Did the U.S. Government Overreact to the Anthrax Attack?

According to the Seattle Times:

Since anthrax-laced letters were sent to members of Congress and news organizations in late 2001, almost $50 billion in federal money has been spent to build laboratories, develop vaccines and stockpile drugs.

For example, an experimental vaccine Ivins spent years working on moved from the laboratory to a proposed billion-dollar federal contract after the attacks, which killed five people.

Ivins helped invent an anthrax vaccine that was scheduled to be added to the nation's vaccine stockpile through an $877 million contract awarded in 2004, but the deal collapsed two years later.

Similarly, the Associated Press reports:

The bioterrorism attacks forced the closing of two major mail processing plants and contaminated 21 other postal facilities. The Postal Service also had to deal with more than 17,000 hoaxes that disrupted operations nationwide.

Today, more than 1,000 biological detectors are sniffing mail for dangerous contamination at postal centers and other government offices across the country......

More than a million containers of mail to Congress, the White House and other federal agencies have been irradiated to kill potential contamination at a cost of $74.7 million so far. Each container weighs 15 to 20 pounds.......

The post office deployed a fleet of biodetection systems at mail processing locations at a cost of more than $800 million. The annual operating cost has been estimated at more than $100 million.

The anthrax attack killed five people and made 17 more people sick. Compare those figures with those from a story from the New York Times:

The United States has significantly underreported the number of new H.I.V. infections occurring nationally each year, with a study released here on Saturday showing that the annual infection rate is 40 percent higher than previously estimated.

The study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that 56,300 people became newly infected with H.I.V in 2006, compared with the 40,000 figure the agency has cited as the recent annual incidence of the disease.

The question is, would more people be alive and more people be healthy had the Government spent less money protecting against a hypothetical threat from bioterrorism, and more money protecting against real and present dangers from other causes such as HIV/AIDS?

Of course, some good has been done by the billions of dollars spent on research and development of preventive and curative technology for communicable disease under the auspices of the bioterrorism initiative. But government is supposed to make rational decisions on priorities, not spend billions on the basis of irrational fears.