Holes and All, Bioshield Needed

By Michael Fumento

Scripps Howard News Service, April 29, 2004
Copyright 2004 Scripps Howard News Service

Feel safer knowing that eagle-eyed airport screeners are snatching sewing scissors from your carry-on luggage? No, because you probably realize that an airliner-as-missile redux would surely fail since passengers and crew would pummel the perpetrators. The "ideal" next terror attack will not only be horrific but hard to stop – which puts biological weapons on the short list.

Horrific, but it's been done. The next attack will come in a completely different way.

Since then, "Senate" has become "senator" – specifically Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, who believes politics should take precedence over national security.

BioShield is intended to streamline government research and provide private industry money to develop products which the government will then procure. In the event of a national emergency, it also gives the president authority and flexibility to authorize use of medical products not yet FDA-approved.

That's the sticking point. Levin "is concerned that the bill will allow the White House to dole out large, no-bid contracts," the Global Security Newswire reported in January.

Levin prides himself on being "an effective waste fighter."

But "It's going to be awfully hard to explain to perhaps millions of Americans (exposed in an attack) that we can't provide an available remedy because we might not have given all companies an equal chance to make bids," says Gayle Osterberg, spokesperson for the Senate HELP Committee. Levin's office did not return my calls.

Meanwhile, the "delay has had a sobering effect within the industry, causing doubt that any investments made to develop new countermeasures against potential bioterror agents will ever pay off," Claire Fraser, president and CEO of the Institute for Genomic Research wrote recently in Science magazine.

Look no further than the ABthrax vaccine under development by Human Genome Sciences in Rockville, Md. The current anthrax vaccine comprises six injections received over an 18 month period – hardly ideal for an emergency. But in early human testing, ABthrax seemed to provide quick and safe protection with a single injection.

Fortunately, as the Japanese found out, fleas are not good at taking orders.

It's not that BioShield doesn't have its problems.

"We would completely break the bank if we committed to purchasing every one," says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The legislation also overemphasizes those germs celebrated by Hollywood and the media but that would make poor weapons, such as Ebola virus and plague. Ebola is terribly hard to catch, requiring exposure to bodily fluids such as in health care or mortuary settings.

BioShield also relies too heavily on vaccines.

"We need to emphasize drugs that can be administered quickly after exposure," Dr. Ken Alibek, executive director of George Mason University's Center for Biodefense at Manassas, Va., told me. Alibek, who headed the Soviet bioweapons program until his defection in1992, said, "That's more sensible than trying to protect the entire population before an attack that may never come."

Vaccines also provide fairly narrow protection because they promote the development of specific antibodies. But antibiotics and some antiviral medicines have already shown the ability to fight a broad spectrum of diseases including the worst of all - those not yet even invented.

But all this can be dealt with later. We need BioShield now. We know exactly when foreign terrorists will attack with bioweapons: As soon as they can.

Michael Fumento (U.S. Army Airborne, 1978-82) is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a syndicated columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service. Read his additional writing on the military. Michael Fumento is the author of numerous books.