, you know, I think that's to say that we have a lot more tractable ways to think about how to fight other types of pandemics, but there's a lot more unanswered questions and, you know, not as many great solutions for Airborne.
17:38 - Yeah.
17:38 - And there's this agency thing here, as you rightly say, you know, if I think this is something that is a risk within food sources or within certain water sources, I can make a choice not to drink something or not to eat something or, you know, but you don't get a choice.
17:54 - You can't wait for two hours until you get home to take a breath.
17:58 - You know, it doesn't work out very well for you.
18:00 - So there's this constant.
18:02 - It's the same with all airborne pollution.
18:04 - Yeah.
18:05 - and risk is that there's this agency challenge.
18:10 - And also, I think more than anything else, and we really haven't got our head around this, there is a deep psychological barrier to break through when it comes to risk and breathing.
18:22 - And I think, I'm guessing, but I think fundamentally it's to do with this because it's such a basic thing within our brainstem to breathe.
18:33 - They in a kind of a strange way, we're hardwired not to think about breathing.
18:38 - You know, it's something that we can have a conversation here.
18:40 - We've been talking for 20 minutes and not once has any of us thought about the air that we've breathed in.
18:48 - You know, we just it's just something we do so instinctively.
18:52 - And I think with that.
18:54 - comes a very particular challenge, whereas many other things we do in life are born out of a lot of purposeful choice, that it's a very unique challenge.
19:06 - And I guess where you come into this is that one of the things about the transmission through air is that buildings suddenly become a very important vector in transmission.
19:20 - Yeah, especially when we spend, you know, what was it, 90% of our time in buildings on average.
19:24 - But maybe going back to this, you know, the difference between how we think about air versus other things, you know, we have this sort of innate social sense of, you know, if I came to you and I took a sip of your water, you're like, well, what are you doing?
19:35 - I can get your germs.
19:36 - Or if I came and took a bite of your food, yet somehow I can sort of like, you know, breathe in your air and we think, well, there's nothing we can do about that.
19:43 - So I think it just kind of occupies a different mental space in our head in terms of what we think is actually actionable versus, you know, what actually is.
19:51 - Yeah, it's one of those great things we do in audiences, isn't it?
19:54 - When we know the CO2 level is quite high in a space, you can make a rough calculation of what percentage of rebreathed air you're breathing in.
20:02 - And lay people are always quite shocked to find out that 2% or 3% or 4%, equivalent of a backwash on a bottle, is someone else's, been in some beside somebody else.
20:17 - And that's the reality of air.
20:22 - It's, I mean, it's certainly, and it's, I think so much of what pandemic preparedness from the perspective of respiratory protection looks like is this very, very kind of unique, unique consideration that so many of the people that are facing a risk in a pandemic are not necessarily the people who are facing a risk in their normal workplace.
20:42 - So when you're thinking about the hierarchy of controls, you're thinking about
20:45 - you know, making making a workplace safe.
20:48 - I think the idea of using a respirator to keep you safe from other people, it becomes very difficult when people themselves are so mobile, when there is not, you know, in many cases, a specific room that someone is working, that they're always working, that can be optimized.
21:05 - You suddenly have people working in, you know, an incredibly diverse
21:10 - set of work environments, potentially moving between those environments, then going back, you know, in a social setting home, going into public transit, and throughout their day facing very, very different kinds of risks from different people from different environments.
21:26 - And so I think it really did flip so much of the hierarchy control for the average person, because they may not have a set workplace in which they can, you know, they can think about
21:36 - cleaning the air through other methods or building in kind of checkpoints of safety.
21:41 - You had people that through like anything that they had to do, they needed to find a way to protect themselves.
21:46 - And I think this is what makes respirators, I think, challenging in a lot of ways, but also, you know, so absolutely beneficial in a respiratory pandemic, because it truly is a thing that a person is able to use as often like the only line of defense between them
22:03 - and an environment that could make them sick.
22:06 - And it could be an environment, a person, anything throughout their day.
22:09 - Yeah, it's the thing that they have complete agency of control over, whereas most of the other environments, an element of that is going almost certainly going to be outside of their control, right?
22:21 - Yes.
22:22 - Yeah.
22:24 - And the interesting thing for me, and a real lesson I've been learning over the last year, particularly in contact with people like Plum Stone from the Safer Air Project, has been this understanding of perception of risk, of vulnerability to these risks, that there's this...
22:44 - scale of risk depending on what the community transmission rate is, depending on what the type of virus it is, depending on your personal vulnerability.
22:54 - The choices of that equipment and when you're going to deploy it is very unique, which makes this.
23:02 - a very complex thing to strategize for and communicate about you know and I know this is the same for you Brian with many of the things that you're looking at but you'd think in a way if you weren't thinking about this clearly that PPE is just something we should just have warehouses full of and they just sit there and this is what's so complicated about it
23:25 - But it's actually quite dynamic, isn't it, PPE?
23:28 - And so the right choice for the right person at the right time, sitting in the context of the challenge at that moment, is a really complex thing.
23:42 - It is very complex.
23:42 - I mean, I don't want to downplay, we should certainly have warehouses full of respiratory protection sitting and ready to go.
23:49 - That's not to say that that is certainly not the only thing that needs to be done.
23:55 - But I don't think you can really downplay how important it is to have high quality products with regulatory approval that are just ready to go in an emergency.
24:04 - And to your point, there's this kind of separate other consideration for a respirator going back to this agency framing that it is only going to be effective if someone uses it.
24:13 - It's only going to be effective if a person makes the decision to put it on, is able to put it on correctly and makes the decision to leave it on the entire time that they need to be wearing it.
24:24 - And I mean, that's an immensely complicated thing.
24:26 - It's a factor of how empowered a person feels in what they're wearing.
24:31 - Do they think that it protects them?
24:32 - Do they feel like it protects them?
24:34 - Is it comfortable to them?
24:35 - Are they able to wear it for hours and hours?
24:39 - And so I think when we're thinking about how to approach our work, I think it's a balance of, there are things that are simply
24:46 - Excellent cost effective things that we can do.
24:50 - But there's also a lot of work that goes into understanding the needs of the end user.
24:55 - And I mean, like really cannot downplay how important it is that people are able to achieve a good fit with a respirator.
25:01 - And in order to do that, that means that they have to put it on correctly and they have to wear it properly the whole time that they need to.
25:08 - Yeah, great.
25:10 - Brian, I promise I'll come on to you in a second, but two really stupid questions for you, Victoria.
25:15 - One is, does a lot of this PPE equipment that we should be stocking and stockpiling and have in readiness, have an expiry or life frame to it?
25:27 - Or is this the sort of thing we can put into storage in perpetuity and build up over time?
25:33 - Or is this something that needs to be kind of, you know, cycled in some way?
25:38 - And is anybody actually doing this stuff?
25:41 - You know, when you're doing your work and looking around the world at how people are preparing post pandemic, do we now see warehouses full of this gear ready to go?
25:54 - Have we learned our lessons in that respect, do you think?
25:58 - I'm not sure that we've learned our lesson.
26:01 - I think so, the first part of that, yes, these products do expire.
26:03 - I think it's a nuanced question.
26:09 - you have a couple of things.
26:10 - I mean, the first is the standards for a respirator are extraordinarily high.
26:15 - I mean, like truly, if you think about what we agree is a person's kind of last line of defense, the one thing that they have agency overwearing, having high trust in a product is a very important thing.
26:27 - And so our kind of like willingness to have a respirator be bad, faulty, expired, it's very low as it should be.
26:35 - So products do expire.
26:38 - I think that very often they, I mean, like, frankly, I think that most respirators, there's very good data that they last longer than their expiration.
26:47 - And I think, you know, to be charitable to manufacturers, I think they want to make sure that that last little bit, you know, maybe the 1%, the 0.1% that is no longer good is not making it into the hands of a person.
27:00 - I think this has been a major driver for our work of understanding if we're going to build stockpiles, we should have them filled with products that are good for stockpiling, things that have long shelf lives, things that are ideal for just sitting on a shelf.
27:13 - And I think you can see that there are respirators that have shelf lives like upwards of 20 years.
27:19 - I mean, that's very different than you're looking at some products where every three years they might reach their expiration date.
27:24 - And so I think that
27:29 - it is important to stockpile in a way that is smart.
27:33 - I mean, I think everybody knows this, having big, big warehouses of product that only last a couple of years and then throwing it all away.
27:41 - Like this is a model that, I mean, you're seeing quite a lot of this post COVID, lots and lots of people bought a lot of respirators and are now at the point where they no longer want to hold them.
27:51 - And so in some ways I think, no, it should be, I think, alarming to people that the stockpiles that were built up during COVID
27:57 - starting to go away simply because those products are starting to expire.
