House Passes Bill to Help Combat Bioterrorism

The House overwhelmingly approved legislation Wednesday designed to encourage private industry to develop vaccines and other treatments needed to protect U.S. residents from acts of bioterrorism.

The House’s 418-to-2 approval of Project Bioshield, first proposed by President Bush in his State of the Union address in January, comes almost two years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that killed about 3,000 people and the mailing of anthrax-filled letters that killed five people and injured 17.

Two Republicans, Reps. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Ron Paul of Texas, voted against the bill. All members of the California delegation, with the exception of Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-Carson), who did not vote, voted for the bill.

In the Senate, similar legislation has bogged down on when to fund the program -- all at once or year by year.

“This legislation will help spur the development and availability of next-generation countermeasures against biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological weapons,” Bush said in a statement released by the White House. “I urge the Senate to act on this very important legislation.”

The House bill would establish a $5.6-billion, 10-year fund for the development, production and stockpiling of vaccines and other drugs to combat such deadly biological agents as smallpox, anthrax, botulinum toxin, Ebola and plague.

A ready supply of such treatments would serve as “both an antidote and a deterrent to future attacks,” said Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

The Bush administration conceived of Project Bioshield as a way of giving pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies financial incentive to develop products for which there is no commercial market.

“Without this clear commitment of funding in future years, private-sector companies that are capable of such development simply won’t undertake the heavy investment and risk,” Rep. W.J. “Billy” Tauzin (R-La.), the bill’s sponsor, said Wednesday.

Industry response to the initiative remains unclear.

Last month, President Bush addressed the annual meeting of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, telling executives to lobby Congress if they were “interested in seeing more flexibility and more research dollars for the sake of national security.”

Yet the House bill does not provide for one of the industry’s key demands: broad protection against lawsuits.

The bill is intended to give the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services new powers and personnel for assessing bioterrorism threats and responding to them.

In addition, the HHS secretary would have the authority to declare a national emergency and, under such conditions, make available to the public drugs and vaccines that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Meanwhile, a smallpox vaccination campaign, the administration’s first major post-Sept. 11 effort to prepare the nation for a possible bioterrorist attack, has all but stalled.

Fewer than 38,000 people had been vaccinated against smallpox as of July 4, almost six months after Bush unveiled his plan to inoculate up to 500,000 civilian health workers and 10 million police, fire and other emergency personnel.

The campaign has been hampered by uncertainty about the threat of a smallpox attack, concerns about the safety of the vaccine and a delay in the provision for the compensation of people injured by it.

Six people who received the vaccine suffered heart attacks some time later, and two of them died. At least 17 others suffered inflammation of the heart.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has continued to investigate a possible connection between the vaccine and heart ailments, advised people with heart conditions or certain risk factors against being vaccinated.

Last month, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended that officials suspend the vaccination program until the CDC’s research had been completed.