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Legislators Urge Increased Biosecurity Investment By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — Prominent Republican and Democratic legislators and experts yesterday urged increased federal investment in efforts to mitigate possible biological terrorism or infectious disease crises, arguing that efforts since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have been greatly insufficient. While the United States has spent more than $20 billion on biological defense since then, “in the future we’re going to have to do much more than this,” said Representative Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee and was recently tapped by President George W. Bush to be the next chairman of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission. Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) said the United States has just two of 57 vaccines, drugs or diagnostics identified by the Defense Department’s Defense Science Board in 2000 as most needed to respond to a biological weapons attack. There was only one in 2000, he said. “At this rate of development, we won’t have 20 countermeasures available into 2076,” he said. Public Health System ConcernsSenator Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who heads a Senate subcommittee on bioterrorism and public health preparedness, said the country is “challenged by the current structure of our public health system.” “I’m concerned that our public health system is not fully prepared to face the challenges that we know are ahead,” he said. Providing an example, Brookings Institution Visiting Fellow Richard Falkenrath, a panelist at the conference, said the United States since the late 1990s has relied on state and local public health agencies to distribute medical countermeasures to the population in the event of a biological crisis. “Four years later, it’s now clear that not a single city in America is prepared to do that in a relevant time period in response to an anthrax aerosol attack,” he said. Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) she said that better biological attack surveillance equipment is needed and that the country lacks and needs an effective mechanism for federal state and local authorities to communicate biological crisis information. “We need to ensure that if a bioterror attack is launched, our health delivery system is prepared to handle the outbreak as a matter of healthcare and national security,” she said. “We are not making the public health investments that are required for the scale of the threat that we face,” she said. Lieberman argued that U.S. biotech and pharmaceutical companies do not have enough incentive to invest heavily in biological defense research and development. He urged passage of his proposed Project BioShield II Act of 2005, which would limit drug company liability and extend company patents on potential biodefense vaccines, as a way to encourage private sector investment in defenses against bioterrorism and infectious disease outbreaks. “We’ve got to get more serious than we have about this threat,” he said, and urged conference participants to suggest additional ways in which pharmaceutical companies can be given incentives to invest in biological security measures. He said Americans “face an even larger threat from [naturally occurring] infectious diseases,” adding, “We don’t have the diagnostics and therapeutics to deal with those either.” The conference was organized primarily by Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute and titled, “Preparing for the Inevitable: Bioterrorism and Emerging Infectious Diseases.” Dispute over Threat PrioritiesCox said a debate was underway within the country about whether future biological terrorism is inevitable. “Not everybody believes that there is anything inevitable about the next terrorist attack,” he said. “The idea that there is an enemy out there [for which] we need to organize and prepared to meet is itself under challenge.” Similarly, panelist Michael McDonald, president of the health information and technology company Global Health Initiatives, said bioterrorism “is not a theoretical threat,” noting that those responsible for the October 2001 anthrax attacks against members of Congress and the media are “still walking free.” While prominent experts have not denied that terrorists including al-Qaeda have sought to produce dangerous biological weapons for terrorism and that future attacks are possible, they have argued that the potential for catastrophic bioterrorism has been exaggerated and prioritized to the neglect of efforts to deal with potentially more catastrophic naturally occurring disease threats, (see GSN, Mar. 9). Prompted by a question, Cox suggested the government has not neglected naturally occurring infectious diseases such as a deadly avian flu detected in Southeast Asia that scientists have warned could begin spreading from human to human and kill millions across the globe. He said it was his “hope” that “dual-use” benefits from the administration’s investments in biological defense countermeasures would benefit a public response to a naturally occurring infectious disease. “I would view this as a big opportunity for public health, and America and the world,” he said. Falkenrath, who was until May 2004 a White House deputy assistant to the president and deputy homeland security advisor focusing on potential terrorism, criticized Cox’s response. “I respectfully disagree with what Chairman Cox said. I do not think that our response to avian flu is commensurate with the real risk that we face,” he said. Were a terrorist plot uncovered that presented the same level of threat that the avian flu poses, he said, “you would get an enormous response out of the government … far beyond what we have today.” “Microbes and microbial threats are the most profound threat faced by our species in the 21st century, they are more profound than Muslim militants certainly,” Falkenrath said. “The highest probability, highest consequence devastating incident in America is an outbreak of pandemic flu, I think. I think it exceeds by an order of magnitude the severity of a risk of [an al-Qaeda biological attack],” he said.
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