“PROJECT BIOSHIELD”: CLUELESS

Project BioShield is President Bush’s $6 bil­lion pro­posal for help­ing phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal firms develop drugs to beat bioter­ror agents. And it is, sim­ply put, a com­plete mess, National Journal reveals.

Paul Redmond had a ter­ri­ble, hor­ri­ble, no good, very bad day recently. It was the day that Redmond, assis­tant sec­re­tary for infor­ma­tion analy­sis at the Homeland Security Department, tes­ti­fied before the House Select Homeland Security Committee about Project BioShield…
Redmond didn’t have an open­ing state­ment. He admit­ted he has only one per­son work­ing under him to assess the bioter­ror threat. He said he isn’t get­ting the infor­ma­tion he needs from the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity. His descrip­tion of the bioter­ror threat was noth­ing more than what law­mak­ers had already read in the news­pa­pers. And he wasn’t pre­pared to brief them in a closed ses­sion. Redmond even­tu­ally made a plea for sym­pa­thy: “I’m try­ing to do my best at this point.“
Redmond’s lack of pre­pared­ness on BioShield is evi­dence of a poten­tially grave weak­ness: Redmond’s intel­li­gence cup­board is largely bare, yet the depart­ment appears to have no trou­ble launch­ing big expen­sive pro­grams with­out hav­ing assessed what the country’s highest-​​priority threats are.

Despite this key­stone kop approach, Project BioShield is “cruis­ing through the House,” accord­ing to the magazine.

June 17th, 2003 | Chem-Bio | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.