28:01 - But I think there are so many opportunities.
28:03 - I mean, the first being
28:05 - People filled stockpiles very often with product that was all that they could get their hands on.
28:12 - You know, this was not a product where they're like, this is the ideal respirator for stockpiling, was like, we want anything that we can get our hands on.
28:18 - And so you end up with products where, you know, they're not something that, you know, a healthcare worker wants to use day to day.
28:23 - If you stockpile something that works for end users, you do have some opportunity to cycle product out.
28:29 - And so this is one of the things that goes into start like smarter stockpiling, being able to allow for product rotation.
28:35 - But I mean, I do want to emphasize the demand in a pandemic, something like COVID is very, very much more than what normal supply chains can supply.
28:45 - And so if you really want everybody who needs to work in person with other people within the first few days, weeks, months of an outbreak, you want them to have a respirator, you know, normal supply chains are not going to supply that product rotation.
28:58 - is not going to be sustainable at that point.
29:01 - And so you do need to think about what are products that are actually ideal for just having on a shelf so that if an emergency happens, they can be given to people immediately.
29:11 - Yeah.
29:12 - And, you know, having come from the medical world myself in a previous life, you know, there's a very big difference in the insurable risk of medical class products and products for general health and safety.
29:28 - And...
29:29 - The challenges is the cost that comes with that, the risks that manufacturers have to take on, the quality control systems that have to be in place and what you often end up finding.
29:39 - And you see this across medicine, medical equipment, the whole work.
29:44 - So there's this elevated cost and shortened life cycle.
29:48 - attached to these products because it's cheaper than dealing with the downstream litigation risks, particularly in litigious countries like the US.
29:59 - That becomes a real overhead risk that you have to bet against.
30:05 - Whereas products for an emergency perhaps are a slightly different thing, you know.
30:12 - And we see that, you know, you see the expiry dates softening in emergencies for even medicines, you know, that you move into that buffer of expiry zone.
30:24 - on the understanding that this particular medicine doesn't go bad.
30:29 - It might just become slightly less effective.
30:33 - It will have a half-life of an X or whatever.
30:35 - And I imagine it's the same for PPE, that you could make some assumptions over that material.
30:42 - That doesn't mean it just hits a certain date and then you can't use it.
30:46 - It might mean that it hits a certain date and you can't quite stand over it the way you would have done the previous year.
30:53 - Yeah.
30:54 - I mean, when you look at when you look at warehousing, I think so much so much of the the uncertainty comes from how things are stored.
31:04 - I mean, if you look at, you know, covid stockpiles, I think, you know, there were some some excellent research done around 2020 looking at
31:13 - you know, trying to assess the actual functionality of expired products.
31:17 - And I think that, you know, we've seen lots of data that expired products are very often no worse, still meeting any regulatory threshold.
31:27 - At the same time, if something was stored improperly, if something was stored outside of its kind of recommended conditions, you end up with products that aren't necessarily usable.
31:38 - And I think this is why you saw such a big difference between
31:41 - I could be wrong on this, but my understanding is you look at products that came out of the Strategic National Stockpile.
31:47 - And even though some of those products were expired, they tended to still be quite good quality versus some local stockpiles, smaller stockpiles.
31:55 - You would have literally crumbling respirators.
31:57 - And so much of that is just having the storage conditions be thoughtful.
32:03 - I think there's no magical date that a respirator just drops to zero.
32:08 - It's not functional anymore.
32:09 - But I think it is important to, I mean, keep going back to this concept of fit, that a respirator is only going to be protecting someone if it's able to fit them.
32:17 - And sometimes it can be very minor differences in the overall structure of a product that interferes with its ability to have a good fit on a person.
32:25 - And so you do have to be very, very careful
32:28 - Especially for all us beardy weirdies out there.
32:32 - We're a living nightmare for respirator fits.
32:35 - I know that from lived experience.
32:40 - Yeah, and you're not immune from this either, Brian.
32:43 - When we talk about stockpiles and stuff going out of date and people getting fed up with having things in buildings and not knowing when they're going to use them next, I mean, how many of us have...
32:55 - gone into rooms and seen air cleaners stuck in the corner with various boxes shoved on top of them and you know boxes of filters that nobody really knows whether they were used or new or you know stuck in storerooms you know there was there was a reaction during a crisis like a pandemic infrastructure was bought
33:17 - you know, for our built environment.
33:19 - And now there's a challenge of trying to get people to recognize its ongoing value and its potential necessity whenever next year, five years time, you know, you're not immune from that either.
33:34 - Yeah, definitely not at all.
33:35 - I mean, if we think about how much, unfortunately, you can't stockpile things like ventilation, but if you think about all the money that was poured into, let's say, improved HVAC designs or portable air cleaners or anything like that, and then promptly not used because, you know, people felt we're coming out of the pandemic and they felt like the risk was lower.
33:55 - And that's, you know, you know, quite frustrating.
33:57 - But I think it kind of goes to, you know, how you how do you solve that problem?
34:01 - Right.
34:01 - Because obviously you can't force people to be afraid of something all the time.
34:05 - That's not like a healthy way to live and that's not really practical.
34:08 - It's really hard to get institutions to think about, especially for things like schools, think about future hypothetical risks versus, you know, I can't afford to pay my teachers or something right now, especially with like limited facilities budgets.
34:21 - And so we think one of the solutions here is to help think about, if you want to get infrastructure installed for the pandemic, you really have to show about the endemic use case.
34:31 - So not necessarily try to sell them upon future hypothetical risk, but luckily for us, the things that will prevent the pandemic pathogen from spreading are the same ones that prevent things like RSV and influenza and other types of endemic diseases that we just have going around all the time anyways.
34:49 - And by making the case of showing its effectiveness and utility against endemic and problems we have right now, we'd be able to better start the wave of getting the infrastructure we need out there that can mitigate this ahead of the next pandemic.
35:07 - So is that a large part of your work then beyond the research into new technologies and so on?
35:15 - The part of this is about thinking about how society thinks about this problem.
35:22 - And like you say, not put them in a permanent process of stress.
35:27 - But understand the utility of getting this right across the board and the co-benefits, you know, that if you've got good ventilation and good air quality and good filtration anyway, all that people have to do to receive the benefits of that is just turn up and breathe.
35:44 - You know that there are these passive co-benefits of improving a lot of this stuff.
35:49 - I think it's important to note, like, you know, our win state, what we're actually trying to get to is actually an actually increased amount of protection in the real world.
35:58 - If the next pandemic comes and we do nothing different, then it doesn't matter how much more additional research that we've done.
36:03 - It doesn't matter what factoids we've discovered.
36:06 - You know, we haven't really done our job.
36:07 - So when we think about how we structure our programs at Blueprint, we think about what actually gets us to that end goal.
36:14 - And oftentimes research and trying to, or developing new technologies or figuring out how new technologies work is just one piece.
36:22 - It's really more about at the end of the day, how do we get to that higher level of protection in the indoor spaces?
36:28 - So from that perspective, if we just learn about things, but it doesn't actually get used, then it's not very useful.
36:34 - So we naturally have to think about, well, what are the conditions where these things are actually used?
36:38 - And then especially when you think about things like private ecosystems and things that actually drive momentum in sort of day-to-day life, we really have to focus a lot on sort of current behaviors and how do we start thinking about sort of those endemic deployments.
36:55 - Yeah, that's really interesting.
36:56 - I was talking to Amanda Reddy a few days ago, actually it was on Monday, about the Healthy Homes Coalition.
37:05 - And, you know, they were talking about the kind of work that they do.
37:08 - They have kind of three spheres.
37:10 - One is research, you know, similar to you guys, but in healthy homes.
37:15 - The other one is in policy, policy action and communication, you know, at a state, local and regional level.
37:24 - And then at a community level, you know, within with other groups who are in this sector, facilitating and supporting them.
37:34 - Is that similar to how you think about this problem as well, that you can do research in products and materials and strategies for stockpiling and so on?
37:43 - But like you say, if that's all within...
37:46 - blueprint and nobody knows about it, it's no good for the next pandemic.
37:50 - So I guess there's a, an element of comms and policy work and, and this kind of stuff that goes with what you're doing.
37:59 - Yeah, I think one thing that makes Blueprint a little bit unique is that we don't focus upon the modalities of our work.
38:06 - We don't think about ourselves as we are a research organization or we are a policy organization or we are an operational implementation organization.
38:13 - We are a pandemic prevention organization.
38:17 - And whatever the right tool is to solve that job, then that's what we'll go forward with.
38:23 - So some examples here are in the German side of the UV space, we think that
38:28 - insofar as these are good ideas to put out there, they have to be there ahead of time.
