Biodefense industry urges Congress to maintain funding and coordination for medical countermeasures

Christopher Frank, representing the Alliance for Biosecurity and speaking from industry experience at Emergent BioSolutions, told the Appropriations Subcommittee that medical countermeasure development and manufacturing depend on predictable federal demand, long‑term funding and early private‑public coordination.

Frank said many medical countermeasures lack a commercial market and therefore require government support to sustain manufacturing capacity and to ensure stockpiles. He recommended funding increases across the medical countermeasure enterprise, specifically naming BARDA, Project BioShield's special reserve fund, the Strategic National Stockpile, and pandemic preparedness programs, and asked for better alignment across requirements, development, procurement and response functions.

"If we don't have funding, it simply means that we don't have the medical countermeasures," Frank said, arguing that biodefense should be treated as a national‑security priority akin to DOD procurement. Members of the subcommittee raised questions about recent HHS reorganizations, including proposals to change the administration for strategic preparedness and response and to combine BARDA with ARPA‑H, and asked industry witnesses to help explain implications for the medical countermeasure industrial base.

The witness group submitted written recommendations to the committee; no formal actions were taken during the hearing.