The $443 Million Smallpox Vaccine That Nobody Needs 290
Hugh Pickens writes "Once feared for its grotesque pustules and 30% death rate, smallpox was eradicated worldwide as of 1978 and is known to exist only in the locked freezers of a Russian scientific institute and the US government. There is no credible evidence that any other country or a terrorist group possesses smallpox, but if there were an attack, the government could draw on $1 billion worth of smallpox vaccine it already owns to inoculate the entire US population and quickly treat people exposed to the virus. The vaccine, which costs the government $3 per dose, can reliably prevent death when given within four days of exposure. David Williams writes that over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work. So why did the government award a "sole-source" procurement to Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, calling for Siga to deliver 1.7 million doses of the drug for the nation's biodefense stockpile at a price of approximately $255 per dose. 'We've got a vaccine that I hope we never have to use — how much more do we need?' says epidemiologist Dr. Donald A. Henderson who led the global eradication of smallpox for the WHO. 'The bottom line is, we've got a limited amount of money.'"
AHA! I know what this is! (Score:4, Insightful)
Person 1 wants money, and person 2 wants to give it to them. Person 2 has lots of money to spend that he's trusted with by other people, so he can't just give the money to person 1, so he comes up with a way to include it as part of a bigger deal that looks like business.
Sounds like the textbook definition of corruption I learned in macro econ in highschool. This clumsy scheme is just above obvious, too. I guess it works so well with Chertoff and Rapiscan, hell, why even try to hide it anymore?
Wallstreet should get a clue - they don't need to create 5 layers of finiancial instruments to hide corruption anymore - this is 2011. The govt does whatever the hell it wants, and if you don't like it the media will paint you to be an unwashed mass who needs "to get a job".
Sorry, I started to vent a little there.
Re:News for nerds?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not?
If it were a Republican president this would be considered fair posting for Slashdot.
(Gimme those troll points.) :-{=
Smallpox is extinct in the wild, not entirely. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Siga's drug, an antiviral pill called ST-246, would be used to treat people who were diagnosed with smallpox too late for the vaccine to help. Yet the new drug cannot be tested for effectiveness in people because of ethical constraints — and no one knows whether animal testing could prove it would work in humans."
The disease has a lot of characteristics that make it a good weaponized agent. In fact, this has been one of the most studied diseases in that regard. To my knowledge, there is no known treatment/cure for smallpox- you either get vaccinated before symptoms show, or you suffer through it and possibly die. Its means of infection are well known, and I would hazard a guess that someone in the US DoD would find a smallpox *treatment/cure* that works after an infection has taken hold something worth studying for other purposes. It would also seem to me that the military is hedging its bets my making sure other nations don't get this technology as well.
Corruption is only news... (Score:2, Insightful)
...when Democrats do it. Never mind a certain $3T war with lots of tasty no-bid contracts to the Vice President's company...
Americans are bad at math (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Smallpox is extinct in the wild, not entirely. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, smallpox does NOT make a good weaponized agent.
One of the key attributes of a bioweapon is controllability. You want it to hit who and where you want it to hit, and you DON'T want it to hit outside that area. In particular, you DON'T want it to be significantly contagious - and smallpox is one of the most horribly contagious diseases known to Man.
Pneumonic anthrax, on the other hand, while highly lethal, is essentially not contagious from person to person. This makes it an ideal bioweapon candidate, as was demonstrated some years back - and they STILL haven't found the $^%#&%$!!! who did it.
Re:Smallpox is extinct in the wild, not entirely. (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't a vaccine (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Stop posting anti Obama articles....you know be (Score:1, Insightful)
The fact that people call out the Obama administration on things they do wrong without cries of "OMG HE'S HALF NIGGER, THE WURST KIND OF NIGUR" directed at the man heading the administration, to me, indicates the human race may be getting somewhere (slowly).
--os
Re:Americans are bad at math (Score:2, Insightful)
So, because there exist numbers larger than the sum in discussion, we should never bother with it ? This may be smaller than the military budget, but is not a small number by any measure. This is not five bucks we're talking about. I will not make this much money in my entire life. You won't either, since you invoked "the rich" argument.
The government is a like a sieve, leaking money to interested parties everywhere. 400 million here, 500 million for solar power, some more for body scanners, hey, shit adds up. And we're paying for all of it. But I guess according to you, we should stop bringing up every instance of corruption because there are other more corrupt practices out there.
Re:News for nerds?? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're just being partisan.
Real trolling would be pointing out that the whole premise of universal healthcare is that the collective wisdom of the government can make better decisions about how to spend money on health than individuals can. Yet here we have the same government blowing a billion dollars on a vaccine for a disease that doesn't exist any more. Meanwhile, people are suffering and dying because the FDA is holding up lifesaving experimental medicine.
Re:Smallpox is extinct in the wild, not entirely. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Corruption is only news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nearly what we pay (Score:4, Insightful)
For Air Conditioning for one week in Afghanistan.
Re:Thanks Obama (Score:2, Insightful)
Obama is corrupt, but you would still vote for him instead of Ron Paul who wants to cut taxes, get rid of income tax, cut departments that don't serve a purpose, and cut overseas military spending?
Re:AHA! I know what this is! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, set us straight then.
Re:Smallpox is extinct in the wild, not entirely. (Score:2, Insightful)
You lack imagination. Small pox dispersal would cause a lot of problems, and if you are the one dispersing it, you simple shut your borders while it spreads.