38:31 - Right?
38:31 - So, and so you have to really focus upon that endemic use case.
38:35 - But for things that might be more surgeable, such as let's say, you know, surging out portable air cleaners or other types of technology, you know, we can focus a lot more upon, you know, not necessarily do we have to prove endemic use case, but like how could they be best used in an emergency?
38:50 - What are the characteristics?
38:51 - What are the supply chains?
38:53 - And so we tend to think about what's the tool we need to use at the current time of a given program, and how can we best leverage that to advance down a strategy that can get us to that real-world protection at the nearest possible.
39:08 - So you're kind of deploying a lot of kind of theory of change into all of this then, and systems thinking.
39:14 - So you're looking at these problems and going, right, okay, okay.
39:18 - if I want to have an impact, if I want to create change, what are the building blocks I need to have in place?
39:26 - It's not just a case of saying, you know, what's the state of the art of far UVC, right?
39:34 - That's interesting.
39:35 - And I'm sure there's some valuable research that needs to be done.
39:40 - But we've been talking about UVC since the Wells is right.
39:44 - So the part of this is about going, OK, well, how do we meaningfully get UVC into the built environment, as you say, because this is a this is a preparation challenge more than a reactive challenge for something like that.
39:59 - Yeah, and I can start from like maybe one more level of distraction.
40:02 - It's not so much how do I get UVC into the environment, but how do I get protected indoor air?
40:07 - And then there's many different ways to protect indoor air as your audience is very well acquainted with.
40:12 - You have your ventilation, you have your filtration, you have your GUV, you have other technologies.
40:18 - And so we start with how do you get to that end point of having enough protected air?
40:21 - And then from there, we think about the different types of interventions, technologies, is like, what are the pros and cons?
40:26 - And how do we make sure that every technology have its greatest potential to impact that sort of overall clean air target?
40:34 - Yeah.
40:34 - And so, you know, when we think about something like FarUVC as an example, it's not a matter of how do I get FarUVC everywhere, but how do I make sure FarUVC is able to contribute as much as possible to attaining the clean air targets that we think are necessary to meaningfully reduce the impact of the next pandemic.
40:55 - Do you think about unintended consequences here as well?
41:00 - Because I think the fascinating thing about risk is that risk will shift depending on what you're talking about.
41:09 - Right.
41:09 - So there are certain things that you might put into the environment from an air cleaning perspective.
41:16 - that could have downstream unintended consequences from an air chemistry perspective, right?
41:20 - You know, producing volatile organic compounds, secondary aerosols, that kind of thing.
41:27 - But that might be a risk that you're willing to absorb if the risk of a pandemic is high enough.
41:34 - So there's certain environments you might not want to flood a room full of something 24 hours a day all of the time in a nursery, right?
41:46 - But in a pandemic, that risk balance might shift.
41:49 - So when you're kind of thinking about this at a very high level, do you go that far even to start thinking about, okay, what are deployment strategies for some of this?
41:59 - And, you know, if this gets bad enough, how do those...
42:03 - views of risk change?
42:07 - I think characterizing risk is a very important part of our work.
42:10 - We think about the three pillars of maybe any sort of technology is what's its efficacy, how well does it work, what is its safety profile, what are the risk considerations, and how do we actually deploy it in an efficacious and safe way?
42:23 - And so, you know, we have these questions and I wouldn't say it's our job to make the determination of what the right risk balance is, but really to characterize the risk because, you know, we're not, we're not the ones going out there and installing it for people.
42:35 - We're not the ones making judgments about their space.
42:38 - But, you know, we think it's very important to understand what the risk profile of any given intervention is going to be so that you can make pragmatic decisions as you think about how to protect your interspace with those interventions.
42:51 - Yeah, I think the interesting thing is that the value of this being in recent history is that we've seen those decisions play out in real time.
42:58 - It was us making them.
42:59 - We were part of those conversations.
43:01 - You know, an anecdote from my life as I was part of some of the government decisions around filtration and something as simple as that.
43:09 - And, you know, a non-additive product, it just removes particles from the air.
43:13 - You know, there's very little downside from it other than the cost and the effectiveness of it.
43:20 - But something as simple as that, governments were in really difficult positions because in some parts of the world, there weren't standards for the deployment of that technology in that kind of a scenario.
43:31 - Which means at a government procurement level, they're reaching for strategies that aren't fit for purpose, which means the wrong technologies get deployed or technologies that could have been deployed didn't.
43:47 - And you find yourself in a real pickle really quickly.
43:51 - So I think that's the really fascinating thing about how we characterize these risks and provide this information for people is we know you get launched into these situations where people are reaching left, right and center for solutions.
44:09 - And it's got to be really clear and well laid out for people across the board.
44:14 - Right, because you wouldn't want a situation where, you know, people are making a decision to use something, but maybe in this situation, they wouldn't want to because of the risk profile.
44:22 - But on the other hand, maybe because of the lack of knowledge or because of perceived risk, but not actual risk, they wouldn't be using an intervention that could, you know, greatly impact and improve their space.
44:32 - And so we see that, you know, part of the role blueprint is to be sort of that arbiter source of truth.
44:38 - of what are the risks and what are the benefits and what's the efficacy and what does the deployment data say so that we can come up with the best solution.
44:45 - Because at the end of the day, if the space isn't actually protected, we haven't really done our job.
44:50 - We don't care about hypothetical protection.
44:51 - We care about real protection.
44:53 - And so things that are going to be barriers to actually solving the problem in the real world, I think, are things that we have to address.
45:00 - I'll have you back to the podcast in just a moment.
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46:56 - Now back to the show.
46:58 - So of all the things you could have looked at, I mean, we've kind of touched on a couple of them, from ventilation effectiveness to filtration to standards around the likes of 241 to UVCs, bipolar ionization, UVC, you know, you name it.
47:18 - There's a hundred different approaches we could look at.
47:22 - What have you found yourself looking at as an organization when it comes to,
47:28 - approaches or technologies for the built environment for biosecurity?
47:32 - Yeah, so we have a number of criteria we use.
47:34 - We've looked very broadly across the sort of the space.
47:38 - And I'd say we care about things that we think are, you know, pathogen agnostic, things that look like they can work pretty well in occupied space, things that have, you know, potentially promising safety and efficacy profiles, things that can work in current operations where you don't have to change that much.
47:55 - and things that could be relatively cost effective.
47:58 - And so with all of those, of course, that's not to say that they're cost-effective today, but like, you know, they have the potential to be so.
48:05 - And so as we think about those, you know, from a bandwidth perspective, Blueprint started originally working on FAR-UVC as being sort of the inaugural program.
48:14 - But we expanded that over time as well.
48:16 - So now we have two more formal programs set up, one being a conventional GUV, as we think about like upper room 254 nanometer deployments.
48:24 - And we're also very interested in learning more about vapors that can help disinfect the air or mitigate pathogens in the air.
48:32 - For example, for glycol vapors is our
48:34 - other program as well and so from there i think that we're not going to necessarily just stop there those are formal programs already but we're actively looking for expanding into areas such as doing more work on filtration ventilation and other related areas many listeners are probably going to know at least two two out of those three um but perhaps some don't but could you give give us the kind of
48:59 - 101 on those kind of three approaches, far UVC, traditional UVC and vapors like glycol vapors, how they kind of fit within that broad picture of being pathogen agnostic, show promise from a risk perspective and, you know, a potential for deployment.
49:17 - What is it about those that seem to work?
49:20 - Yeah, so maybe sort of starting that oil, that order.
49:24 - So far UVC, for those that are not familiar with it, it is lower wavelength UVC light, typically deployed at 222 nanometers, but I think the formal definition is anything within the range of 200 and 230.
49:38 - Like other types of germastidal light, it's shown to rapidly deactivate pathogens.
49:43 - It's been shown to work on viruses and bacteria and other types of microbes as well.
49:49 - What makes it a little bit unique is because of the shorter wavelength that has a shorter penetration depth.
49:53 - And so the exposure limits for far UVC are much higher than let's say your more canonical 254 nanometer UVC because higher wavelengths will have a much larger penetration depth into your skin.
50:05 - So generally, they're just seen as being much more safe to be exposed to by orders of magnitude.
50:11 - And that allows you to have them deployed into occupied spaces and disinfect the air.
50:15 - Now let's contrast that with something more like conventional GUV, which a lot of your listeners will be familiar with this.
50:21 - It's usually deployed in a sort of upper room format, such that you're not actually exposing people to the 254 nanometer light, just the microbes in the air.
50:31 - And then as the air sort of mixes in the room, it kills the microbes that are out there.
50:36 - You know, we think this is, of course, the much older technology.
