09.06.11
Austerity leaves bioterror defense lobby blue
The bioterror defense lobby dynamic duo, Jim Talent and Bob Graham, are about to try and coattail/carpetbag the Contagion movie, using it to push for more spending.
A few weeks ago the lobby tried the same stunt with the Anders Brevik massacre in Norway.
It was not a success. And this push will undoubtedly flop, too. Although the lobbyists will probably be successful in getting a couple opinion pieces planted in the nation’s newspapers.
The publicity push will fail to gain traction because of a simple question.
How many people want to see a movie where masses of people die horribly, along with the threat of worldwide collapse eight now? Yep, Hollywood has sure guessed the public mood right again.
Everyone is just dieing to see a doomsday plague movie! (Just prior to the beginning of the sick season.)
“In ‘Contagion,’ which opens next weekend with a cast that includes Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Laurence Fishburne, health professionals around the world combat a deadly airborne virus of mysterious origin. The action thriller depicts mass suffering and panic.
“Hoping to capitalize on the movie, Talent and former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., the chair of the WMD commission, plan to release a new report that reiterates the threat of biological attack ..”
The bioterror defense lobby is also suffering from a bit of the blues brought on by the economic collapse and austerity politics now in play. The debt talks and political climate have made it nervous.
If there’s a place that actually can be cut without much screaming, it’s in bioterror defense.
And this explains the slant of some articles now emerging on the subject, hooked to hit the tenth commemoration of 9/11.
Again, from the wire:
The Homeland Security Department is the government’s lead agency when it comes to protecting against biological weapons. Part of that task is developing technologies that can quickly trace the source of an outbreak, a critical step in determining mass treatment.
Yet the House proposed a budget this year for Homeland Security that would have cut research and development by 81 percent, a cut that Dr. Tara O’Toole, the agency’s undersecretary for science and technology, said would have been devastating.
“It would be have basically shut down science and technology here,” O’Toole said in an interview.
The federal budget remains uncertain for the new fiscal year starting Oct. 1, making it hard to plan for long-range projects that don’t immediately bear fruit, she said.
“The work we’re doing in biodefense won’t get done unless we do it,” she said. “The notion of a bioattack sounds outlandish and farfetched to some people, but it’s really not. It’s easier to imagine that happening than a nuclear attack orchestrated by terrorists.”
Making that case in the climate of cutting is a challenge.
Earlier in the year the economic collapse accidentally and pleasantly intervened to kill a bioterror defense project that looked like all but a done deal a couple years ago.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, long a force in expanding government funding for bioterror defense, has shockingly seen plans for a bioterror vaccine facility collapse …
This is the project that Tara O’Toole, formerly of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity and now at the Dept. of Homeland Security, tried to build.
Slight victories in these matters are good things. If the bioterror defense industry is hurt a little bit in these times, fine. It exploded post-anthrax and continued unrestrained and unregulated growth through the entire decade.
And to see Tara O’Toole expressing even the slightest alarm re its future is, from this perspective, a sign that something is going in the right direction. If only minutely and by accident/coincidental events changing its trajectory.
The wire story quoted, originally from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, continues the long tradition of mainstream media stories which quote only from the bioterror defense lobby.
Subsequently, it is written to convey the impression that there is a consensus on the level of bioterror defense spending which is appropriate. And that there are no critics of the industry.
Which is very far from the case and truth.