The anthrax letter attacks affected 22 Americans and killed 5, mostly because the biodefense “experts” at CDC and other parts of the federal government did not know or care to ask about the following:

• that anthrax spores, 1 micron in size, could easily get through the pores in letters and envelopes (roughly 10 microns in size)

• that mail sorting machines used air under pressure, creating air columns that rose many feet into the air and dispersed loose anthrax spores widely

• that prophylactic antibiotic treatment of postal workers and others who were exposed could have prevented or reduced the severity of anthrax

• that people working in affected post offices and the AMI building in Boca Raton, FL should have been immediately moved out to reduce exposure to ambient spores. CDC’s Bradley Perkins, MD was responsible for this mishap. Interestingly, he was later discovered to be working on digital IDs and vaccine passports during COVID.

You can always count on the government to come up with expensive fixes that don’t work. Billions of taxpayer dollars have since been spent on a series of microbial detection programs to warn us of a biological attack. Unfortunately, none of them worked very well and I think all have been scrapped.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/11/science/25-years-since-anthrax-attacks-vulnerability.html

Probably the best and cheapest way to identify a bio attack is to correctly and quickly diagnose the first humans to get sick. AMI’s Robert Stevens was correctly diagnosed in 2001 because his infectious disease doctor personally looked at a slide of his cerebrospinal fluid under a microscope and identified anthrax. Few doctors are trained to do this now.

However, the US has been gutting hospital microbiology departments in order to send samples from rural hospitals hundreds of miles away by air for culture and diagnosis. This was done at my hospital in Bar Harbor, Maine. Microbiology specimens were collected at the end of the day by a courier, driven over an hour away to Bangor, Maine, placed on a plane and sent to Quest’s hub in Chantilly, Virginia for processing—about ten miles from Dulles airport.

Someone made money on this cumbersome deal. No one paid any attention when I tried to explain to the hospital president (an accountant) that many bacteria would die en route, before they could be properly processed. Which meant we would not get an etiologic diagnosis for those patients. And if the sample did remain viable when it was finally processed, you would still face a considerable delay in getting a diagnosis, up to 72 hours’ delay:

So you can’t rely on hospitals that do “pack and ship” microbiology to be your early warning canary for a bioweapons event.

The young author of this piece obfuscates the problem, a typical NYT issue. The design of the biowatch strategy never worked; it was very cumbersome, and it was only located in about 30 cities. There was not (primarily) a problem of the funding running out; the problem was coming up with a viable strategy for testing air that is not too sensitive or insensitive; did not require human hands to keep collecting and testing samples; and could be done for reasonable cost throughout the US.

The author fails to explain any of the real shortcomings of the system; fails to contextualize the issue by exploring other approaches; repeats the need for more funding; and tries to scare the public.

She will go far.

 

IPAK-EDU is grateful to Meryl’s CHAOS letter (Critical Health Analysis and OpinionS) as this piece was originally published there and is included in this news feed with mutual agreement. Read More