WASHINGTON, D.C. - In some ways, former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge knew the nation was not prepared for something like the novel Coronavirus, or COVID-19.

“This country, with all of its capacities and all of its abilities, has yet to really focus on building an antidote to viruses at large,” Ridge said.

Ridge, who now heads a cybersecurity firm in Washington, D.C., is also the co-chair of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense. He leads the group with former U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.). Together, the group studies and assesses America’s readiness for things the country has never seen before, such as the Coronavirus.

More than four years ago, the commission produced a report outlining 33 steps to improve these weaknesses. One of their top assessments is blunt: infectious diseases threaten national security.

“The United States is underprepared for biological threats,” a portion of the Oct. 2015 report reads. “Nation states and unaffiliated terrorists (via biological terrorism) and nature itself (via emerging and reemerging infectious diseases) threaten us. While biological events may be inevitable, their level of impact on our country is not.”

“If we somehow focused on vaccines, there could be quick antidotes to this kind of challenge,” Ridge said.

Experts say developing a Coronavirus vaccine could take at least a year. Earlier this week, the first clinical trial on an experimental COVID-19 vaccine was performed in Washington state.

The commission also produced what’s called the “One Health Concept.” Here, they found a significant link: 60 percent of infections due to infectious diseases come from animals; 72 percent from wildlife.

Those numbers are similar to recent findings published in a February report in the New England Journal of Medicine report, which explains how scientists believe covid-19 may have originated from bats in China.

“One of the recommendations we made several years ago was based on the notion that Mother Nature can mutate and move very, very quickly,” Ridge said.

Ridge, who is also a former U.S. Representative and governor of Pennsylvania, hopes the Coronavirus will be the wakeup call officials need to be sure America is equipped should another pandemic happen again.

“Mother Nature, in all of her fury, can throw something like this at us,” he said. “We’re not quite as well-prepared for this as we could be.”