Clean Air Is Non-Negotiable: A Call for Measurable Solutions
Breathing indoors should not be a health risk.
For more than a century, public health transformed society by making clean water non-negotiable. We built systems. We tested them. We regulated them. We improved them. No one debates whether water safety is optional.
Indoor air should carry the same weight.
Clean airAir free of pollutants, including viruses, bacteria, and harmful particles. is not a luxury. It is a basic condition of human dignity.
Respiratory pathogens like COVID-19A disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, leading to respiratory illness., influenza, RSV, and future airborne threats have exposed something uncomfortable: we do not actually measure or enforce air performance in most of the places where we spend our lives.
We have guidance (which are often woefully behind).
We have recommendations (which are clouded by agendas).
And…we have strongly worded PDFs and sometimes funny memes.
What we often do not have are deployable systems that produce verified, measurable results.
That is what this RFP is about. You can find it here.
Moving Beyond “Should” to “Does”
At PHAN, we are launching a call for proposals focused on one thing:
Measurable reduction of indoor airborne disease transmission.
Not theoretical models.
Not awareness campaigns.
Not dashboards that look impressive but change nothing.
We are looking for interventions that deploy in the real world and prove they work.
If someone increases verified air changes per hour across an entire school district, that matters.
If someone builds a screening tool that meaningfully reduces transmission events and can demonstrate it with data, that matters.
If someone develops a scalable retrofit model that materially lowers exposure risk across hundreds of buildings, that matters.
We are not funding ideas in isolationSeparating sick individuals from healthy ones to prevent disease spread..
We are funding performance.
Why Now?
Because we’ve been at an inflection point.
The science of airborne transmissionThe spread of pathogens through aerosols or droplets suspended in the air. is no longer controversial. The tools exist. The need is obvious. And yet implementation remains uneven, inconsistent, and frequently under-validated even without all the disinformation attempting to cloud and diminish the issue.
We do not lack technology and innovation.
We lack standards.
We lack measurement.
We lack accountability.
Clean indoor air is not futuristic innovation. It is foundational protection. It is how we keep schools open, protect healthcare systems, reduce workplace disruption, and prevent the next respiratory wave from becoming another avoidable setback.
It is also, frankly, long overdue.
What We Hope to See
We hope to see bold ideas grounded in evidence.
We hope to see engineers, public health professionals, entrepreneurs, and operators step forward with solutions that are not just technically clever, but operationally viable.
We hope to see projects that can prototype or deploy in 2026 and demonstrate measurable impact in 2027.
We hope to see models that scale beyond a pilot and become a new baseline.
Most of all, we hope to see proof.
If you can define your baseline, quantify your impact, and explain how it works in the real world, we want to hear from you.
If we cannot measure it, we cannot manage it. And if we cannot manage it, we cannot protect people.
Where We’re Going
History remembers when clean water stopped being a suggestion and became a system.
That shift did not happen because people wrote better memos. Little in history (if anything?) has happened because a bunch of us talked about a bunch of stuff. It happened because people innovated, built, measured, improved, and proved.
Indoor air is next.
We are inviting innovators, builders, institutions, and partners to help define what measurable clean airAir free of pollutants, including viruses, bacteria, and harmful particles. looks like in the modern era.
If we do this right, a few years from now it will feel obvious that we ever accepted anything less.
Sincerely,
-The PHAN Team