50:39 - This is your, you know, 1930s or whatnot experiments with the O'Reilly and Wells and the schools.
50:45 - So it's been around a long time.
50:47 - And I think that, you know, the fact that it's so well better characterized than a lot of the other things that are out there, yet still somehow not really used is like a big question mark for us.
50:56 - And so we think that there's also a potential there for adding a lot more air cleaning capacity spaces with that.
51:03 - Glycol vapors are a little bit different.
51:04 - So we think about propylene glycol and triphylene glycol and dipropylene glycol, if I got those correct, hopefully, off the top of my head.
51:11 - So these are things that have been studied since I think the 1940s.
51:16 - Basically, the concept is that these are things that are aerosolized and change the vapor form in the air and have been shown to deactivate aerosolized pathogens.
51:26 - I think we're still working on the exact mechanism, but it could be just dehydrating them or so forth.
51:31 - But also the nice thing about these is these are generally thought to be relatively safe for human exposure.
51:35 - Oftentimes these are the same chemicals that are in fog machines or many other different types of consumer products.
51:41 - And what's really appealing to us is that they're already mass manufactured.
51:44 - You know, large amounts of these are made for traditional chemical products.
51:48 - industrial processes.
51:50 - And so we think of these as being a potential for something that can be deployed during an emergency, perhaps with emitters that people can have in their own homes or in their businesses that can add a lot of air treatment capacity into those spaces with relatively little cost and with relatively little additional infrastructure.
52:08 - And an interesting fact that I learned about far UVC when I was chatting to a far UVC expert is that there's no natural 222 nanometer light on planet Earth.
52:22 - The only far UVC you'll come across is human manufactured far UVC because it has such a short wavelength.
52:29 - It's absorbed so quickly in the atmosphere that...
52:32 - Even if it is produced in space, none of it is getting to Earth.
52:37 - So actually, our exposure to it on the surface is zero, unless we've made a light to produce it, which I thought was really interesting.
52:47 - Yeah, I think that's... You don't come across it.
52:49 - Yeah.
52:50 - I'm not an expert, but I think that's true for all of UVC in general, which is why the problem, if I remember correctly, one of the problems with the ozone layer is that you lose a lot of that protection when that was lost.
52:59 - And so you had a lot more of these more higher energy waves coming through.
53:02 - Again, not an expert in this space.
53:04 - Yeah.
53:05 - Yeah.
53:05 - Yeah.
53:05 - Yeah.
53:06 - Yeah.
53:07 - I mean, the thing I've always wondered about the UVC side of stuff, whether it's GUV or far UVC, is that.
53:16 - Again, it's this collective memory problem is that it's difficult to characterize how effective it's being in the moment because we're not measuring an impact on the risk in the space.
53:31 - in the same way that we might measure CO2 or a VOC of formaldehyde or something.
53:38 - So it's quite difficult for us to prove efficacy in the moment or in certain circumstances.
53:44 - Now, I know there's some really good work going on with RpH and others.
53:48 - There's some really good tech, I think, being developed that might change that landscape.
53:54 - But I think the challenge is that people can see, well, most people will never see a GUV light going into a HVAC system or a bit of duct or a fan coil unit.
54:08 - Or they won't see it in an air cleaning unit.
54:10 - They may not even recognize it if it's upper room.
54:13 - GUV.
54:14 - So first of all, they don't know it's there.
54:16 - And secondly, they've got no experience of having any benefit.
54:22 - So there's a very small number of people that may value it at any given moment.
54:28 - So it's just one of these things that's very difficult to sell, I imagine, more than anything else is because
54:35 - you could put them into a, into a hotel or a hospital.
54:39 - And unless you've got some fairly sophisticated ways of showing efficacy, you know, you're, you're trying to characterize infection risks in certain wards or something, you're going to miss its benefit.
54:55 - So it's just, it's been around, but it just, nobody really cares.
54:58 - Yeah.
54:59 - Yeah, I think you're alluding to a larger problem just in general in the airborne pathogen mitigation field is that there's not like a measurement that I can take a number in the space, whereas I can measure the amount of PM 2.5.
55:09 - I can measure the amount of CO2 instantaneously.
55:12 - I can't tell you what the real time concentration of infectious airborne particles are in the air.
55:18 - And even if I could, I couldn't tell you how likely you are as a person in that room to become infected.
55:24 - by that because that will also depend upon the room and the person and a myriad of other things.
55:28 - And so the fact that we can't measure something is actually very frustrating because I can't tell you quantitatively if it's getting better without a lot of very large study and a lot of statistics and a lot of reasons that can go well.
55:39 - Now, we're still trying to do those studies, you know, where as an organization, we're trying to fund better, you know, randomized controlled clinical trials for these types of interventions and trying to learn
55:49 - how to do these better.
55:50 - But at the same time, this is a problem we see writ large in the field, is we know in our head that if I have fewer infectious particles in the air, I should be coming sick less often.
56:02 - And at the same time, I have a device that I can measure how well it removes infectious particles from the air or kills microbes in the air.
56:09 - But somehow I can't seem to integrate those into, and I get sick less often for the variety of reasons that make this complicated.
56:18 - And so I think the challenge is that that data is very important.
56:21 - That would be the most convincing data that you could have.
56:25 - It's also perhaps the hardest data you can collect because it's also possible that I can decrease the amount of airborne infectious particles, but I also perhaps cannot demonstrate that clinically because that's very hard.
56:37 - Yeah, I think my gut says it's in the realm of epidemiology more than it is in toxicology and real time risk.
56:47 - I think statistically, if you have the right environment, you can show over time a benefit of having something like this in.
56:57 - But it is inordinately hard to even model it.
57:00 - I talk about this quite regularly, but Ben Jones, one of the guys behind the maths of 241, the ASHRAE standard for infection, he was at a conference and he said, you know, we've been crunching the numbers, millions of lines of numbers on this using Wells Riley models and everything else.
57:19 - And we can say with absolute confidence that your chance of getting infected in a space is somewhere between zero and 100%.
57:29 - Yes.
57:30 - And that was it in a nutshell.
57:32 - You know, a change in an R value, a change in the number of infected people, a change in the wind direction, a change in location.
57:39 - You know, it's just so hard to even model a particular outcome in a particular scenario or even a particular outcome in a particular space over a few days even.
57:52 - There's just so many variables.
57:55 - It's a hard one.
57:57 - Yeah, agreed.
57:58 - Yeah.
58:00 - And the glycol one's interesting, isn't it?
58:02 - Because it's one that people probably have a more of a natural aversion to, I would say.
58:09 - The instinct is, okay, spraying stuff in the air.
58:13 - That sounds a bit dodgy.
58:17 - I think that that's most people's reaction to it.
58:20 - I think people saw a lot of COVID theatre as well during the pandemic,
58:29 - theatre frankly you remember the um drones spraying um uh the the football stadium seating and stuff yeah i just you know amazing stuff going on just looked good
58:46 - But frankly, these seats are out in sunlight, you know, all day long.
58:50 - And there's pictures of drones going around spraying seats in stadiums.
58:57 - So I think there's this kind of I think people are probably on the surface more sceptical about adding something that could be perceived as a chemical into a space to kill something else.
59:08 - Is that a.
59:10 - Is that something you've seen in your discussions?
59:14 - Because it's not without risk.
59:15 - I mean, you add anything, particularly something that might react with free radicals, ozone, that kind of stuff.
59:22 - There is always the potential for secondary aerosols in these things.
59:26 - So it is something I guess you have to be cognitant of.
59:29 - But what's your kind of perspective on it, having looked at this kind of technology and how you see it, how it's received by people in the community?
59:40 - Yeah, so I'll first caveat that, you know, we're pretty early in our first work here.
59:44 - So we have funded our first, you know, four and a half million dollars of the work looking at different safety and efficacy and real world deployability.
59:51 - And so we're trying to answer a lot of the foundational questions there.
59:55 - But I think it's also an interesting sort of divergence between indoor air quality and, you know, pandemic pathogen mitigation, because it's, you know, you are adding...
1:00:06 - a chemical to the air.
1:00:07 - I think you're adding this glycol vapor now.
1:00:10 - We add chemicals to the air all the time.
1:00:11 - If you've ever had a Glade plug-in, if you've sprayed anything to make something smell better.
1:00:16 - If we've ever been into a fog machine, you've probably been exposed to these things and the theatrical fog.
1:00:21 - But at the same time, especially from the air chemistry community, it's like, well, hey, you're adding stuff to the air.
1:00:27 - And clearly, we'd like to know what happens.
1:00:28 - And so our perspective is, yes, we should do the studies to find out what happens.
