BioterrorismU.S. unprepared for biological attack

The United States is inadequately prepared to respond to a biological attack and there are several severe weaknesses in its defense capabilities. According to a New York Times investigative report, funding issues, competing agencies with different priorities, and an overall lack of urgency have contributedto a situation where the U.S. lacks countermeasures to combat a number of biological agents that could be used in an attack.

The threat of bioterrorism is not a new phenomenon, Bill Clinton established the first stockpile of medicines for an array of dangerous pathogens in 1998, but it was not until the 2001 anthrax attacks that defense officials declared their commitment to developing the necessary countermeasures to deal with a biological attack.

Ten years and billions of dollars later, serious gaps still exist in the United States’ bioterrorism defenses.

One of the main problems in addressing the threat of a bioterror attack is the ease in which a terrorist could develop a biological weapon.

“What took me three weeks in a sophisticated laboratory in a top-tier medical school twenty years ago, with millions of dollars in equipment, can essentially be done by a relatively unsophisticated technician,” said Brett Giroir, a former director at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “A person at a graduate-school level has all the tools and technologies to implement a sophisticated program to create a bioweapon.”

Successive administrations have often focused on the threat of nuclear terrorism, which has at times detracted from the attention paid to bioterrorism.

A 2008 report by the Congressional Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, formed in 2007, concluded“to date, the U.S. government has invested most of its nonproliferation efforts and diplomatic capital in preventing nuclear terrorism. The commission believes that it should make the more likely threat — bioterrorism — a higher priority.”

The potential effect of a biological attack could be as severe as a nuclear attack. In November 2009, the National Security Council estimated that a biological attack could place “hundreds of thousands of people” at risk of death and cost more than $1 trillion.

Some progress has been made in efforts to stockpile vaccines for biological agents that could be used in an attack. The Department of Health and Human Services operates a program called Project BioShield, which was established in 2004 and currently holds enough smallpox vaccine to immunize every U.S. citizen and enough anthrax vaccine to respond to a “three-city attack.”

Medicines for a variety of other pathogens, such as plague and the tularemia bacteria are needed, however.

“Especially troubling is the lack of priority given to the development of medical countermeasures — the vaccines and medicines that would be required to mitigate the consequences of an attack,” the 2008 commission report found.

In 2006 Congress created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to fund the development of new countermeasures. The organization was intended to have a $1 billion annual operating budget, but between 2006 and 2009 it received one quarter of that amount annually on average, though funding has increased in the last three years. With the average cost of developing a new pharmaceutical drug at approximately $1 billion, not a single new vaccine has been added to the government’s stockpile and other than tentative progress on a new anthrax vaccine, none are currently in development.

When compared to other national security priorities, the $12 billion it would take to develop a dozen new vaccines seems small, about the cost of two months of fighting in Afghanistan.

For some agencies biodefense does not necessarily equal bioterrorism. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) receives $1.6 billion annually for biodefense research, yet only a small portion of that money is geared towards the threat of bioterrorism. 70 percent of the organization’s biodefense budget is dedicated to research into natural diseases such as AIDS, SARS, and malaria.

“To me, the idea of a naturally occurring threat is infinitely greater,” said Anthony Fauci, NIAID’s director.

According to Kenneth Bernard, who served as the senior biodefense official in the Clinton and Bush administrations, views such as those expressed by Fauci are common.

“We’re not spending that kind of money to prevent a bio attack because the people who work on biology are not trained to think like that. They are much more interested in dealing with the three particular strains of influenza that are in the dish this year than they are in thinking about a plague attack in 2018.”

For retired Air Force colonel and biosecurity expert Randall Larson, the problem is a lack of unified leadership.

“Today, there are more than two dozen Senate-confirmed individuals with some responsibility for biodefense. Not one person has it for a full-time job, and no one is in charge,” he said.