| As a novelist
I’m outraged that the government has ignored bio-threats that novels
have been predicting for years.
As an author of medical thrillers, I’ve written some pretty disturbing stuff, and I’m always grateful for the distance between the scenarios I write about from the safety of my home office and my own life. But since September 11th, that’s all changed. After watching Tom Brokaw discuss his assistant’s anthrax infection on the Today show, my daughter turned to me as she was on her way out the door to school, and asked, "Why don’t we just vaccinate everyone?" She was looking for comfort. I couldn’t give it to her. "There’s not enough vaccine." With that troubling fact, I sent her off to school. Thank God I haven’t had to tell her--yet--about smallpox. Anthrax is a dangerous disease, one that we should rightfully be concerned about. But smallpox? Well, as a U.S. working group on bioweapons put it, the deliberate release of smallpox "would be an international crime of unprecedented proportions." Why is smallpox so scary? Because it’s deadly (30 percent of its victims die) AND, unlike anthrax, it’s very contagious: people walk around spreading it to those they come in contact with for two weeks before they develop symptoms. As if that weren’t enough, guess what? There is no treatment, there is no cure for smallpox. And, according to experts, those of us vaccinated over 25 years ago are unlikely to be protected. Here’s another chilling fact: the current CDC stockpile of smallpox vaccine would vaccinate only 7.5 million to 15.4 million people. As you read this, researchers are trying to determine whether that vaccine could be diluted, stretched out to serve up to 75 million. Either way, you get the picture. Only a fraction of our population stands any chance at all of being protected by vaccination. Now I have a question: How can that be? How is it possible that we, as a nation, are so unprepared for a bioterrorist attack using the deadly smallpox virus? Two years ago I began researching my latest novel, Clinical Trial, in which a Soviet scientist uses a strain of smallpox genetically engineered for bioterrorism to contaminate a vaccine developed by a U.S. pharmaceutical company. In my research I learned some very disturbing facts: That after the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty in 1972 banned the development of germ weapons, the Soviets actually escalated their work developing bioweapons. That smallpox was the number one focus of Russian scientists. They grew it by the ton, literally. That rumors have abounded for years that when the Soviet Union collapsed, putting thousands of Biopreparat scientists out of work, some of those scientists smuggled biowarfare agents out of the labs, and out of the country. Into the hands of terrorists. Now, I ask again, if two years ago, I was able to readily find this information--on the internet and in libraries--why are we not more prepared for the prospect of bioterrorists using smallpox now? In Clinical Trial, Dr. Isabel McLain injects herself with a hantavirus vaccine, unaware that it’s been deliberately contaminated with smallpox by Sergei Kirov, a fictional Russian scientist. Kirov used to head the Soviet’s development of smallpox as a weapon at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Vector, but now he works for a fictional Portland, Oregon biotech company called ImmuVac. ImmuVac’s CEO employs Kirov to develop a smallpox vaccine. Why? Because, he knows that smallpox is in the hands of bioterrorists, and it’s no longer a question of if, but when it will be used in an attack on the United States. He also knows our government is not prepared for such an attack, which means that ImmuVac stands to make a fortune if they have a vaccine on hand. I strive to make my novels realistic, my plots credible. Despite my degree in biology, graduate work in veterinary medicine and work as an attorney in the biotech industry, I always consult with experts about my plots. And the foremost question I ask them is: is this believable? Is this accurate? Could this happen? If I can come up with this scenario--a scenario so eerily close to what we see happening now, a threat now looking us squarely in the eye--why didn’t our government? Why wasn’t I able to turn to my daughter and tell her that she is safe? That her government, her parents, are prepared to protect her from bioterrorists? It’s a pretty good question, isn’t it? |