Of course, a vaccine would be made pretty quick, so you would reap it's benefits.
Or you create a vaccine before dispersal.
This assume you actual are about who gets it. Maybe you just want to bring death to all infidels because, clearly, your god would protect you.
Well not YOU, but who ever did it.
Al Qaeda did the anthrax attacks. It's pretty much confirmed.
Re:Americans are bad at math (Score:5, Insightful)
So it's fine to piss away $443mn because it's less than $70bn?
Do you code? If I'm trying to improve the performance of a program I've written, I might notice little things here and there that could be done a bit faster. For example, I might have be saying pow(x, 2) someplace, and I know that for integers, it's far more efficient to just type x*x. I'm not wrong, that would be faster. And yet, if I waste any time fixing that type of stuff, I'm an idiot. You profile the program, you find the sections where your code is spending the most time on, and you fix that. If the profiler is telling you that the pow function is the problem, then you fix it. Otherwise I've spent a lot of time fixing things and my code will still perform super-slow.
It's not fine to piss away $443 mn. That said, it's also not fine to waste resources trying to fix that problem when there are bigger problems to be fixed. Fix the bigger problems first, then go back to the $443mn when it actually does represent a significant portion of the problem. Otherwise you waste a lot of time only to discover we're still just as broke.
Re:If They're That Worried About It (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the current smallpox vaccine can kill. Not many, sure, but if you try to apply it to an entire population? Some people are going to die.
Re:News for nerds?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:News for nerds?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, I guess you've never met Peter King. Or Herman Cain. Sarah Palin. Or even Frank Miller.
Heck maybe you've never seen Mitt Romney's outright distortion of a comment President Obama made about "We've been Lazy" ? Or perhaps you believe that calling somebody a Nazi is only done by the Left...never used by anybody on Fox News.
Yeah, keep pushing the "Conservatives are innocent of any outbursts, and are always polite and decorous" you'll get far with that. Maybe all the way to a slot on Fox News or MSNBC.
Until you're ridiculed for your own hypocrisy on the Daily Show!
Just hope there's not video.
Oh wait, there is!
Re:Smallpox is extinct in the wild, not entirely. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Al Qaeda did the anthrax attacks. It's pretty much confirmed."
[citation needed]
Re:Americans are bad at math (Score:5, Insightful)
...$443 million isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. Now, $70 billion in tax cuts for the rich? Well, we're starting to talk some real money. The cost of the Iraq war? Yeah, about that...
Cost of the Iraqi war? Peanuts compared to the $20 trillion lost during the financial meltdown, but enough about numbers...I find it quite refreshing that people are upset over even half a billion in possible waste. Maybe it's a sign of the apathy starting to thaw out from the frozen flock. Hey, Obama wanted more "open Government"...he's only getting exactly what he asked for. The spotlight.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:News for nerds?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Add to this that Greece going under is mainly due to there being a culture of not paying taxes & the huge cash-in-hand economy.
Isn't that what these Libertarian/Republicans in the US want? Small government, low taxes, etc?
Greece is a chilling vision of things to come for the US if this neoconservative ideology is continued to be pushed.
Cold War BioWarfare Types, not just Big Pharma (Score:5, Insightful)
The US Military hasn't been willing to let go of biological warfare, and probably also hasn't been willing to let go of chemical warfare either. And the Ex-Soviet Cold Warriors haven't been willing to either, and neither side trusts the other, and they aren't going to let little events like the fall of the Soviet Empire calm them down. If you remember the late years of the Clinton Administration, the fearmonger types were busy ranting about Anthrax and Terrorism, so after 9/11 happened, it was US biowarfare weaponized anthrax they kept working on got used for terrorism, and Bush got to lie about Saddam making anthrax and force US soldiers to get relatively risky vaccines to keep his pharma and biowarfare friends happy. Bush and Cheney also tried to ramp up anti-Russian fear and push NATO to be aggressive toward them (and after all, fighting Russians is NATO's whole purpose, so if they didn't do it they'd be obsolete), and that helped Russia pick Putin as a tough-guy leader, who's happy to have a quasi-enemy to give him an excuse to get tougher, and both sides get to use terrorism as an excuse to pretend that they need to keep developing biowarfare capabilities in case terrorists or crazy employees steal the other side's smallpox*, while quietly telling their own political hardliners that they don't trust the other side's military hardliners.
It's especially egregious with smallpox, because you can make anti-smallpox vaccines the old-fashioned way, from cowpox, and don't have to keep smallpox itself around. There's no excuse for either side not to eradicate their stash, and by doing so, they can reduce the risk to themselves as well as the rest of the world, even if the other side cheats . But even with anthrax, there's no excuse for the US to be developing techniques to weaponize it, as opposed to just keeping it around for vaccine and antibiotic testing, and while Cipro's now out of patent, countries like Argentina which have occasional anthrax problems (from cattle ranching) generally just use penicillins.
( * And it turns out not to matter whether the FBI is right that Bruce Ivins was guilty, or the crazy conspiracy theorists who say Ivins was framed as a coverup by the spooks who really did it are right, or the FBI-is-incompetent theorists who say that Ivins was believable enough to get people off the FBI's case after they were wrong about Hatfill, because either way there can be another Bruce Ivins or Ivan Brewski around to flip out or frame. Only way to prevent it is to destroy it all.)
Re:Americans are bad at math (Score:2, Insightful)