Non-Profit Coalition Calls for a National Reassessment of
the Biodefense
Building Boom
(October 14) - A
non-profit coalition is calling upon Congress and the public for an urgent
national reassessment of America's biodefense spending. The
coalition contends that the $6 billion in biodefense
that Congress hastily appropriated after last fall's anthrax attacks have
triggered a laboratory rat race more likely to undermine US national and environmental security than to enhance it.
The groups dedicated to research safety, arms control,
and scientific responsibility do not oppose all biodefense
work; but cite a range of concerns and evidence in support of their demands
(see attached quotes and contact sheet). The Coalition says that unless a national
reconsideration is done, competition for biodefense
funding and poor planning will combine with dangerous results, including a
needless proliferation of facilities handling biowarfare
agents and a spread of the knowledge needed to wage biowarfare.
This poses dangers to local communities, to arms control, and US
national security, they claim. Instead of emphasizing biotech band aids from
facilities pursuing dream vaccines and working in secret, the coalition says
spending should focus on unclassified, public research to bolster local public
health capabilities.
“The number of new biodefense
biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories being developed
far exceeds what is prudent and necessary, and we are asking Congress to freeze
biodefense laboratory construction until a
cross-cutting federal review ensures that the massive new investment isn't
going awry, and wouldn't be better spent elsewhere,” said Steve Erickson of
the Citizen’s Education Project in Salt Lake City. According to Edward Hammond
of the Austin, TX-based Sunshine Project, “Government
and academic labs are responding less to bona fide needs than the urge to build power and revenue
centers for what they hope is a perpetual biodefense
boom. This will result in a dangerous proliferation of bioweapons
agents and the knowledge to use them.”
“Too many agencies want too many facilities,
likely leading to duplication and unnecessary danger,” Colin King of
Nuclear Watch of New Mexico in Santa Fe, “Agencies
are confusing the public by trying to gain lab approval on a one-by-one basis,
obfuscating the risks and ramifications of large national programs.”
The
coalition is calling for programmatic environmental impact assessments and
insists that Congress and the General Accounting Office carefully examine the
programs of the National Institutes of Health and the Departments of Defense,
Energy, and Agriculture both individually and for their collective
implications. “Congress and the GAO need to identify the pork, the overlap, the
national and local dangers, and address the bigger question of whether the
proposed construction spate of more than a dozen new (or upgraded) biodefense labs really serves America's domestic
and international interests” argues Marylia Kelley of TriValley CAREs in Livermore, CA.
The
coalition is currently working on biodefense lab and
program expansions proposed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Utah State University
and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, Rocky Mountain Laboratory
in Montana, and the University of Texas in Galveston. Other new and upgraded BL3 and 4 labs are
proposed in San
Antonio
and Lubbock, TX, Manhattan, KS, Albuquerque, NM, Davis, CA, Honolulu, HI, and Plum
Island, NY. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID), part of NIH, is promising up to a dozen "Centers of Biodefense Excellence", each with BL3 and/or 4 capacity.
Additional Information, Contacts, Quotes
The
coalition members are Citizen’s Education Project (Salt
Lake City, UT),
Coalition for a Safe Lab (Hamilton, MT), Los
Alamos Study Group (Santa Fe, NM),
Nuclear Watch of New Mexico (Santa
Fe), The Sunshine Project (Austin, TX),
Tri-Valley CAREs (Livermore, CA) and
Western States Legal Foundation (Oakland, CA).
Members cite a range of concerns and evidence in support of their demands,
including:
Domestic Threat: The FBI's investigation of last fall's anthrax letters has
determined that the attack was perpetrated with a US biodefense anthrax strain, and
suggests that the author of the attacks was biodefense
insider with hands-on training courtesy of the federal government. Under
current plans, thousands of new people will gain access to bioweapons
agents and knowledge of their preparation and use. How is the government making
sure that it isn't sowing the seeds of domestic terrorism?
