A Good Defense Won’t Win the Bioterrorism War

Excerpts from an op ed in USA Today, November 22, 2004.

The 2001 anthrax attacks proved that biotechnology can be abused to disseminate a lethal pathogen. In fact, any terrorist can find on E-Bay the materials needed to create a biological weapon. Because this is possible, what can be done to prevent another bioterrorist attack? The U.S. government is depending on defense.

This past summer, President Bush signed into law Project BioShield, a laudable $5.6 billion program to bolster the nation’s defenses against biological terrorism. This month, the government awarded its first contract: $877 million to a California company that will produce 75 million doses of a new anthrax vaccine. In theory, this funding sounds great. The problem, though, is that biodefense alone will not win the bioterrorism game.

To be prepared for threats that do not exist yet—such as genetically engineered pathogens — we need an adaptable strategy. In researching such threats, the scientific community must identify and manage the data in a way that does not lower the barrier to illicit bioweapons development.

The trouble with Project BioShield is it invests in technical solutions to detect known agents and to treat known threats. But it offers no equivalent investment in planning, analysis, and research for stronger surveillance, international collaboration, and other approaches that are needed to prevent the spread of new, potentially devastating biological weapons. Its game has no offense — and certainly not enough to win the bioterrorism game.