Saturday, August 16, 2008

How much money have we wasted on biodefense based on four deaths?

Science (8 August 2008) has an article about the scientist who committed suicide recently having been suspected of the anthrax attacks in 2001. It points out that there remain doubts as to whether he was the perpetrator of the crime, especially since the U.S. Government just paid a $5.8 million damage assessment to another scientist that they had implicated publicly in the crime.

The article notes:
Many believe that the case is bound to have wider ramifications for the biodefense field. Before 2001, such research was largely confined to USAMRIID and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. The anthrax letters, which plunged a nation reeling from 9/11 into further anxiety, helped spur a massive increase in the biodefense budget--now some $5.4 billion a year--and a construction boom in biosafety labs. "The entire rationale for that expansion was fraudulent," says Richard Ebright, a prominent biodefense critic at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, because it assumed a threat from outside the country. The boom has made the country less safe, Ebright maintains: "The spigot needs to be closed."
Comment: Of course there are some very good people working on the biodefense program and of course there will be some spin offs that will prove of benefit to the world, even if the Bush administration did waste a lot of money in politically motivated over reaction to the threat of bioterrorism. Still, I wonder how many lives would have been saved if the money had been devoted to health care for those who don't enjoy health insurance, or to high payoff public health campaigns. Even more lives would have been saved and more suffering averted if the funds had gone to dealing with the diseases of poverty in developing nations. Still, I guess we waste a lot more money in dozens of ways. Still, this is another example of the Bush administration's incompetence. JAD

Civilian Biodefense Funding
by Fiscal Year, FY2001–FY2007 (in $millions)

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