Manipulation of the Facts: In California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) wants a new biodefense lab smack dab in the middle of a major nuclear
weapons design facility, and right next door to a bioreactor (fermenter) facility potentially capable of producing agents
on a massive scale. These issues were
brushed aside in the lab's draft environmental impact assessment. LLNL claims
it needs the new facility because it has insufficient access to similar labs
nearby and because the Department of Energy has no BL3 capacity. "LLNL is manipulating the truth to its
convenience." says Marylia Kelley, Executive
Director of Livermore-based Tri-Valley CAREs, "First, LLNL’s
environmental assessment fails to give due consideration to the
civilian-mission BL3 facilities already in existence. Second, LLNL conveniently ignores the fact that DOE also wants to build
a BL3 facility at the Los Alamos Lab in New Mexico. And,
finally, new information has surfaced showing LLNL involvement in a proposal to
build BL4 and BL3 labs in nearby Davis, California.”
Opaque Proposals: In Utah, the US Army's Dugway Proving
Ground wants a 200% increase in its biodefense
activity, including BL3 lab upgrades and another aerosol chamber, a very
controversial piece of testing equipment with many potential offensive uses.
The Army has produced a huge draft environmental impact assessment (DEIS); but
according to Steve Erickson of the Citizens Education Project in Salt Lake
City, "The DEIS is 1000 pages long,
but it's so vague that it’s impossible to fairly assess what the Army wants to
do. They want to conduct many more in-lab and open-air tests, but won't say
with what and when or under what conditions until future plans and studies are
completed and rubber-stamped by the brass. There is no independent oversight of
this facility, and given its penchant for secrecy and its track record of
exposing civilians and contaminating the environment with its biological,
chemical, and radiological tests, Dugway can’t be
trusted with such blanket permission to expand programs and missions.
Poor Community Consultation: In Hamilton, Montana, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wants to build a
new BL4 facility at Rocky Mountain Labs (RML). NIH originally proposed to begin
building in February 2003 with only a brief environmental assessment and a two
week public comment period. Hamilton’s Coalition for a Safe Lab demanded more public
participation and a more thorough review of the project. NIH relented and is now conducting an
Environmental Impact Statement, which will delay groundbreaking. Then, RML put
together a community outreach committee; but decided the meetings would be by
invitation only. The Coalition protested
again. At the last minute, RML opened
the meetings to the public; but still required interested people to call ahead
and advise the lab that they would like to attend.
Coalition
for a Safe Lab organizer Mary Wulff, says, “When we arrived for their meeting we were
welcomed with the news that we needed a security escort to use the restroom.
The meeting was scheduled for 2 hours. During that time we listened to NIH talk
about public relations with their community, children’s programs, and bus rides
across the NIH campus. Ten minutes were left for our twenty community ‘leaders’
to comment and ask questions. Several of them didn’t comment at all. Our
Coalition previously presented RML with a comprehensive list of questions,
which they have not yet answered. RML’s assistant director
said at the meeting that they definitely will not be working with smallpox or ebola; but conflicting information was given to a Coalition
by RML’s biosafety
committee chairman. The chairman said that if the world situation changes then
‘all bets are off’. It’s unfair to thrust a national facility like this on a
small community, especially in the absence of a comprehensive national review.”
Ephemeral Promises? In Galveston, Texas, the University of Texas (UT) is
building a new BL4 lab. UT claims good community relations for the effort,
which began before September 11th, 2001. UT held public meetings and in July 2001, dispelled
criticism that the lab's work might be ”secret or ominous” with the public
declaration that “No classified research
will be performed.” In September 2002, the Austin-based Sunshine Project
wrote the lab's Director to verify that the University of Texas stands by its no secrets pledge, and to request the lab’s biosafety committee transparency rules. The BL4 that prides itself on community
relations did not reply.
Dangerous Relationships with Weaponsmaking: In New
Mexico,
a number of non-profit organizations are asking tough questions of Los Alamos
National Laboratory (LANL), which wants to build a new BL3 facility. Greg Mello
of Los Alamos Study Group in Santa Fe says "Does it really make sense to put a biodefense
lab at the nation's largest facility for designing, testing, and producing
weapons of mass destruction? Los Alamos
has little conspicuous expertise in biology, but it does have a 60-year history
of secrecy and compartmentalization devoted to weapons development. What is the rest of the world going to
think? What should they think? Los
Alamos is not inspectable. A decision to build a bioweapons
‘defense’ facility at such a place could cripple efforts to build a better
nonproliferation regime for biological weapons.”
