Homeland Insecurity - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - page 58

its banquet days under Clinton), there was an irresistible tropism of researchers and research projects to-
ward biodefense windfalls. Reporting on this new “brain drain,” writer Merrill Goozner cited the case
of a leading UCLA lab that phased out its “basic science research on TB in favor of studying tularemia
[rabbit fever]”—a disease that “has zero public-health importance”—because the latter infection was “on
the government's A-list of potential bioterrorism agents” and tuberculosis was not. 252 (After workers at
a different lab accidentally infected themselves with tularemia, some scientists expressed concern to the
New York Times that “leaky” biodefense research “may pose a menace to public health comparable to the
still uncertain threat from bioterrorism.”) 253
To many infectious disease experts, Project BioShield was Bush's and Thompson's version of
Through the Looking Glass, with priorities established in inverse relationship to actual probabilities of
attack or outbreak. “It's too bad that Saddam Hussein's not behind influenza,” complained Dr. Paul Offitt,
a dissident member of the government's advisory panel on vaccination. “We'd be doing a better job.” 254
Indeed, HHS's zeal to combat hypothetical bioterrorism contrasted with its incredible negligence in ex-
ercising oversight over the nation's “fragile” influenza vaccine supply. As the GAO had warned Donna
Shalala, vaccine availability in a pandemic would depend upon the stability and surge capacity of existing
production lines. But as shocked Americans discovered in the winter of 2003-4 and again in early fall
2004, the entire vaccine manufacturing system had decayed almost to the point of collapse. While Bush
and Thompson were trying to bribe the pharmaceutical industry to join Project BioShield, the same in-
dustry was abdicating its elementary responsibility to maintain a lifeline of new vaccines and antibiotics.
“Big Pharma,” as recent exposés have emphasized, is the most profitable industry in the United States,
and it maintains the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. (According to Harvard Medical School's Marcia
Angell, the ten big drug companies included in the Fortune 500 in 2002 earned more in profit than all the
other 490 corporations combined.) 255 Thanks to the tolerance of a Congress awash in its campaign contri-
butions, the drug industry mines gold from outrageous prescription prices for drugs that manage chronic
illness (diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, and so on), as well as the sale of such lifestyle enhancers
as Viagra.
Products that actually cure or prevent disease, like vaccines and antibiotics, are less profitable, so in-
fectious disease has largely become an orphan market. As industry analysts point out, worldwide sales for
all vaccines produce less revenue than Pfizer's income from a single anticholesterol medication. 256 Des-
pite the 90,000 Americans who die every year from hospital infections, the drug corporations also scorn
spending money on the development of new antibiotics. Indeed, as Nature writer Martin Leeb points out,
“from a marketing standpoint, antibiotics are the worst sort of pharmaceutical because they cure the dis-
ease.” 257 The giants prefer to invest in marketing rather than research, in rebranded old products rather
than new ones, and in treatment rather than prevention, in fact, they currently spend 27 percent of their
revenue on marketing and only 11 percent on research. (Not surprisingly, “all the CEOs of major pharma-
ceutical companies [are] from marketing and sales; they are not scientists.”) 258 “Preventing a flu epidem-
ic that could kill thousands,” wrote Donald Barlett and James Steele in Time magazine, “is not nearly as
profitable as making pills for something like erectile dysfunction.” 259
* The other neuraminidase inhibitor, zanamivir (Relenza), is equally effective, but it is an inhaled drug in short supply,
not as attractive a candidate for stockpiling as the much easier-to-use Tamiflu.
* By militarizing the biotechnology sector, BioShield also obviously aims to woo young science entrepreneurs and
their startup firms to the Republican Party.