One year after President Bush sought to energize the nation’s bioterrorism preparations with an unprecedented smallpox vaccination campaign, the effort has all but ground to a halt. A report released Thursday, meanwhile, finds that only two states–Illinois and Florida–are prepared to distribute and administer vaccines or medicines that would be needed in the event of a major outbreak or attack.
Fewer than a dozen states have written plans for dealing with other public health threats such as pandemic flu, the report added, and the majority of states remain ill-prepared for any type of large-scale emergency.
After two years of work and $2 billion in federal aid, “states are only modestly better prepared to respond to public health emergencies than they were prior to Sept. 11, 2001,” concluded the Trust for America’s Health, a non-partisan, non-profit health advocacy group.
Despite Bush’s high-profile call on Dec. 13, 2002, to immunize millions of health-care workers and emergency responders, the number vaccinated has been stuck at 38,700 for months.
“We are still underprepared to respond to even two cases of smallpox anywhere in the world,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “You need a core group of vaccinated workers able to go out to the front lines, and we don’t have that.”
White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Bush is pleased with the progress made on smallpox defenses but “would like more frontline workers to be vaccinated.”
State budget cuts, personnel shortages and red tape were the chief reasons identified by the Trust for the spotty progress in preparedness.
The report scored states in 10 areas, including lab capacity, flu preparedness, availability of information on the SARS virus and appropriate distribution of federal dollars. States received 1 point for each category in which they met basic thresholds, with a 10 the highest possible score. More than 70 percent of the states received scores of 5 or lower.
“The full-scale effort to comprehensively fix the nation’s public health system is falling short,” the report said.