1:00:32 - So we understand what the trade offs between the safety and efficacy of profile of these different treatments would be, so that we can make rational decisions about, you know, what we shouldn't be doing in this field in the future.
1:00:44 - So what are some of the next steps for the organization as you move forward?
1:00:48 - Are you looking at, I think you hinted at it, you're looking at,
1:00:52 - perhaps broadening the scope of some of the things you're looking at, ventilation strategies, filtration, that kind of thing.
1:00:58 - Are you fairly singular, Victoria?
1:01:01 - Is the focus really firmly planted on PPE or does that expand beyond that in some way?
1:01:08 - Like how's it working for you as an organization over the next kind of 12, 18 months?
1:01:14 - Is this a broadening scope of work generally or is it pretty linear?
1:01:20 - I think there's certainly other things that we're considering, but I think it's worth saying that, you know, PPE itself is a broad category.
1:01:28 - Respiratory protection itself is a broad category.
1:01:30 - And so, you know, we might call this a respiratory protection program, but we're within that.
1:01:36 - There's very, very different actions that could be taken, for example, to ensure that we have robust supply chains for N95 respirators.
1:01:46 - It's a very different goal than trying to secure stockpiles of reusable respirators, which is one of our biggest priorities.
1:01:52 - And so for us, I see a little bit of a transition away from, like I mentioned early in our organization, it was about identifying what are the single most cost effective things that we can do.
1:02:07 - I think now growth looks like not just, you know, what is the single most cost effective thing we can do, but how can we have a well-rounded and robust strategy for respiratory protection?
1:02:18 - And I think going into that includes, you know, effective stockpiles, smart stockpiles, but it also includes things like ensuring that, you know, product can be manufactured.
1:02:27 - It can be reinforcing supply chains and quite a lot of trying to understand that.
1:02:32 - like I said before, the end user, what goes into using a respirator correctly.
1:02:36 - When you have a pandemic, you have an enormous number of people who are going to need to be using some kind of respiratory protection who like maybe have never actually worn a respirator before.
1:02:46 - They may not even really know what a respirator is.
1:02:48 - They're certainly not going to have access to a respiratory protection program in their workplace.
1:02:53 - They may not know.
1:02:53 - There's almost definitely not a path to get them a fit test in a short span of time.
1:02:59 - And so trying to think not just about, you know, getting getting respirators on hand, but ensuring that they can actually be used correctly and used effectively in an emergency situation.
1:03:11 - Is there a geographical focus to your work?
1:03:14 - Are you solely focused on the US?
1:03:17 - Is this a global piece of work?
1:03:20 - What's your kind of worldview of the problem?
1:03:23 - It's a good question.
1:03:25 - We're not solely focused on the US.
1:03:27 - I think we are a relatively small organization in terms of our actual headcount.
1:03:33 - And I think we're very conscious of what we can do well.
1:03:37 - And it is a full time job just to be thinking about policy advocacy, for example, within the US.
1:03:45 - I think we're so much of the research that we're doing is broadly applicable.
1:03:50 - And so if we're trying to understand, for example, like how long do filters last in use?
1:03:55 - Are you seeing degradation of like filter quality when a respirator has been reused?
1:04:00 - That's work that has implications for anyone who's using a respirator anywhere.
1:04:05 - And it's not to say that, you know, it's
1:04:09 - It's not to say that we are fully focused on the US, but on a day-to-day basis, like we are trying to think about what it is that we can do well and answer robustly, which means,
1:04:22 - the world is a big place.
1:04:23 - Every single geographical region, country, city, everything, enormously different contexts.
1:04:29 - I mean, I think we've experienced this a little bit as we've tried to understand what preparedness could look like at a state level.
1:04:36 - It's like, well, even within the United States, every single state has dramatically different considerations.
1:04:42 - And so I think we try to hold that complexity and think about
1:04:45 - You know, we're probably not going to be doing any kind of formal advocacy for stockpiling in other countries simply because we are just not, you know, qualified to be speaking to that level of intricacy.
1:04:57 - But when we're thinking about effective use or kind of like broad technological advancements, like the goal is for these things to become accessible, to become accessible everywhere.
1:05:07 - Yeah.
1:05:07 - Yeah, I think you'd even speak to an organization like the WHO and they would say they're probably not staffed adequately to deal with this as a global problem.
1:05:16 - You know, like it's an enormous, that's an enormous conundrum.
1:05:20 - You know, the difference between the BRICS, the Global South, Europe, the US, you know, like culturally habits, the built environment is enormously different, you know, not withstanding climate and cultures and religion, you know,
1:05:36 - that's not something you could even look at.
1:05:39 - I mean, the perspective from outside the US would certainly be with something like PPE and masks, and it's become quite polarised, a little bit like vaccines, in that people can be very pro it, can be very against it.
1:05:54 - But you wonder if this was to come round again what the perspective on masks would be given an emergency.
1:06:02 - I always think humans...
1:06:05 - talk a good game and argue, but when the push comes to shove, they'll generally go with the flow.
1:06:10 - If, if they're, if it's recommended that it's the right approach, you know, so I think it's easy to talk post pandemic about whether you thought masking was a good idea or not, but when the risks there and it's manifest in front of you, I think my gut is people will change.
1:06:28 - And similarly for the built environment, right, Brian, you know, the,
1:06:31 - People were tired of trying to manage buildings in the pandemic.
1:06:35 - It was expensive.
1:06:36 - You know, the schools had, you know, particularly in Europe, in colder climates, you know, kids, my kids spent two or three years sitting in cold classrooms through winter with windows wide open to try and protect them.
1:06:50 - This stuff leaves a mark.
1:06:52 - you know, ultimately.
1:06:53 - And so you're always playing that game between it being recent enough that people remember and remember how important it is, but also that there's potentially scar tissue there as well that you've got to deal with for people.
1:07:09 - I mean, certainly respiratory, I'll say masks.
1:07:13 - Masks are certainly a polarizing topic.
1:07:16 - I think, you know, I said this a little bit earlier, I think this is,
1:07:19 - I think I would agree with you that you can't take too much of what happened during COVID specifically as a sign of universal human nature or just how people are always going to react.
1:07:33 - You know, I think it's worth saying that the COVID pandemic obviously brought quite a lot of people to have, you know, a negative feeling about masking.
1:07:44 - But I think you also see a lot of people who wear respirators regularly.
1:07:48 - I mean, I live in New York City and I see people wearing a respirator regularly.
1:07:53 - the subway every single time i'm on the subway this has become you know something that for a lot of people has become a part of their day-to-day and so i would expect in a future emergency you'll see the same thing which is a diversity a diversity of opinions i guess it's also worth saying you know again this a mask is not a respirator and um to say that a person maybe had a bad reaction to
1:08:16 - wearing a cloth mask or being asked to wear a cloth mask that we know in retrospect, quite a lot of these did not offer basically any protection to people.
1:08:24 - It was extremely variable.
1:08:26 - I mean, that's not to say that there were not some cloth masks that were quite effective or that as a whole, these things did not add value.
1:08:34 - But from the perspective of an individual, there were certainly cloth masks that didn't offer that individual almost any protection at all.
1:08:42 - And so I think, I really do think
1:08:44 - a huge factor is going back to giving people a high quality option to start with.
1:08:51 - And my strong opinion is that that would change quite a lot about how people see, you know, what a mask or a respirator is doing for them.
1:09:01 - Just so we're clear on the language, what's the delineation for you between a mask and a respirator?
1:09:07 - Would you class an FP3 mask as a respirator?
1:09:12 - What differentiates a standard moulded FP3 mask from a respirator if it is different?
1:09:20 - This is, I mean, this is one of my pet peeves that they, the word mask is in, you know, FFP3, N95, these things, you know, you can do Google searches for them and what will come up is like N95 mask.
1:09:33 - And, you know, an N95 and FFP2, 3, these are all respirators.
1:09:36 - And what a respirator is doing is a respirator.
1:09:39 - is filtering the air that a user breathes to some sort of standard.
1:09:45 - And the level of filtration is going to depend on the product itself, whether that's FFP2 or FFP3.
1:09:51 - And for all of these products, you have to achieve a good fit, which is why
1:09:55 - In almost all use cases, a person wearing a respirator needs some kind of fit testing to show that that respirator does fit them.
1:10:01 - And what I would refer to as a mask.
1:10:03 - I mean, you know, at a high level, technically a mask would be anything that goes goes on to your face.
1:10:08 - So maybe maybe in like a kind of general definition, a respirator is a type of mask.
1:10:12 - But what I'm really talking about are.
1:10:14 - things like surgical masks and cloth masks, which at most they form a barrier.
1:10:20 - I mean, you look at, I still see this quite a lot today.
