Budget cuts more than $600 million from Bioshield program

its fiscal 2010 budget request. A spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the budget process, did not respond to Matishak’s questions submitted earlier last week.

The budget moves could hurt biomedical firms and lead them to cut back development of WMD countermeasures, some experts argued. “From a company’s perspective, if they’re going to enter into this long-term investment of their time and resources, I think it’s appropriate for them to have some confidence that the government will actually have money available to buy it,” Smith said.

“Using Bioshield funds for flu preparedness and other issues not associated with national security will severely diminish the nation’s efforts to prepare for WMD events and will leave the nation less, not more, prepared,” said Randall Larsen, executive director of the congressionally chartered Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism.

The panel has warned that unless steps are taken, an act of WMD terrorism is likely to occur by 2013 and that a biological event is more likely than a nuclear strike. In June it sent a letter to Obama urging the administration not to make Bioshield funds available for the development of H1N1 influenza vaccine. The commission sent a similar missive to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

“People kind of see it as a pot of money, ‘Ooo! We can go over here and grab some money.’ No. That was put there for a very specific national security reason,” Larsen told GSN. “We think [the Bioshield program is] critically important and those funds should be spent exactly for the reasons that Congress initially appropriated them.”

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chairman Joseph Lieberman (I-Connecticut) would prefer to “fund Bioshield, NIAID, and BARDA fully rather than deplete the Bioshield budget to strengthen the other two,” committee spokeswoman Leslie Phillips said in a statement to GSN. “The Bioshield program is intended to provide a market incentive for the advanced development and production of needed biodefense medical countermeasures,” Phillips said. “Senator Lieberman fears that diverting resources to other research endeavors could weaken that incentive. That said, the senator understands and has accepted the decision of the appropriators in their difficult job of divvying up public funds in a difficult economic environment.”

Others, though, said they do not think the money transfers are an issue of concern. “Money transfers like that are pretty regular,” said Patrick Clemins, director of the research and development