A Pox on Our House: Will Clinton’s N.S.C. Compound America’s Vulnerability to Biological Warfare?

(Washington, D.C.): Tomorrow, a senior Clinton Administration interagency group is
scheduled
to consider a National Security Council recommendation that the United States destroy its
remaining stockpile of the smallpox (variola) virus, a move currently being pushed by the World
Health Organization (WHO). Elimination of this stockpile is a hobby-horse of NSC staffer
Elissa
Harris, the Administration’s principal and irrepressible champion of efforts to use arms
control to
contend with the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons. Despite mounting evidence
that the smallpox virus is in the hands of potential adversaries able to exploit the vulnerability of a
U.S. population with a decreasing level of immunity to its deadly effect, those like Ms. Harris are
determined to deprive American scientists and biological weapons (BW) defense personnel the
samples of this virus they may require to contend with such a BW attack or other needs.

Why Would We Go There?

This issue first arose in 1996 when a WHO expert committee unanimously recommended the
destruction of the last declared laboratory stocks of smallpox virus, held at the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the Russian “Vektor” virology laboratory near
Novosibirsk. WHO’s member states chose to postpone the final decision until June 1999 in the
face of abiding misgivings about taking such a step.

The fatuous argument for destroying the last stocks of the virus was recently articulated by
Dr.
Donald A. Henderson, a physician who directed WHO’s highly successful smallpox eradication
program. He asserts that it would “send a clear signal to any group or nation contemplating the
use of the virus that such action would be the most reprehensible of crimes.” Far from creating a
“norm” against the use of smallpox as a weapon, however, this step would increase the likelihood
of such an event — and make it more difficult for the United States and its friends to cope with a
smallpox outbreak

A Biological Weapon of Choice?

The smallpox virus is an ideal weapon for use as a biological agent. It is highly virulent,
stable,
relatively easy to grow and can be easily spread by an odorless aerosol. Before 1980 the use of
smallpox as a weapon would have been highly unlikely because vaccinations had made most of the
population, particularly in industrialized nations, immune to the smallpox infection. However, the
apparently complete eradication of the virus — the last naturally occurring case was in Somalia in
1977 — has led to the near total cessation of vaccinations in this country, perversely
increasing
the utility of smallpox as a terrorist weapon. Since the vaccination only provides
immunity
against smallpox for 10 years and the U.S. stopped routine vaccinations in 1972, nearly the
entire U.S. population is completely vulnerable to the virus.

Even Dr. Henderson, a staunch supporter of destroying the virus, admits that smallpox would
be a
potent biological weapon. He said it “wouldn’t be difficult to administer….It certainly is possible
to put up an aerosol of smallpox, have it drift a long way…and have it infect people with very few
particles. It would not become apparent like a bang….There’d be a delay in recognition, and the
disease would begin to spread by the time the diagnosis was made.”

An Invitation to Disaster

Ms. Harris’ determination to destroy the United States’ remaining stocks of the smallpox virus
will only encourage their use as a weapon. A terrorist knowing that the United States only retains
6-7 million doses of the vaccine and that testing a new vaccine against a mutation in the virus or a
genetically altered version of smallpox requires actual samples may be tempted to use the
smallpox virus. A recent simulation was run by doctors, hospital workers and U.S. health leaders
simulating the release of the smallpox virus at a political rally. The results were sobering: An
estimated 15,000 Americans were infected, 4,500 died and 14 other nations became infected with
the virus. Moreover, some of the factors in the scenario were believed by some of its participants
to be overly optimistic.

Smallpox BW: A Present Danger

The need for the United States to retain real virus samples was made even clearer last year
thanks
to ominous testimony from Ken Alibek, the former deputy director of the largest and most
dangerous illegal biological weapons program in the world — that run by the Kremlin’s
Biopreparat organization. 1 Mr. Alibek, who defected to
the United States in 1992, testified
before Congress about the extent of the Soviet and Russian BW program in May 1988. On the
occasion, he declared that the Soviet Union had produced “hundreds of tons of anthrax
weapon…along with dozens of tons of smallpox and plague. The total production capacity of all
of the facilities involved was many hundreds of tons of various agents annually.”

