RFP ANNOUNCEMENT: PRODUCTION AND ACQUISITION OF ANTHRAX VACCINE - NIH-NIAID- DMID-03-29
Parallel contracts were awarded in September to a US company, VaxGen, and a British company, Avecia:
VaxGen one of two firms picked to develop new anthrax vaccine
Delivery of the 25 million dose stockpile is scheduled for the end of this year. The development plans calls for a much larger stockpile to be built up subsequent to that, but no precise numbers are available on how fast they'll be able to ramp up production. It took about a year to manufacture the 300 million dose stockpile of smallpox vaccine after 9-11, so that may give us a ballpark.
My pick of a May date for a US assault on Iraq is, of course, arbitrary: I have no inside information on Bush's schedule. I assume that it will be at least several months after the initial 25-million dose stockpile is produced, because Saddam could easily attack any city in the whole world, even if we felt we could protect obvious targets such as (say) NYC and DC with that initial stockpile. This is what Project Bioshield, announced in the SOTU, is all about. I do suspect that Bush will attack before the next presidential election, although, if the assessment is that we cannot protect ourselves or our allies at that time, some pretext will be found to delay things into his second term. From a public opinion management standpoint, Bush has all the cards. This is easy sh*t.