McCain or Obama win? Level 4 Bio-Defense Lab will remain a controversial Boston issue

Regardless of who wins Tuesday’s presidential election, Boston residents and elected officials will still have to grapple with the urban siting of a laboratory where extremely dangerous germs are proposed to be studied.

In fact, a number of cities around the country will face tough questions related to the debate between national defense and local autonomy. Of the two likeliest candidates to be inaugurated President in January, both Senators Barack Obama and John McCain support a national network of government funded laboratories doing research on such nasty pathogens as Ebola, Anthrax, Tularemia, and Plague.

In Boston, the research related to understanding the nature of these bugs – and some critics of the Level 4 high security facility would say, turning these germs into weapons - would be carried out at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory under construction on Albany Street on the campus of Boston University’s Medical Complex in the South End.

On the Obama campaign website www.barackobama.com, under the issue heading of “Homeland Security,” the Democratic Party candidate argues that “Biological weapons pose a serious and increasing national security risk. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will work to prevent bioterror attacks and mitigate consequences.” Their plan calls for increased capacity building and an accelerated timetable to develop vaccines. Incidentally, these are stated goals similar in approach and outcome to that of the post 9/11 Bush administration.

Additionally, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius – widely seen as a potential vice presidential running mate for Senator Obama earlier in the campaign - visited Washington D.C. recently to lobby Homeland Security officials for a new biodefense laboratory in that state, according to the Kansas City Star newspaper.

The McCain campaign doesn’t speak directly to the issue of biosecurity in its literature. But the Arizona Senator has close ties with members of both Bush administrations – father and son – who helped draft position papers for the formation of the neo-conservative “Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

In a June 12, 2008 article on www.truthdig.com, journalist and political analyst Elliot Cohen writes about a 2000 PNAC document outlining how the United States should rebuild its defenses. Known as the RAD document (“Rebuild America’s Defenses”), it promotes fighting wars on multiple fronts and suggests that biological warfare can be a “politically useful tool.” According to the RAD document, “…advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”

A number of the Project for a New American Century founding members currently serve as advisors to Senator McCain’s presidential campaign.

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The assertion made by Senator Obama (and the Bush administration) that biological weapons pose a major threat, has been disputed by a significant number of scientists and other analysts. Randall Murch, a former FBI scientist who has studied how to trace the origins of biological weapons, told the International Herald Tribune Newspaper in August, "I think it's an important risk, but frankly I'm more concerned about bombs and guns, which are easily available and can be very destructive.”

This position was articulated more recently by Dr. David Ozonoff, a Professor of Environmental Health at the Boston University School of Public Health, who says the preferred weapons of choice of terrorists are “guns and bombs.”

Speaking at a public forum held in Boston City Hall and sponsored by The Safety Net, a coalition of groups opposed to the Level 4 laboratory at BU Medical Center, Dr. Ozonoff argued that identified enemies of the United States don’t have the resources or inclination to mount the research effort necessary to develop effective biological weapons. On the other hand, he said, the billions of dollars spent since 2001 on biodefense has drained financial resources from disease research that affects Americans every day.

“The laboratory is explicitly meant to work on organisms that are important for biodefense. But these are not organisms of any real importance to public health. In fact, very few people around the world and certainly none in this community are sickened by them anywhere.”

In 2002, Dr. Ozonoff noted, more than 700 National Institutes of Health funded scientists wrote an open letter to the director of NIH to warn of the consequences of diverting resources from public health to biodefense. The situation is worse now, he said, due to the expanding local and national financial crisis.

Fears that security at these laboratories may not be adequate to protect the public from accidental releases of pathogens, or criminal intent to steal germ samples, were heightened with the release of a General Accounting Office report last month that said intruders could “easily break into two of the labs due to lax security.” The Associate Press identified the location of the two labs as Atlanta, GA and San Antonio, Texas.

During a contentious public meeting in Roxbury last month, the chairman of a “Blue Ribbon” panel of scientists and academics established by the NIH to study ways of improving relations between Boston University and people living in nearby neighborhoods, vehemently denied that any weapons type program would be established at the BU laboratory.

So far, attempts to reach the spokesperson for the BU National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory have been unsuccessful.