Homeland Insecurity - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - page 54

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Homeland Insecurity
Regardless of human endeavors, nature's on-going experiments with H5N1 influ-
enza in Asia and H7N7 in Europe may be the greatest bioterror threat of all. 232
Richard Webby and Robert Webster
On 3 December 2004, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Tommy Thompson held a
press conference to announce his resignation. His turbulent, heavy-handed reign had alienated most of the
leading disease researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and elsewhere. “I don't think,” one
senior scientist told Nature, “you're going to find very many people at the NIH who are doing anything but
jumping for joy.” 233 Yet his tenure ended with a note of frankness rare in the Bush era. Unlike the previous
seven cabinet members purged in the President Bush's postelection housecleaning, Thompson, according
to the New York Times, “gave candid, unexpected answers to questions posed to him.” He complained, for
instance, that Congress, ever solicitous of the pharmaceutical industry, had refused to give him authority
to negotiate lower prices for Medicare prescriptions. He also agreed with FDA critics that an independent
watchdog of the agency was needed in the wake of scandals about the safety of Vioxx and other drugs.
“Asked what worried him most, Mr. Thompson cited the threat of a human flu pandemic. . . . 'This is a
really huge bomb that could adversely impact on the health of the world,' killing 30 million to 70 million
people, he said.” 234
The secretary, of course, spoke with the authority of someone with access to the best medical intelli-
gence in the world, but reporters were undoubtedly surprised that Thompson was so alarmed about a peril
that his department with its $543 billion annual budget—a quarter of the federal total—had done so little to
address. In the last fiscal year, for example, Thompson had allocated more funds to “abstinence education”
than to the development of an avian influenza vaccine that might save millions of lives. 235 This is but one
example of the way that all Americans, but especially children, the elderly, and the uninsured, have been
placed in harm's way by the Bush regime's bizarre skewing of public-health priorities. On Thompson's
watch, HHS and the Pentagon spent $14.5 billion to safeguard national security against largely hypothetical
biological threats like smallpox and anthrax, even as they pursued a penny-pinching strategy to deal with
the most dangerous and likely “bioterrorist”: avian influenza. The administration's lackadaisical response
to the pandemic threat (despite Secretary Thompson's personal anxiety) is only the tip of the iceberg. Over
the last generation, writes Lancet editor Richard Horton, “The U.S. public-health system has been slowly
and quietly falling apart.” 236
Under Democrats as well as Republicans, Washington has looked the other way as local health depart-
ments have lost funding and crucial hospital surge capacity has been eroded in the wake of the HMO re-
volution. (A sobering 2004 Government Accounting Office [GAO] report confirmed that “no state is fully
prepared to respond to a major public-health threat.”) 237 The federal government also has refused to ad-
dress the growing lack of new vaccines and antibiotics caused by the pharmaceutical industry's withdraw-