New
Mexico
non-profits are fed up with LANL's dismal
environmental and safety compliance. In August, Nuclear Watch of New Mexico
filed suit in federal court, arguing that LANL and DOE have failed to take the
hard look at their bioweapons research program that
is required under federal law. “We hope
to compel DOE to undergo a Los Alamos-specific Environmental Impact Statement,
and a Programmatic EIS for the Chemical and Biological National Security
Program. If we are successful, this will greatly increase public scrutiny of DOE’s program, and make it more difficult for the agency to
continue to avoid environmental and public health issues,” said Nuclear Watch’s
Colin King.
Misplaced
Priorities: The coalition sees overinvestment in high-tech facilities to
handle pathogens as the wrong emphasis for protecting the public against
biological agents – whether naturally-arising or intentionally introduced by
terrorists. Dr. Robert M. Gould, President of the San Francisco Bay Area
chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility states “We need to develop a comprehensive, primary-prevention approach towards
all forms of infectious disease, which means providing adequate resources to
combat AIDS, antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, as well as the rise in diseases
such as malaria predicted to increase from global climate change. According to
a UN report from 2000, $10 billion a year would provide enough clean water and sanitation
to cut by up to one third the 4 billion cases of diarrheal
disease that kill 2 million people every year.”
International Ramifications: According to the coalition, the emphasis on labs doing
work such as aerosol challenge tests, particularly by the Defense and Energy
Departments, runs terrible risks of being misinterpreted by other countries and
triggering a bioweapons research race, or even worse.
Says Jackie Cabasso of Western States Legal
Foundation in Oakland, CA: "With
biological weapons, the line between offense and defense is exceedingly
difficult to draw. In the end, secrecy is the greatest enemy of safety. Last
year, the US single-handedly blew apart an international system for inspections
of these kinds of laboratories, a system that would have made great strides
toward ensuring that biodefense labs aren't abused
for offensive purposes. Having thumbed our nose at the world, the US is now
massively expanding its biodefense program, mostly in
secretive facilities. Other countries
are going to be suspicious. This bodes badly for the future of biological
weapons control."
Primary Contacts for this Release:
Edward Hammond,
Sunshine Project (Austin,
TX), (512) 494
0545, hammond@sunshine-project.org
Steve Erickson,
Citizens Education Project (Salt Lake
City, UT),
(801) 554-9029, erickson.steve1@attbi.com
Colin King, Nuclear
Watch of New Mexico (Santa Fe),
(505) 989-7342, colinking@nukewatch.org
Contacting All Coalition Members
Citizens Education Project
(Contact: Steve Erickson, Director)
Salt Lake City, UT
erickson.steve1@attbi.com
(801) 554-9029
Coalition for a Safe Lab
(Contact: Mary Wulff, Coordinator)
Hamilton, MT
animals@bitterroot.net
http://www.oiruco.com
XXX-XXX-XXXX
Los Alamos Study Group
(Contact: Greg Mello, Director)
Santa Fe, NM
gmello@lasg.org
http://www.lasg.org
(505) 982-7747
Nuclear Watch of New Mexico
(Contact: Colin King, Research/Technologies Director)
Santa Fe, NM
colinking@nukewatch.org
http://www.nukewatch.org
(505) 989-7342
The Sunshine Project
(Contact: Edward Hammond, US Director)
Austin, TX
hammond@sunshine-project.org
http://www.sunshine-project.org
(512) 494-0545
TriValley
Citizens Against a Radioactive Environment (CAREs)
(Contact: Marylia Kelley,
Director))
Livermore, CA
marylia@earthlink.net
http://www.trivalleycares.org
925-443-7148
Western States Legal Foundation
(Contact: Jackie Cabasso, Director)
Oakland, CA
wslf@earthlink.net
http://www.wslfweb.org
510-839-5877