Conclusion: Year of the Rooster - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - page 72

Researchers were appalled that the bird flu containment campaign in Vietnam was collapsing for lack
of relatively trivial financial aid. Yet even on the U.S. home front, where “biosecurity” was supposedly a
top priority, the CDC's budget for emergency public-health assistance was slashed by an eighth in fiscal
2005. Although plenty of money was found to increase funding for “abstinence education” (now $193
million per year), child immunization was reduced and preventive-health block grants to the states were
eliminated. (A $20 million increase for pandemic vaccine hardly offset the loss of the block grants.) At a
time of maximum menace, the CDC altogether lost $500 million in critical funding: a recession that only
deepened gloom in an agency suffering, according to top official Robert Keegan, from a “crisis of confid-
ence” that had led to the resignation of a score of top scientists and administrators. In an internal memo
revealed by the Washington Post in March, Keegan spoke darkly of an “atmosphere of fear” and staff
“cowed into silence” in the face of Director Julie Gerberding's autocratic style and her subservience to
the administration's ideological agenda. Another CDC official described life in the agency as an “Alice in
Wonderland environment where the CDC director is like the Queen of Hearts. You know, 'Off with their
heads,'” 325 Meanwhile, an open revolt had broken out against the War on Terrorism's deleterious impact
on university-based communicable disease research. Led by two Nobel prize-winners, 758 researchers
signed a petition claiming that Washington's obsession with exotic but potentially weaponizable viruses
and bacteria had resulted in a 27 percent decline in federal grants for research on tuberculosis and other
major non-terror diseases. 326
With this dissension in the background, Mike Leavitt, the new secretary of HHS, spoke to the National
Academy of Sciences on 7 April about his department's strategy for dealing with H5N1. Following on the
heels of an unexpected admission by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Disease, that a flu pandemic was a greater immediate threat than a bioterrorist attack, Leavitt
emphasized that avian influenza had the administration's full attention and that he was receiving daily
briefings on the worrisome situation in Asia. He told his scientific audience that an H5N1 vaccine was in
the human test stage, and that he had signed a $97 million contract with Sanofi Pasteur to develop new
cell-based vaccine production lines. 327
But the former governor of Utah did not address the problems inherent in vaccine production—the
minuscule scale of the start-up, the long lead times, and the uncertainty whether current templates would
match the evolved genome of a pandemic—that CDC Director Julie Gerberding had acknowledged in
February at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Gerberd-
ing—according to a University of Minnesota news source—had warned that it was “nearly impossible to
stop an outbreak by quarantining sick people” and “that flu vaccine production remains focused on or-
dinary seasonal flu, and it would be impossible to switch gears quickly to make a pandemic vaccine.” 328
Leavitt also sidestepped widespread complaints about Washington's failure to stockpile Tamiflu in quant-
ities comparable to recent purchases by Great Britain (14.6 million courses) and France (13 million). 329
Nor did he explain why the Bush administration was refusing to provide the aid that Vietnam so desper-
ately needed to keep H5N1 in check.
Moreover, Leavitt's sunny assurances that Washington had public biosafety well in hand were imme-
diately undercut by the startling revelation that a Cincinnati bioscience firm had sent out more than 5,000
samples of a deadly pandemic strain of influenza. H2N2, the “Asian flu” virus that killed 1 to 4 milli-
on people during the 1957 pandemic, had not circulated amongst humans since 1968 and was a grave
threat to anyone born afterward. Influenza researchers, chastened by the escape of an earlier “lab fossil”
(a strain of H1N1—the 1918 virus) in 1977, had long fretted about the security of H2N2 specimens in
lab archives. They were incredulous that Meridian Bioscience—a contractor to the College of American
Pathologists (CAP)—had knowingly included H2N2 in the viral test kits routinely used to assess quality
control in laboratories across the world. CAP had not been informed of the strain's identity (which was,