CCDD is a research group at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health that works on modelling all aspects of infectious disease, from detection and prevalence estimation, to understanding how a disease spreads, to designing vaccine trials.
CCDD dedicates its efforts towards pandemic preparedness and biosecurity. Preparing for future pandemics, especially those that pose a risk to humanity's survival or long-term potential, is one of the best ways to create a better future.
CCDD takes a diverse range of approaches to the problem of enhancing pandemic preparedness and improving biosecurity. Among these are:
CCDD's director, Marc Lipsitch, is a key part of this work. He splits his time between directing CCDD and serving as the Senior Advisor for the CDC's Centre for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics. Lipsitch is also a nuanced contributor to important debates, such as around which dual-use biomedical research (like gain-of-function research) is worthwhile.
The impact-focused evaluator Longview recommended that the Longtermism Fund provide a grant to help support CCDD’s work by partially funding the salary of a Director of Research and Administration. In addition to evaluating the case for this specific grant, Longview has conducted several reviews of CCDD’s work since 2020 and found this work to be a cost-effective way to improve biosecurity, prepare for pandemics, and thereby create a better future.
We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things: