Posted on 12/14/2002 6:06:19 AM PST by woofie
For months, Bush administration officials have talked about the threat of a smallpox attack but have offered no strong proof. But by asking millions of Americans to accept the risks of smallpox vaccinations, President Bush has signaled that he thinks the possibility of an attack is rising as the United States considers a war against Iraq and assesses long-term dangers.
Even if Saddam Hussein is removed in Iraq, federal officials said yesterday, the specter of a smallpox attack will not disappear.
The announcement of the nation's first smallpox vaccination campaign in three decades is part of a long-term strategy to protect the country from a contagious virus that killed one in three unvaccinated people.
The administration's decision to offer 10.5 million health care workers and other Americans a vaccine against a conquered disease says more about the perceived risk of a smallpox attack than volumes of official statements and Congressional testimony, or even Mr. Bush's assurances yesterday that the United States faces no imminent threat.
It means officials are willing to accept the potential public backlash from complications of the vaccine.
"We live in a new world," said Jerome M. Hauer, assistant secretary for emergency preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services.
In an interview, Mr. Hauer said Mr. Bush's decision was rooted in a calculus that looked at the smallpox threat over the long term — not just weeks or months but years and decades.
The risks accumulate over a long time, Mr. Hauer said, and that drives officials to take prudent steps now to prepare for the worst. Medical experts estimate that the vaccine could give vaccinated individuals some protection against the disease for decades.
By vaccinating millions of Americans, Mr. Hauer said, "you're testing your logistics, developing trained cadres, and protecting medical response teams. So in the event of an incident, you don't have to be concerned about vaccinating those groups." He added that vaccination could then begin of people who had come in contact with infected people "and, if necessary, mass vaccination."
Yesterday, Mr. Bush seemed to bend over backward not to create a panic, to understate the threat, never once mentioning potential war with Iraq. His strongest statement on the danger was that "regimes hostile to the United States may posses this dangerous virus."
Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff, a physician and smallpox expert at the Sandia National Laboratories, said in an interview that the administration was engaged in no bluff or bluster, but had carefully weighed the long-term risks of a smallpox attack.
"I think the administration has got it just about exactly right," he said of offering the vaccine to 10 million people. "The question is not what is the risk of attack in the next six months or year, but what is the risk over the effective lifetime of the vaccine, which is measured in decades."
Intelligence agencies believe that Iraq may have collected the smallpox virus from a natural outbreak that struck there in 1971 and 1972. Based on interviews with defectors and other informants, the agencies also believe that North Korea has the virus and that Russian scientists, impoverished by the collapse of the Soviet Union, may have sold the virus to terrorists.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
What I'm afraid of is that he's going to go for something that we don't have treatment for, like the Blackpox mentioned or other illnesses that will devastate our population and cause chaos. He's much more likely to do that.
All this talk of smallpox vaccine seems like a waste of time and a distraction, when you consider who we're dealing with.
And that's part of the problem. There is so much information being circulated about this right now it is hard to decide which is accurate and which is not.
Very, very true. And also true that logic and concern for their people has nothing to do with nuts like Saddam who would consider using bioweapons. What's a few million Iraquis to Saddam, who in any case, with his "Mother of All Battles" mosque, sees himself as the leader of the Islamic world, and thereby has many millions more bodies at his disposal.
It is a very different "game" this time around as Saddam must realize on some level that if the US invades it won't stop until he's gone. There's no telling what a lunatic like Saddam would do when backed into that corner.
I think vaccine makers received protection from exactly this kind of liability in the Homeland Defense bill passed last month.
Why don't we want to harp on the real threat? Because if we talked up the real threat, if the "A" word was on news anchor's lips every day, pretty soon people would connect the dots and understand exactly who made that gaping hole in the New York skyline, and why we can't do anything about it. And that is an epiphany that is best delayed until such time as the perp has been dealt with -- however long that might take.
That's a good question. I understand this vaccine is different from the ones we got as kids. I am not really sure though.
My understanding is that the difference is that the old virus/vaccine was grown on calf bellies which led to higher risk of contamination from other viruses/bacteria. Now it is being grown in a sterile lab environment. Same live virus tho'.
