For years, experts have warned that terrorists and hostile states could launch a biological attack against a United States that remains woefully underprepared.
A critical lack of testing kits. A shortage of ventilators. Not enough ICU beds.
America’s struggle to deal with the spread of the highly infectious new virus Covid-19 is bad enough, with the number of confirmed cases surging, hospitals begging for help and entire cities going on lockdown.
But it’s also exposed just how unprepared the U.S. is for a threat many would-be Cassandras have been warning about for years: a targeted biological attack.
“When one thinks about what a bioterror attack would look like—it is crystal clear we are not even close to being ready,” said former Department of Homeland Security official Daniel Gerstein, now a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation.
Today’s mantra of “flattening the curve” — or lessening the spike in illnesses, thereby slowing the infection rate to reduce the burdens on the health care system — would not apply to a bioterror attack. “The people in that cloud would be infected all at once, so you would see a very large spike of very sick patients,” Gerstein said.
As the response to the outbreak from governments at all levels has shown, the U.S. was completely unprepared for a slowly creeping pandemic — let alone a biological attack that would overwhelm it all at once.
Potential biological weapons include anthrax, which, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, “makes a good weapon because it can be released quietly and without anyone knowing”; smallpox, frozen stocks of which are still maintained by the U.S. and Russia; tularemia, also known as rabbit fever, which attacks the skin, eyes, lymph nodes and lungs and was stockpiled by the U.S. military and the former Soviet Union after World War II; and botulism, which is caused by exposure to toxins made by C. botulinum — the most toxic substances known to humankind, which attack the body’s nerves and can lead to respiratory failure.
“The sense is that we haven’t fully prepared” for that possibility, said a U.S. government official who was not authorized to speak on the record. “If we had an attack, and even if we had the treatment or the vaccine that everyone needed, we don’t have the capacity to get that to 330 million Americans if we were in a lockdown situation where trucks weren’t moving. So that’s one thing that we’ve looked at.”
Other basic logistical questions also have yet to be resolved, the official added. “Can we create a capacity? What does that look like? Do we set it up in gymnasiums? Who’s going to do it? How are the things going to get delivered if you have sort of a general breakdown in the system?”
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