US not ready to cope with biological terror attack, report warns

Barack Obama is planning to announce new proposals to respond to any bioterrorism attack after a government commission today warned that the US was ill-prepared for such an event. The commission on the prevention of weapons of mass destruction proliferation, set up by Congress to monitor the government's readiness for a nuclear or biological attack, said the Obama administration had been lax in preparing measures to protect the large numbers of Americans at risk from the release of deadly viruses or bacteria. "Nearly a decade after September 11 2001 … and one month after the Christmas Day bombing attempt, the United States is failing to address several urgent threats, especially bioterrorism," the commission's chairman, former senator Bob Graham, said. "Each of the last three administrations has been slow to recognise and respond to the biothreat. But we no longer have the luxury of a slow learning curve when we know al-Qaida is interested in bioweapons." The commission's report said the threat of an attack on a larger scale than 9/11 remained real. "Especially troubling is the lack of priority given to the development of medical countermeasures – the vaccines and medicines that would be required to mitigate the consequences of an attack," the document said. The commission's executive director, Randy Larsen, said the government's handling of swine flu was evidence of how poorly prepared it was for large-scale emergencies. Larsen said that even though the authorities had six months in which to prepare an H1N1 vaccine, there were widespread shortages when the virus returned towards the end of last year. The report made a number of recommendations, including the tighter overseeing of laboratories dealing with dangerous pathogens and the enhancement of a rapid response plan to prevent biological attacks inflicting mass casualties. The White House said Obama would address plans to counter deadly biological threats in his state of the union address tomorrow. But while Graham cited the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a plane over Detroit by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as evidence of the continuing threat from al-Qaida, Obama said Osama bin Laden's claim of responsibility for the failed attack – in a recording claimed to be from "Osama to Obama" – was a sign of his weakness. "Al-Qaida itself is greatly weakened from where it was back in 2000," the president told ABC news. "Bin Laden sending out a tape trying to take credit for a Nigerian student who engaged in a failed bombing attempt is an indication of how weakened he is, because this is not something necessarily directed by him."