Randall Larsen, executive director of the WMD Commission
up the government’s perspective: “There are always going to be problems when you’re making a new stealth bomber, nuclear powered submarine, or pharmaceutical for biodefense…they ran into some problems and said okay, this is normal. We think if we give it a little more time and a little more money, they will be able to get past this problem.”
Adding to the difficulty of creating a substantial SNS, House Democrats crafted an appropriations bill which reallocated $2 billion from project BioShield to prevent teacher layoffs (“Bioterrorism experts criticize cuts in BioShield to pay for teacher retention,” 14 July 2010 HSNW. Despite the Democratic-Republican bipartisan commission unanimously concluding that bioterrorism was the most likely weapon of mass destruction terrorists would use, Larsen pointed out another instance of poor financial prioritization: “in the fiscal year 2010 appropriations, the amount of money that congress put up for EPA to do R&D was about half of what they appropriated for Marine Corp. marching band.”
Aside from the attempt to raid the BioShield strategic reserve fund, the WMD commission’s major concern is that the government lacks the means to clean up after an anthrax attack, with the most likely targets being a major metropolitan subway such as in New York, Washington D.C., or San Francisco. Larsen labeled the weaponized disease as “mother’s nature’s best bioweapon” because of its persistence as demonstrated on the island of Gruinard off the coast of Scotland where the British tested anthrax bombs during the Second World War. “It took them forty years to clean up that island.”
In 2006 Larsen interviewed the deputy chief of transit police in Manhattan for his book on homeland security and found that releasing anthrax in a subway system “would be the worst scenario — and the fact that we have no clue how to clean it up because we’re not spending sufficient money on it. The only answer for getting a subway system in New York City running again is to vaccinate everybody and we don’t have enough vaccine to do that.”
Larsen, along with former senators Bob Graham (D-Florida), chairman, and Jim Talent (R-Missouri), vice-chairman at the WMD Commission, will be releasing a follow up report card (“U.S. gets ‘F’ in preparation for threat of biological terrorism,” 29 January 2010 HSNW) in October of 2011, which will be the 10th anniversary of the U.S. capitol building being closed for anthrax contamination.
The report will measure about eight things, according to Larsen, starting with rapid detection and diagnosis technology, all the way through environmental clean up. “Over the past ten years, the U.S. government has spent $62 billion dollars in biodefense,” Larsen said, “…and a significant portion has been wasted. The problem is that the government has no means to do an end-to-end assessment from early detection through clean up, and no one has a system to measure that readiness. The number one project for the WMD center in 2011 will be to design a tool that can measure this readiness, and identify where the problems are so that congress will know what exactly to spend money on.”
