by Michael Isikoff
The Obama administration and Congress get an F for failing to prepare for a biological terrorist attack—a “national security” risk that is getting greater “by the day,” according to the director of a blue-ribbon federal panel set up to study the issue.
The panel—chaired by former Democratic senator (and intelligence-committee chairman) Bob Graham and former GOP senator Jim Talent—concluded more than a year ago that there was better than a 50-50 chance that Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group would use weapons of destruction somewhere in the world in the next five years.
Since then, the risks of such an attack have only gotten greater, said Randell Larsen, the executive director of the panel, in an interview. “The further we go down the road, the easier it gets to make a biological weapon,” he told Declassified. “It’s getting easier every day.”....
....But the panel says the Obama administration and Congress get the lowest possible grade by failing to respond to one of its most important recommendations: taking steps to prepare vaccines, train medical workers, and conduct environmental cleanups in the event that a terrorist group unleashes anthrax or other biological weapons on the U.S. homeland. One development that underscored how woefully the government is prepared for such an attack was the problems encountered getting and distributing vaccines to deal with the H1N1 virus last year.
Read it all, more disturbing information than you may want to know.
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