The Pros And Cons Of Project Bioshild

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In the fall of 2001, a few weeks after terrorists flew airplanes into the Twin Towers, an additional wave of attacks hit the United States. This caused far less damage but started paramount aftershocks filled with fear. Envelopes holding anthrax spores were sent to several news outlets and two senators. It infected twenty-two people and killed five of them. Protecting against inevitable bioterrorism attacks in the future became of top importance for the government, and in his 2003 President George W. Bush announced the creation of Project BioShield. This "major research and production effort to guard our people against bioterrorism," Bush said, would "quickly make available effective vaccines and treatments against agents like anthrax, botulinum …show more content…

The U.S. has invested over 5 billion dollars into this but to this day, the it has made no doses of a next-generation vaccine, or for that matter any vaccines or drugs to defend against Ebola or plague. No major pharmaceutical companies have been willing to supply Project BioShield and the small biotech companies that do have had difficulty with large-scale manufacturing. Congress has also transferred $1.4 billion from Project BioShield’s which is more than 25% of the money they have to other projects. There are fewer than 6 million doses of a treatment for exposure to radiation, and only enough botulinum antitoxin to treat about 100,000 people. Novel anthrax treatments total 75,000. A smallpox antiviral would treat 1.7 million. Several of these products still have to receive FDA approval, and all of them have expiration dates; as a result, the U.S. government will have to pay quite a large amount of money to keep fresh supplies in stock. Project BioShield's first investment was quite painful for it. HHS awarded $879 million to a rookie biotechnology company, VaxGen, to make 75 million doses of a new anthrax vaccine. Also in December 2006, project BioShield was almost destroyed as it was believed that it wasn't fast enough to keep up with