1:10:24 - I mean, especially within industries like healthcare where surgical masks and N95 respirators are treated as almost interchangeable.
1:10:31 - They're both types of respiratory protection.
1:10:33 - And it's like almost a little bit of a stretch to call a surgical mask respiratory protection because these things are designed to stop what a wearer
1:10:41 - is kind of like spewing into a sterile space.
1:10:45 - So a surgical mask is not designed to filter aerosols or airborne particles.
1:10:51 - It's really meant to catch large particles and essentially spit that is coming out of a person's mouth.
1:10:57 - It's not meant to filter either the air that they are inhaling or the air that they are exhaling.
1:11:01 - And that's not to say that there is not some benefit in air filtration either in or out from somebody wearing a surgical mask.
1:11:11 - or a cloth mask, but the problem is the lack of any kind of standard.
1:11:14 - The problem is that one person's cloth mask may be very, very different than another's.
1:11:20 - And the same thing for surgical masks.
1:11:21 - You know, surgical masks are generally higher quality, but they're not subject to regulatory oversight in the same way that respirators are.
1:11:30 - And so some of them are better at filtering than others.
1:11:33 - And essentially, no surgical mask is going to get a user a good fit.
1:11:36 - That's just not what they're designed for.
1:11:39 - And, you know, we mustn't be too hard on ourselves.
1:11:42 - We have moved incrementally forward.
1:11:44 - And, for example, in the general consciousness, I think people have an understanding culturally what a mask is.
1:11:52 - Before that, it might have been something you only saw people in certain parts of Asia wearing in airports, right?
1:11:58 - Or undergrounds.
1:12:00 - Or, you know, we know what a CO2 monitor is.
1:12:04 - In 2026, in 2019, outside of the academic community and a few, you know, HVAC organisations, a CO2 monitor, most people wouldn't really know what that even meant.
1:12:19 - Never mind know what a thousand parts per million of something meant to them in a space.
1:12:25 - You know, we know what air cleaners are.
1:12:27 - We know what...
1:12:28 - you know, certain grades of filters mean.
1:12:32 - So the conversation has moved on for sure.
1:12:36 - And that's got to encourage you as an organisation is at least people often know to some degree at a basic level what you're talking about on these things.
1:12:48 - For the built environment, though, I wonder if there's some selection bias of the people we're talking to tend to know.
1:12:53 - We also tend to talk to people sort of in the indoor air community.
1:12:56 - So, you know, if I go to the average person on the street and I start talking about, you know, CO2 levels, I think it's going to be the same as it was maybe five, 10 years ago.
1:13:04 - But I think we're optimistic that the message that maybe your indoor air should also be clean is not so controversial and is something that maybe over time can catch on a bit better.
1:13:16 - Yeah, and maybe that will always be the case.
1:13:18 - I mean, I guess that perhaps is the difference between the requirement to understand strategically how to stockpile PPE and the general population understanding the difference between a surgical mask and a N95 mask, right?
1:13:34 - Or...
1:13:35 - the building facility management people and the headmasters and principals of schools and teachers and people that manage spaces in the moment understand what a CO2 sensor is now.
1:13:50 - How did you guys get involved in this?
1:13:53 - What was your, maybe start with you, Victoria, how did you find yourself working for a philanthropic organization looking at PPE in this space?
1:14:04 - I mean, my background is as essentially a cell biologist.
1:14:08 - And so, you know, I spent most of my career before this doing, you know, maybe like a lot of people at Blueprint, like interesting and diverse things.
1:14:16 - You know, I think what drew me to Blueprint, I mean, probably like a lot of people, the pandemic was was a big motivator.
1:14:24 - I think it was very eye opening to see truly how disruptive a pandemic could be.
1:14:31 - and how many gaps in preparedness there were.
1:14:34 - And so like a lot of other people trying to understand how to find more impact out of my career, I think working in kind of biology, R&D, working on very, very cool things, for example, like human on a chip modeling is how I spent quite a few years of my career.
1:14:50 - It's such interesting work
1:14:54 - But at the same time, I think I am really, really drawn to the model that Blueprint has, which is being a philanthropic organization, being philanthropically funded to solve these problems and contribute to making the world a better place.
1:15:11 - you're able to do work that is really just not sustainable within industry.
1:15:16 - You're able to answer questions that other people just aren't able to answer.
1:15:19 - And it's not that the researchers within industry don't care about these questions.
1:15:23 - It's not that they don't want to answer these questions.
1:15:26 - It's really that it's just not compatible with them being able to run a business.
1:15:31 - And I think the same goes for academics, where very often the funding just isn't there to answer the questions.
1:15:39 - that they specifically see as most important.
1:15:41 - And so I think what I really value about working here is being able to empower the people that are able to answer the most important questions on these topics in a way that's, that's truly for a public good.
1:15:53 - What about yourself, Brian?
1:15:54 - How did you find yourself here?
1:15:56 - So yeah, a lot of similarities with Victoria.
1:15:58 - So, you know, technical science background and spent a number of years working in biotech, a combination of bench scientists or,
1:16:05 - business roles, corporate development, and those things.
1:16:09 - And then I think at a certain point, I was just looking for another opportunity to do work that I felt was very important, right?
1:16:16 - Because we all work, we all spend time during our day, a large percent of our day doing something productive, and you wanna make sure you feel like those hours are well spent.
1:16:26 - You're giving a lot of your life energy into that, and so you wanna make sure you have a return on that life energy.
1:16:32 - And something that I've always felt very compelled by was this idea that, you know, right now we have, there's a lot of potential biological risk.
1:16:38 - You know, we have this pandemic we just went through and there's a lot of ways and that could, you know, greatly impact our lives.
1:16:45 - And, you know, it would be a good outcome to have a lot of the work that I do have result in that being much less of a risk.
1:16:52 - have a much less of a chance of some large event that comes downstream of that, or to make the world such that, you know, these biologic risks are just not that big of a deal and not something that we have to deal with.
1:17:04 - You know, it's like, you know, a good analogy here is, you know, fires used to be a really big problem.
1:17:10 - Entire cities used to burn down, but we learned how to do fire prevention.
1:17:13 - So why not?
1:17:14 - And so we'll always have outbreaks, but may perhaps never, if we can ever have pandemics again, that would be a good outcome.
1:17:20 - And so luckily, Blueprint had open roles for things in the space.
1:17:24 - And so I just really appreciate the opportunity to not just care about a problem, but be given the ability to actually try and solve a problem is pretty motivated.
1:17:36 - What's the DNA of Blueprint?
1:17:39 - What money does it come out of?
1:17:41 - Is this just general money that someone said, look, this is the problem I want you to look at?
1:17:46 - Or does it come from a certain place that kind of guides what success looks like in some way?
1:17:54 - Yeah, I'd say it comes from a variety of places.
1:17:56 - So there's, you know, philanthropic organizations that care a lot about, you know, biosecurity and pandemic risks, as well as just individuals that will donate.
1:18:05 - You know, one thing we don't do is we don't take money from, you know, commercial interests.
1:18:09 - We don't take money from any for profits.
1:18:12 - And we don't currently take any money from the governments as well.
1:18:15 - And so we're really sort of empowered by our funders to really take this whole focus upon, you know, not with an agenda to do so, but to solve a problem, you know, for the benefit of humanity.
1:18:26 - Yeah, it's a really interesting perspective, that.
1:18:29 - And it's something I can't say I've never worked in a philanthropic organization.
1:18:35 - So I can't speak to what drives it fundamentally and the DNA of the people that work there.
1:18:45 - But I'm guessing it's subtly different to everything else.
1:18:48 - And I was having this conversation with a policymaker a couple of weeks ago that
1:18:54 - In science, you're trained to communicate with peers.
1:19:00 - You know, the whole output in science is through academic literature, you know, communicating with peers, progressing the question.
1:19:10 - Right.
1:19:10 - Yeah.
1:19:12 - in policy life and in politics, it's about political capital.
1:19:18 - It's about the risks you take as an individual and then as an organisation or a party in progressing an idea and what the cost of that political capital is on votes, ultimately, and your ability to stay in power.
1:19:34 - It's a very different mechanism, politics to academia.
1:19:39 - And then industry obviously is, you know, largely a profit driven organism, you know, a corporation, you know, the Latin comes from corpus, the body.
1:19:53 - It's an element in and of itself that has to live and survive and needs resources to grow, you know, a company.
1:20:03 - So again, it's very different.
1:20:05 - But a charity, a philanthropic organization is very different.
1:20:10 - So you're doing elements of research.
1:20:13 - So you have to research, use scientific rigor and report, present stuff in a way that scientists understand.
1:20:21 - But you also have to understand how to present this information politically and politically.
