Word: bioshield
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...fact, the government has so far spent very little on new biodefense drugs, thanks in part to the long and torturous contracting process. Under BioShield, HHS has paid $5.7 million to buy black raspberry--flavored liquid potassium iodide, a child's version of a pill intended to protect against radioactive iodide in a dirty bomb. The agency is also spending $2.2 million on experimental anthrax treatments (although that money is not coming from the BioShield fund), and a contract for a new smallpox vaccine is expected in 2006. But more than a year into the program, drug companies still complain...
...BioShield hasn't transformed much of anything besides expanding the federal bureaucracy. Most of the big pharmaceutical and biotech firms want nothing to do with developing biodefense drugs. The little companies that are vying for deals say they are being stymied by an opaque and glacially slow contracting process. The one big contract that has been awarded--for 75 million doses of a next-generation anthrax vaccine--is tangled in controversy; it went to a California firm, VaxGen, which in its 10-year history has never brought a drug to market. In the scientific community, biodefense is viewed...
...many steps being taken to shore up the country's biodefenses. They point out that the U.S. has been stockpiling countermeasures, such as 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine. Since 2001 HHS has doled out $5.5 billion to state and local governments for bioterrorism emergency-response programs, and including BioShield, the government has spent about $18 billion on biodefense. "No matter how hard we try, some steps in the process cannot be rushed," said Stewart Simonson, assistant secretary for Public Health Emergency Preparedness, defending BioShield's slow start before Congress in July...
Proposals to fix BioShield have gained a new sense of urgency, however, as fears of another biological threat--avian flu--have mounted. China and Indonesia recently reported human fatalities from the disease, bringing the total number of deaths as of late December to 73, and the U.S. is now scrambling to stockpile medicines--such as the antiviral Tamiflu--to thwart a possible pandemic. Bush has asked Congress, as part of his $7.1 billion response plan, for a "crash program" to speed the development of new vaccine technologies, and Congress last month passed a defense bill that included $3.8 billion, mainly...
...bioterrorism countermeasure, and BARDA would be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, keeping its work largely veiled from public scrutiny. HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt has said new liability protections should apply only to vaccines and medicines for pandemic flu, which is likely to delay action on Burr's "BioShield 2" bill until next year...