Project BioShield Lags

Project BioShield was the federal government's $5.6 billion answer to the anthrax scare of 2001. But funds have been slowly distributed, and an anthrax treatment is bogged down in a rivalry between two competing biotech companies. Details in this New York Times piece.

"The inept implementation of the program has led the best brains and the best scientists to give up, to look elsewhere or devote their resources to medical initiatives that are not focused on biodefense," said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland.

Even some former department officials who helped create BioShield are dismayed.

"I find this all rather repugnant," said D. A. Henderson, a former top bioterrorism official. "You have people here who, in the face of a problem of serious import, are using every tactic they can to line their own pockets."