The US government keeps a list of nations and groups that it suspects either have clandestine stocks of smallpox or seem to be trying to buy or steal the virus. The list is classified, but it is said to include Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Serbia, terrorist organization of Osama bin Laden and, possibly, the Aum Shinrikyo sect of Japan.
Ken Alibek, who was once Kanatjan Alibekov, a leading Soviet bioweaponeer and the inventor of the world's most powerful anthrax, defected, in 1992, and revealed how far the Soviet Union had gone with bioweapons. Alibek says that there were twenty tons of liquid smallpox kept on hand at Soviet military bases.
In 1989, a Soviet biologist named Vladimir Pasechnik defected to Britain. British intelligence spent a year debriefing him. By the end, the British agents felt they had confirmed that the U.S.S.R. had biological missiles aimed at the US. This information reached President George Bush and the British PM Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher then apparently confronted the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. She was furious, and so was Bush. Gorbachev responded by allowing a small, secret team of American and British bioweapons inspectors to tour Soviet biowarfare facilities. In January of 1991, the inspectors travelled across the U.S.S.R., getting whirlwind looks at some of the major clandestine bases of the Soviet biowarfare program, which was called Biopreparat. The inspectors were frightened by what they discovered. ("I would describe it as scary, and I feel a responsibility to tell the world medical community about what I saw, because doctors could face these diseases," said one inspector, Frank Malinoski, M.D., Ph.D.) On January 14th, the team arrived at Vector, the main virology complex, in Siberia, and the next day, they were shown into a laboratory called Building 6, where one of the inspectors, David Kelly, took a technician aside and asked him what virus they had been working with. The technician said that they had been working with smallpox. Kelly repeated the question three times. Three times, he asked the technician, "You mean you were working with Variola major?" and he emphasized to the technician that his answer was very important. The technician responded emphatically that it was Variola major [the killer strain]. Kelly says that his interpreter was the best Russian interpreter the British government has. "There was no ambiguity," Kelly says. The inspectors were stunned. Vector was not supposed to have any smallpox at all, much less be working with it -- a supreme violation of rules set down by the W.H.O.
Per Malinoski: "There were tons of smallpox virus made in the Soviet Union. The Russians admitted that to us. One of the Vector leaders when he said to us, 'Listen, we didn't account for every ampule of the virus. We had large quantities of it on hand. There were plenty of opportunities for staff members to walk away with an ampule. Although we think we know where our formerly employed scientists are, we can't account for all of them-we don't know where all of them are.' " Today, smallpox and its protocols could be anywhere in the world.
Sitting with D. A. Henderson [widely credited with the eradication of smallpox] in his house, I mentioned what seemed to be the great and tragic paradox of his life's work. The eradication caused the human species to lose its immunity to smallpox, and that was what made it possible for the Soviets to turn smallpox into a weapon rivalling the hydrogen bomb.
Henderson responded with silence, and then said thoughtfully, "I feel very sad about this. The eradication never would have succeeded without the Russians. Viktor Zhdanov [who first raised the idea] started it, and they did so much. They were extremely proud of what they had done. I felt the virus was in good hands with the Russians. I never would have suspected. They made twenty tons -- twenty tons -- of smallpox. For us to have come so far with the disease, and now to have to deal with this human creation, when there are so many other problems in the world . . ." He was quiet again. "It's a great letdown," he said.
Immune people are like control rods in a nuclear reactor. The American population has little immunity [the vaccination begins wears off after 10 years], so it's a reactor with no control rods. We could have an uncontrolled smallpox chain reaction." This would be something that terrorism experts refer to as a "soft kill" of the United States of America.
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/b/ Yes.
/c/ Yes.
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The problem is you are seeking logic from insane arab muslims who strap bombs to their own children in order to hurt their enemies and think it's a great trade off.
They worship pain and death, not love and life.
Remember, the frog and scorpion story is an arab muslim parable.
Can you enlighten me?
From the same article:
"A bioterrorism attack with smallpox virus is regarded as a possibility today. Such an attack could quickly develop into a global epidemic with wave after wave of smallpox spreading in populations that are largely unprotected."
Any nation that unleashes smallpox as a military weapon, or abets another nation or group in doing so, should suffer the most grevious consequences: annihilation of all population centers with thermonuclear devices, followed by ummary execution of all survivors.
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