1:20:27 - communicate with the right organizations.
1:20:29 - And also you need to engage with industry and developing technologies and understanding how they will come in to fill those gaps when they're identified.
1:20:39 - So it's quite a unique position when you think about it that way.
1:20:44 - Yeah, personally, it was a very interesting transition to come from a for-profit company into a philanthropic.
1:20:49 - You know, it's almost a, at a for-profit company, it's actually a very simple optimization.
1:20:54 - If the thing I'm doing allows us to make more money or more profitability or increase the enterprise value, then I'm doing the correct thing.
1:21:01 - But preventing the next pandemic is I don't quite know how to quantify that.
1:21:05 - It's really hard to know day to day whether or not you've gone up 1%, 3%, 4% protection, you know, and so you sort of have to find other ways to ensure you're making progress against your goal.
1:21:17 - And it becomes a much harder problem, but also I think a very satisfying problem.
1:21:21 - And one that I think motivates a lot of our team because we care very deeply about sort of the outcome that we're trying to get to.
1:21:27 - You're solving very hard problems, though, which means you're not banging off success after success week after week here from a we've now got Virginia to stock six months worth of PPE.
1:21:44 - Or we've now, you know, we've now solved UFAR, UVC deployment in schools or whatever.
1:21:50 - You know, like these are big questions, some of these that you're answering.
1:21:54 - So do you have to be quite clear on what success trajectory looks like, how you roadmap this out as an organization?
1:22:02 - And then who holds you accountable to that?
1:22:06 - Do you have like a board of governors, directors that kind of oversee your work and that you ultimately end up reporting into?
1:22:13 - How does that work?
1:22:16 - I mean, I think assessing the impact that we have is a beast all in and of itself.
1:22:22 - I think it's something that isn't necessarily intuitive and easy to calculate.
1:22:26 - I mean, I think, you know, for PPE, for example, you know, it's very, very unlikely that, you know, you're going to be able to count every respirator in the world.
1:22:36 - And, you know, every day you just get one more respirator.
1:22:38 - That's certainly not how any of this works.
1:22:40 - Really what you're hoping for.
1:22:42 - is that the work that you're doing, you know, the education that you're doing, the relationship building that you're doing is going to pay off when, you know, there, there is, there are larger opportunities.
1:22:53 - And so,
1:22:55 - You know, it's not, you're not going to secure a stockpile of, you know, one respirator per day.
1:23:00 - But, you know, we, by building these relationships, we're hoping that we secure a stockpile of a sizable amount.
1:23:08 - You're not necessarily able to tell along the way, how far are you?
1:23:13 - Is it going to happen next year?
1:23:14 - Is it going to happen the year after that?
1:23:16 - How strong are my relationships?
1:23:17 - This isn't necessarily something that can be quantified.
1:23:20 - And so I think something about us is that, you know, we, we try to, the work, we try to build in as much as possible to our work, things that are going to help us in like highly leveraged ways.
1:23:35 - So building strong relationships, knowing the researchers, building those relationships, this isn't something where.
1:23:42 - you know, a single grant is necessarily going to be like, OK, here we've we've solved we've solved this major problem check.
1:23:48 - But it is something where, you know, as as new questions emerge, as opportunities emerge, you know, you know who to answer the questions that come up.
1:23:58 - you've already done so much of the roadmapping to understand what goes into success, because I don't know that there's going to be any success for any of us that isn't a combination of researchers and policy makers coming together to advance these solutions.
1:24:15 - Yeah, and I think that's also why the road mapping and honestly, the theories of change are so critical to our work, because that's how we sort of measure our progress.
1:24:21 - If you have this mental model of if X, Y, and Z happen in the real world, we'll get to this endpoint, and you get to X, and you find out that's not feasible, of course, now you're not going to keep on pivoting down the things that aren't going to work.
1:24:33 - You have to keep on readjusting, but at least you still have that strategy of here is the progression of things that I can impact that is important.
1:24:41 - I think another thing that's also really important for our work is urgency.
1:24:44 - It is very easy to imagine these problems take 30 years to solve and to have that mentality.
1:24:48 - And then, of course, they take 60 years to solve if you do that.
1:24:51 - And so trying to think about how do we have much more near-term urgency to drive forward and also different timelines for different potential outcomes allows us to not just take multiple bets, but sort of bet hedge those different avenues we're taking so that we can ensure we're having the most amount of impact we can.
1:25:11 - in a given period of time.
1:25:12 - Yeah, that's really clever, actually.
1:25:14 - I quite like that as a mental picture that, you know, you're, you're in a way trying to prepare for success in an unknown time frame.
1:25:22 - So it's not like your goal is to hit net zero by 2050.
1:25:28 - You know, that you might have to hit net zero by 2028.
1:25:32 - Right.
1:25:33 - It's that it's kind of global warming, but with an undefined time zone.
1:25:39 - You've got big questions to answer, but your approach to it will be very different depending on the time frames that you're dealing with.
1:25:47 - So success looks very different.
1:25:49 - It reminds me that there was this great movement back.
1:25:52 - in the 90s, I think it was, called The Natural Step.
1:25:55 - It was out of Northern Europe, Scandinavia somewhere.
1:25:59 - It was the early days of sustainability, and they were very good at framing, because back then it was quite a big question, sustainability.
1:26:06 - They're much less further down the road than we are now.
1:26:09 - I'm not saying it's solved or it's not still a big problem, but they were having to really conceptualise the risk of climate change and the challenge and how to...
1:26:19 - create theories of change for it.
1:26:22 - And they used a lot of that kind of visual language, these ideas of funnels and trees.
1:26:30 - You know, a great one they always had was around sustainability, that if you look at sustainability, you can focus in on electric cars or fossil fuels or retrofitting buildings.
1:26:42 - There's 20,000 subjects you could look at.
1:26:47 - And you could spend the next 50 years arguing over the details of each one of those.
1:26:52 - And they said, well, you've got to imagine each one of those as a leaf.
1:26:57 - we recognize what a tree looks like.
1:27:00 - We can articulate the big problem.
1:27:05 - We'll get through the small stuff, but at some level, you've got to have a big strategy.
1:27:11 - And I heard a brilliant articulation of this kind of the other day around AI about people talking about this,
1:27:18 - the likelihood of AI killing everybody and the person was using that chess analogy that, you know, I can't predict, I can predict very well that you're going to lose a chess game.
1:27:29 - I can't tell you which piece is going to get you, but the outcome is fairly sure if we go down this road.
1:27:37 - So I think these kind of framings of these big challenges, we know a pandemic is coming.
1:27:43 - You know, we, depending on your view, we're either lucky or unlucky in the last pandemic.
1:27:49 - It could have got us all.
1:27:51 - It got a lot of us and it left a lot of damage.
1:27:55 - We don't know when it's going to happen again.
1:27:57 - But what we do know is it will.
1:28:00 - Yeah, I think like an important modification I would have is we know that an outbreak is going to come.
1:28:06 - I would argue we don't have to accept that a pandemic is inevitable or a pandemic is a progression of that.
1:28:11 - And so, you know, one thing that we sort of sort of accept in sort of the air, the air patterns like, oh, just it's inevitable.
1:28:17 - There's nothing we can do about it.
1:28:18 - But what if there was something we can do?
1:28:20 - Should we not take action about that?
1:28:22 - You know, I think that whereas we think about outbreaks will be inevitable, we shouldn't accept that we're just going to get sick from the air.
1:28:31 - Yeah, that's really interesting.
1:28:32 - So a North Star for you is genuinely pandemics aren't inevitable.
1:28:40 - That is a fundamental guiding principle, not that you're coming at this from the perspective of pandemics are inevitable, what do we do when we're in one?
1:28:51 - This is the perspective of having the infrastructure to be able to cut this off if you can.
1:28:57 - Yeah, I think like, you know, pragmatically, you know, whether you get there on a certain period of time, you know, it also depends upon the pandemic and where you are in that curve.
1:29:04 - But I think you have to go for that.
1:29:06 - We have solved the problem viewpoint or you're not going to take the right big bets.
1:29:10 - You're not going to write frame the problem the right way because it's not a small optimization problem.
1:29:15 - It's a big problem to solve.
1:29:17 - But I think recognizing the problem as likely solvable is the important frame shift that we need to have.
1:29:23 - Yeah, really interesting.
1:29:25 - And from the perspective of success, you know, if I ask you, Victoria, if you were genuinely to walk away from this in half a decade, a decade's time,
1:29:39 - What would good look like for you, for, say, the US?
1:29:45 - What are the things that people get wrong that they will now understand and get right?
1:29:51 - What does this practically look like for people?
