By Jill Chapin
February 11, 2012
Apparently there is a dire need to supplement our smallpox vaccine stockpile in the event of a national threat. The Obama administration recently awarded a $433 million no-bid contract to Siga Technologies, the maker of ST-246, an experimental smallpox antiviral drug. This staggering amount would have us believe we were dealing with a multi-trillion dollar surplus instead of the mega-deficit of monumental proportions in which we are currently mired.
According to the Los Angeles Times, senior administration officials replaced contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services who were resisting Siga’s financial demands. Thanks to the Obama administration’s intervention, Siga Technologies is now the proud owner of a five year contract from the Department of HHS to develop a new expensive drug. ST-246 costs $255 per dose with a shelf life of 38 months, versus $3 per dose for our current vaccine with a shelf life of several decades.
Why are we adding to our defensive stockpile when, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
– Routine vaccination of the American public against smallpox stopped in 1972 after the disease was eradicated in the United States.
– The last case of smallpox in our country was in 1949. The last naturally occurring case in the world was in Somalia in the mid seventies.
– The disease has been eliminated from the world, and routine vaccination against smallpox among the general public was stopped because it was no longer necessary for prevention.
– Smallpox is known to exist only in locked facilities in Russia and the United States.
Keep in mind that if there were to be a bio-terrorist attack of the smallpox virus, we now have enough vaccine stockpiled with which to vaccinate every person in the United States. Vaccination within three days of exposure will completely prevent or significantly modify smallpox in the vast majority of people.
The experimental drug that Siga is developing would be used to treat people who were diagnosed with smallpox too late for our current vaccine to help. But its obscene cost and inability to be tested on humans for safety and efficacy due to ethical reasons would cause some to wonder why taxpayer dollars are not instead being directed toward making sure the vaccine we currently have is within a three day delivery of all Americans. Admittedly, it could be difficult to pinpoint exactly when people are exposed to smallpox before they present symptoms, but if a credible threat arose, couldn’t we err on the side of caution and pre-emptively innoculate everyone?
Further, what is difficult to comprehend is that this expensive contract with Siga will have the HHS acquire only 1.7 million doses of this new drug. But with over 300,000,000 people in the United States, what happens to the other 299,000,000?
It is a curiosity why this disease, above all others, gets major funding. The administration is citing a 2004 finding by the Bush administration that there was a “material threat” that smallpox could be used as a biological weapon. True, but so are eleven other pathogens. Is research being conducted to find an antidote for those as well?
So why smallpox, why Siga, why a no-bid contract and why so expensive? Well, Siga Technologies is a New York company run by a major democratic donor, Ronald O. Perelman. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Siga spent more than half a billion dollars lobbying in Washington since 2009.
With a plentiful supply of a smallpox preventative vaccine, do we really have a credible need for an unproven drug that is off limits to human testing? Or is this just another example of money and politics masquerading as public service?
The Hunger Site
February 13, 2012 at 7:46 am
I take it there is no danger beyond bio-terrorist attack, from Russia, the only country besides the U.S. capable of launching such an attack, since “Smallpox is known to exist only in locked facilities in Russia and the United States.”
I suppose it could be argued that this shares the supreme rationality of the nuclear weapons race. I.e., if we don’t have smallpox “in locked facilities,” they might attack us with it. If we don’t have this smallpox missile shield, they might survive an attack and we might not, so they might attack us.
Soon SIGGA will have to propose another highly lucrative contract to counter the threat of smallpox in outer space.