Bioterrorism Threat Is Disputed

William R. Clark, the chair emeritus of immunology at the University of California, doesn't think that bioterrorism is a serious threat, right now. He just wrote a book on the politics of bioterrorism called Bracing for Armegeddon? In an interview with Matt Palmquist in May, Professor Clark explained how he really feels about reports of a bioterrorism threat:

The more I looked into it, I thought, "Jeez, what are these guys talking about?" What are the odds that a terrorist group, no matter how well financed, would be able to create a bioterror weapon? I began looking into what it takes to really make a successful bioterrorism agent, and I just became very skeptical of this whole thing. The (United States ) military gave up bioweapons 30 years ago. They're too undependable; they're too hard to use; they're too hard to make. Then I started checking around, and I found there's a whole literature out there of people who've been screaming for years that this whole bioterrorism thing is really overblown; it's not practical; it's never going to work. Aum Shinrikyo couldn't get it to work; those guys put millions and millions of dollars into it. So you think of a bunch of guys sitting in a cave in Afghanistan — they're sure as hell not going to do it. Is any government going to do it? No. So that made me very skeptical, and I went back to Oxford and said, "This whole thing's a crock.

Other commentators disagree entirely. In Congressional testimony earlier this week, Jeffrey W. Runge, MD, Assistant Secretary for Health Affairs and Chief Medical Officer of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), made the case that: "The risk of a large-scale biological attack on the Nation is significant. We know that our terrorist enemies have sought to use biological agents as instruments of their warfare, and we believe that capability is within their reach." He amplifies:

We have determined that al-Qaeda seeks to develop and use a biological weapon to cause mass casualties in an attack on the homeland. Our analysis indicates that anthrax is a likely choice; and a successful single-city attack on an unprepared population could kill hundreds of thousands of citizens. A coordinated attack on multiple targets would come much closer in magnitude to our enemy's goal. Because of this, we see the threat of an aerosolized anthrax attack as our number one bioterrorism concern, and it is that threat which we vigorously plan, invest and intend to defeat. Our efforts are not optional or discretionary. The ramifications of such an attack include tremendous loss of life, economic costs, damage to critical infrastructure, and unprecedented environmental contamination.

It's hard to know who to believe, when disagreement is so strong. Personally, I come down on believing that there is a plausible threat, based on past evidence. I'd also buy that this threat has been magnified by institutions that have a vested interest in holding on to the massively increased funding made available for bioterrorism research after September 11. It rose from the hundreds of millions of dollars in 2001, to $2.5 billion in 2002, when President Bush signed a bill funding the Department of Health and Human Services. New grants and other projects are also underway. I don't mean to suggest that anyone in the government or elsewhere would ever maliciously magnify a bioterrorism threat. But it is human nature to protect our interests and organizations (made up of humans) tend to follow suit.