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Tuesday, November 05, 2002A Bush administration intelligence review has concluded that four nations -- including Iraq and North Korea -- possess covert stocks of the smallpox pathogen, according to two officials who received classified briefings. Records and operations manuals captured this year in Afghanistan and elsewhere, they said, also disclosed that Osama bin Laden devoted money and personnel to pursue smallpox, among other biological weapons. The other two are Russia and France. UPDATE: The Bloviator has more on this. He's upset that the government didn't share this information with the CDC's advisory committee on smallpox vaccination this past summer. The knowledge just might have swayed their decision. Maybe the feds didn't trust the advisory panel with the information. Judging by some of the public comments that came out from the advisory panel members last summer, they seemed rather partisan. (Sorry, I would dig out the link but I've got to get back to the office.) The one piece I'm thinking of is a Washington Post op-ed by one of the panel members which accused the administration of using the smallpox issue for political purposes. It was hardly the voice of impartial science. As it is, the information we have now was "leaked." Maybe it was done this way to light a fire under public health officials when it became obvious just how laggardly they've been at preparing for biodefense. UPDATE on the UPDATE: Here's the item I was thinking of. It's by Ruth Katz, associate dean of Yale School of Medicine and member of the CDC advisory panel. Here’s her take on the Adminstration’s attempt to get the ball rolling sooner rather than later: "The Bush administration is now pushing hard on the smallpox vaccine, and it may well have valid reasons for doing so. But public health, not politics or public relations, needs to be the driver here. If the administration is only seeking to show that it is "tough on smallpox" and prepared for anything in the struggle against terrorism, health experts, elected officials and the American public should protest the hijacking of a carefully formulated policymaking process. Planning for a smallpox epidemic is not an event being staged for television." While I was looking for that, I also came across two other pieces from last summer that are also pertinent. The first was one about political tensions between the CDC and the White House: The tensions stem from a variety of factors, including fallout from widespread criticism of how federal health officials handled last fall's anthrax attacks, the absence of a CDC director since March, efforts by the new administration to change approaches to controversial issues such as sex education and HIV prevention, and a campaign to exert more control over the CDC from Washington, health experts said. ...Other factors have also contributed to the tension between the CDC and HHS, sources said. D.A. Henderson, who joined the department last November as head of HHS's new Office of Public Health Preparedness and is currently Thompson's principal science adviser for public health preparedness, once worked at the CDC but reportedly feuded with the agency on various occasions later in his career. ..Moreover, since the resignation of Jeffrey P. Koplan as CDC director in March, the agency has been run by a four-person interim team, leaving employees uncertain who will be the CDC's next leader. "If they appoint someone as the next head who is clearly a political hack, people will leave in droves," a former federal health official predicted. The Administration can be forgiven if they felt less than trusting of the public health officials they had to work with last summer. There was obviously quite a bit of political animosity present there. The second piece was from the early July issue of Businessweek, and it proves that the recent “leak” isn’t new news. I can’t link to it, but here’s the post: "The risk of a terrorist attack can't be quantified. But homeland security experts note ominously that both Iraq and North Korea vaccinate at least some of their military, suggesting that they may have stockpiles of smallpox. And Russians once produced tons of highly weaponized forms of the virus, some of which may now be in terrorists' hands.". The only thing that’s new is the French angle. posted by Sydney on 11/05/2002 07:39:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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