In the course of his testimony Mr. Alibek paid special attention to the smallpox virus, insofar
as
he contends that Soviet BW scientists have worked extensively on splicing genes from other
pathogens with smallpox to make the virus either more virulent or more resistant to current
vaccinations. According to the Soviet defector:

“Genetic engineering work [was conducted] on these viruses, with the eventual aims of
manipulating smallpox virulence factors and inserting genes of other viruses into smallpox to
create chimera viruses. (The point of creating chimera viruses was to design new organisms that
would have a synergistic effect and/or evade current vaccines or treatments.) A chimera strain
involving insertion of Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis (VEE) genes into smallpox was
created in the late 1980s. Using the technique described above of substituting related viruses for
smallpox, a chimera strain of ectromelia and VEE was created for initial testing.”

Mr. Alibek also testified that he was “convinced that Russia’s biological weapons program has
not
been completely dismantled.”

The Need to Retain the U.S. Stock of Smallpox Virus

The importance of Ken Alibek’s statements to the current debate over destroying the
remaining
smallpox stockpiles cannot be overstated. If his allegations are correct — and he carries particular
weight with experts and intelligence officials who say most of his allegations can be corroborated
— then there will likely be a real need to develop a new vaccine.

Even if Mr. Alibek were wrong, and neither Russia nor any other nation or terrorist ever
develops
a strain of smallpox resistant to the existing vaccine, there are segments of the population that
cannot use the current vaccine. For example, the current vaccine cannot be given to transplant
recipients, people with the skin disease eczema and those infected with the AIDS virus because of
potentially lethal side effects.

For these reasons a committee of the National Research Council’s Institute of Medicine
concluded earlier this year that the U.S. should retain its supply of the virus. In a report entitled
“Chemical and Biological Terrorism: Research and Development to Improve Civilian Medical
Response,” the committee cited smallpox as a particularly dangerous virus and said that
“its
use in a terrorist attack would pose a threat of a global epidemic.” The report went on
to say
the following about the best way to protect the population from a smallpox outbreak:

“Reestablishing manufacturing of the current [vaccine] is not a recommended option in view
of
the undesirable characteristics of the product and the potential for improvement….Retention of
the U.S. stocks of variola virus currently scheduled for destruction in 1999 would be of value to a
drug discovery and development program. Pox viruses vary widely in their sensitivity to
chemotherapeutic agents, and use of surrogates for variola such a monkeypox cannot be relied
upon totally….Direct in vitro testing against variola virus is important to be sure of
usefulness in
treating smallpox.”

This view was seconded by another panel of experts assembled by the Institute of Medicine,
at the
request of the departments of Defense, Energy, and Health and Human Services, that has just
concluded that research on live smallpox samples “could lead to new and important
discoveries with real potential for improving human health.” This group affirmed that
the
live virus was “essential” to finding an anti-viral drug for treating smallpox and that
these samples
would be needed to design a safer vaccine than the one currently stockpiled by the Center for
Disease Control (CDC).

To be sure, Ms. Harris and other proponents of smallpox destruction claim that because the
entire
smallpox genome has been sequenced, researchers can get all necessary information from cloned
genes. Both Institute of Medicine committees believe, however, that the live virus is
critical
to ensuring the success of any new vaccine and that even if such research on smallpox
vaccines can be conducted without actual samples, tests to confirm the precision of the
vaccine require live samples. According to Alan Zelicoff, a highly regarded
scientist at Sandia
National Laboratories and consultant to the Department of Defense, “If we are serious about
bio-defense, the [smallpox] stocks are necessary for developing an anti-viral drug, and possibly
necessary for developing a vaccine more suitable for the general population than the current one.”

The Bottom Line

It has become abundantly clear to all but the most ideologically blinded that biological
weapons
will continue to proliferate. Any sign that the U.S. is vulnerable to a particular biological agent
will almost surely make those who would do us harm focus their energies in attaining just a such
weapon. It is almost universally accepted that there are not simply two places in the
world
where smallpox can be found, given what we know about BW proliferation and Russian
practices. The United States, by retaining its stockpile of the virus, will set no norm that is not
already set by the fact that has no offensive BW program. It will, however, ensure
that the U.S. is
more prepared and less vulnerable should smallpox weapons be used against us.

1For more information on Ken Alibek, see the Center’s
Decision Brief entitled Soviet Defector
Offers Timely Warning on Bioweapon Threat; Ex-CIA Director Woolsey Rejects On-Site
Visits as Rx (No. 98-D 53, 27 March 1998).