1:29:55 - You know, if this thing, if you can genuinely park this in five or ten years' time and say that we've done something meaningful here with PPE, what would that look like for you, do you think?
1:30:09 - Are you able to articulate that or imagine that?
1:30:12 - I mean, absolutely.
1:30:13 - I mean, if you think about, well, there's maybe two interpretations of this.
1:30:18 - And I think, you know, this idea of walking away in, you know, five to 10 years with feeling like this problem is solved, you still have to define it in something of an outbreak use case.
1:30:29 - So, you know, my...
1:30:33 - My vision would be that, you know, strictly speaking within the United States, that everyone who has to work in public with other people has access to high quality respiratory protection, that there's a respirator either on hand or available through manufacturing.
1:30:50 - to what we call critical workers who are the people who just simply cannot be at home.
1:30:55 - You know, if you think about you think about an outbreak like COVID, you know, the first few days, weeks, people, people suspended activities that they didn't have to do because they they didn't want to take that risk.
1:31:07 - There were so many uncertainties, but there were also many, many people who had to keep going to work because their work was so important and just simply couldn't stop.
1:31:15 - And I think that there's always going to be work that just simply cannot be suspended regardless of an outbreak.
1:31:22 - And so for all of those people to have access to a respirator, but also that they know what that respirator is, that they understand at a basic level.
1:31:34 - this is why I'm wearing it and how it protects me.
1:31:36 - I think you hear even very basic misunderstandings of how respirators work.
1:31:41 - I remember early COVID hearing people say things like, a virus is too small to be filtered by a respirator.
1:31:47 - Look at the quote unquote poor size of this respirator.
1:31:51 - It's just a virus that will just go right through it.
1:31:52 - This is crazy.
1:31:53 - I'm like, obviously this is not how a filter works, but there were some very basic understandings
1:31:59 - misunderstandings that people had and probably still have.
1:32:03 - And going back to effective use, being able to know if a respirator fits you, both the knowledge that a respirator fits you and the ability to assess the fit of a respirator.
1:32:16 - And so I think those are all, again, framed in terms of what will happen if there is an emergency, if there is an outbreak.
1:32:23 - But, you know, hopefully it also means that there is improvement in terms of respiratory protection, even outside of an outbreak.
1:32:29 - You know, if you think about a person who is there's a wildfire, air quality is very poor.
1:32:35 - A person makes the decision to wear a respirator.
1:32:37 - how can they as a person not in, you know, an occupational respiratory protection program get fit tested for that respirator.
1:32:46 - And, you know, maybe in, in some big cities there, there are options, but for a lot of people, it's like this, this truly does not exist.
1:32:51 - And you look at, you know, other, other occupational settings where there are people who do wear respirators right now as part of their job, where they are not given access to fit testing.
1:33:01 - And this is just simply something that, that,
1:33:04 - they don't have access to.
1:33:05 - And so, you know, my goal would be that we've had kind of a reckoning for how important it is for people to be able to get something that protects them and give people, you know, at all levels, the tools in order to access that.
1:33:20 - So it seems to me in order for that to happen, that there's a couple of fundamentals there.
1:33:25 - One is that
1:33:26 - people need to have a plan that needs to be at a state or a federal or at a local level, or even within organizations, businesses or certain areas that there's a strategy.
1:33:40 - Because risk is strategy.
1:33:42 - Risk is understanding what that risk looks like, what mitigation you have, and what the gaps are and how you improve it, right?
1:33:49 - What can I – what's the term?
1:33:53 - What can I be reasonably expected to do with the resources that I have at a fundamental level?
1:34:00 - So there's a big piece of work there in people saying, right, okay, what does a plan look like?
1:34:07 - Is this a first wave plan and softening the curve piece until we get the...
1:34:14 - supply chains up to speed in order to meet demand at the backside of it?
1:34:20 - If we're doing that, how long have we got?
1:34:23 - Who can we serve?
1:34:24 - So there's a real logistical, strategic, deciding what good looks like for that particular setting.
1:34:33 - And then there's a huge educational piece there, as you're saying.
1:34:36 - It's about people having access to knowledge to understand what's right for me when it comes to that time.
1:34:44 - So I think that, you know, what would be done in five to 10 years if we had a sufficient level of air protection and all congregate indoor space or or having that protection being very, very easy to turn on immediately.
1:34:57 - in the event of a pathogen outbreak or something of that nature.
1:35:04 - This is actually interesting, pretty compatible with viewpoints like ASHRAE 241.
1:35:09 - But I think that if we are at the point where all these things were being installed or in just a recognition that all indoor space should meet a certain air cleaning target, then basically I think we've mostly sort of hit the job there and we move on to solving other problems.
1:35:27 - Yeah.
1:35:28 - And do you get any sense that there are there's technologies and innovations to come here?
1:35:35 - I mean, you know, I think we can we can serve the community very well with the technology that we have if correctly deployed.
1:35:41 - Right.
1:35:42 - But there is innovation happening here as well.
1:35:45 - Like you say, the glycol vapors, you know, that kind of thing is one understanding those much more fundamentally.
1:35:51 - You know, we've got the work happening on measuring and identifying.
1:35:56 - bioaerosols and understanding that risk, making the invisible visible in a more meaningful way.
1:36:02 - So there is some innovation potential here as well, isn't there, over the next kind of decade?
1:36:07 - I think there is, but I also think we should recognize that it's not some new technology that's going to come.
1:36:11 - It's all the problem.
1:36:12 - It's the implementation of a lot of different technologies to actually do the things that we know we want to do already.
1:36:18 - You know, FIRA VC is newer, but not brand new.
1:36:21 - Conventional GUV has been around for a while.
1:36:23 - Even glycol vapors have been around for quite some time.
1:36:26 - And so I think that it's, whereas there's technical innovations that would make them easier to install or perhaps less expensive,
1:36:34 - or better characterized.
1:36:35 - It's more about understanding the benefits of getting those things out there, understanding the characteristics of deployment, how do we deploy them efficaciously, how do we deploy them safely, how do we deploy them in a way that they're actually used and helpful, and then just making sure that they're actually used and a recognition that indoor air is a problem that we can solve and that we should take the action to solve that.
1:37:02 - Yeah.
1:37:03 - Yeah.
1:37:03 - And that's why both of you do have a lot in common is that you both work in an environment where people don't really understand these protection mechanisms when they don't use them very well when they do have them and they forget where they are and have to turn them on or access them.
1:37:20 - So, you know, there's there's there's some low hanging fruit there for success.
1:37:25 - Where can people go to find out more about your, are there outputs that are valuable to people that they can access?
1:37:32 - Yeah, we've had a recently redesigned website.
1:37:36 - And I think like people stop by that one is a great, great hub.
1:37:40 - We have a lot of documents that we put out.
1:37:42 - We have the PPE blueprint.
1:37:44 - We have the fire UVC blueprint.
1:37:45 - We're putting out new documents.
1:37:47 - on a relatively regular basis.
1:37:49 - And so I think that's a great place to start just to better understand our work and see the different types of work that we fund and different types of work that we output and so forth.
1:37:58 - Yep, sign up for our newsletter.
1:37:59 - It's where we talk a lot about what we're doing month to month.
1:38:03 - Yeah, really interesting.
1:38:04 - And do you have any asks of the community in general?
1:38:07 - Are you looking for people to connect with you, tie in with research?
1:38:14 - Is there much of a challenge for you to get the resources and the knowledge that you need that the community can recognise and try and support in some way?
1:38:25 - I think our biggest limitation sometimes just being, you know, better connections for people that want to do work in this space.
1:38:31 - You know, we put out RFPs to solve specific problems that we think are important on a regular basis.
1:38:37 - And, you know, the more awareness and the more research that we can get involved in this space, trying to think about these problems and solving them, I think is very important.
1:38:44 - So just if you're a researcher in the space and want to get more involved, please, you know, track our work.
1:38:50 - I'm very happy to connect and talk about what's important for our funding.
1:38:54 - Yeah.
1:38:55 - Well, Victoria, Brian, it's been brilliant talking to you, I guess, this afternoon where you are, this evening where I am.
1:39:04 - It's been an absolute pleasure, really fascinating to find out about this area of work as well.
1:39:08 - I think clearly very important.
1:39:11 - But very interesting as well.
1:39:13 - I think this is an angle a lot of people would not have heard about before this kind of philanthropic charity angle to these big problems.
1:39:21 - I think it's been really illuminating and I found personally really interesting.
1:39:25 - So thanks a million.
1:39:26 - I really appreciate your time.
1:39:27 - Thanks for having us.
1:39:28 - Thank you so much.
1:39:30 - Thanks for listening.
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1:39:45 - So thanks a million to them as always.
1:39:48 - See you again next week.