Flunking the anthrax test

As bad news continues to pile up, Washington can't seem to get its act together.

By Jake Tapper

Oct 24, 2001 | Under pressure to reassure the public that the government has its act together, government officials appeared before the press, the public and Congress Tuesday in an effort to dampen serious questions about the nation's preparedness. With bad news coming in by the hour -- two D.C. postal workers' deaths definitely anthrax-related, more postal workers possibly infected by anthrax, anthrax detected at an off-site White House mail-opening machine -- the sense of unease inherent in the very subject being discussed, deadly death spores, continued.

And all the while, contradictions and glaring problems in the domestic front in the war on terrorism continued to pop up -- perhaps best illustrated when Mr. Reassurance, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, testified at a House subcommittee hearing that had to be held in his own department building, since U.S. House office buildings are still being tested for the presence of anthrax.

And President Bush, answering questions from reporters during a photo op with members of Congress, denied having any anthrax-related illness -- but then refused to answer questions about whether or not he had been tested. Three times he was asked if he had been tested for anthrax; all three times he responded by saying, "I don't have anthrax." The simple response was clearly an attempt at swaggering command, but in the end it left the question ominously unanswered.

Indeed, as the twin demands of more security precautions and reassurance are fast becoming enemies, the only things government officials seemed able to agree on were: Anthrax was mailed, and anthrax is killing people. But other matters are up for debate -- such as how lethal the type of anthrax being mailed is, or what the treatment protocol should be.

High-ranking government officials continued to contradict one another on whether the anthrax sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., was "weapons-grade." Law enforcement officials were forced to admit that they still had few, if any, leads on who was sending the deadly deliveries. The White House announced that the presence of anthrax had been detected at an off-campus White House postal facility, but said that there was no need for any new testing of the White House itself for the presence of anthrax, since the White House already irradiates its mail.

And everything was tarred by what seemed like an immense failure in public health, as officials tried to address -- while not expressly apologizing for -- an apparently grave misjudgment made last week by officials at the Centers for Disease Control. CDC officials had apparently made a mistake about the potency of the anthrax letter sent to Daschle and about whether the postal employees who came in contact with it should have had the same testing congressional employees underwent.

"Despite the events of recent days, every American must and should continue to live their lives -- working, spending time with family, having a meal out, or shopping at the local mall -- and they should be able to do that with confidence," HHS Secretary Thompson insisted. He said that the government on every level was "ready to respond to biological warfare and bioterrorism quickly and effectively throughout the country."

But Thompson's optimism is not universally shared. His past inclination toward silver linings has proven wrong -- such as on Oct. 4, when he speculated that American Media Inc. photo editor Bob Stevens, the first post-9/11 American to die of anthrax inhalation, might have contracted the disease after "he drank water out of a stream when he was traveling to North Carolina."

On Tuesday, members of the House, who were criticized last week for adjourning early in the wake of the anthrax letter, were often the ones at the forefront of criticizing the federal government.

"We seem medically unprepared to deter or defend against attacks using agents anthrax and smallpox, long considered likely terrorist or biological warfare weapons," said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee's national security, veterans affairs and international relations subcommittee, before which Thompson testified.

Almost two years ago, Shays said, his subcommittee had pointed out a glaring weakness in the Department of Defense's anthrax vaccine immunization program, and had issued recommendations that were not followed. Shays' subcommittee judged that the Department of Defense's anthrax vaccination program was "overly dependent" upon one company that produced what Shays deemed an outdated "logistically cumbersome medical technology," and recommended that the department research other anthrax vaccine technologies.

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