What's New in Life Science Research

Part of what's scary about bioweapons is their method of deployment en route to smiting your enemies. Infectious agents can turn people into deployment devices to infect more targets than you "hit" with the original agent. Certainly, this can get you lots of bang for your bioweapons buck, assuming you get your biological agents into humans who can act as vectors for further spread. But as far as the bacillus or the virus is concerned, any susceptible human is an acceptable host -- whether that human is on your enemies' side of the conflict, your side, or no side at all.

In other words, for your bioweapon to hurt your enemies but not your friends, you friends either need to be sealed up in those biohazard suits (which can, after all, rip -- I saw Outbreak), or they need to have some immunity to the infectious agent you're using, owing perhaps to vaccination against it.* Even though not everyone on your side can necessarily be vaccinated (maybe because of allergies to components of the vaccine or other immune system issues), you need enough of your side vaccinated that in the event that your bioweapon infects a host on your side, the chances of spread to another vulnerable comrade are tiny.

If the people on your side enjoy freedom of movement -- especially to the point of being able to get on a plane and travel to a different country -- the herd in which you want to set up herd immunity (in order to control your aim of your bioweapon) is much, much bigger. Essentially, it's the population of the world except your enemies.

On the one hand, this ought to make it easier to defend against attack with a particular bioagent than it would be to set up conditions where that bioagent is effective against your enemies but not against your friends. Given enough vaccine (and a sensible program for distributing it), you could create a population in which that particular bioagent would have a hard time finding reservoirs of vulnerable people to infect. On the other hand, some worry that vaccines themselves will be used as templates with which to create more effective bioweapons -- tweaking enough details of the pathogen so that it is not recognized by the immune systems of the people who got the vaccine.

To be sure, our bodies are engaged in constant battle with new natural variants of influenza, for example, and some years' flu shots are more effective than others. So turning to a pathogen designed to elude a vaccine sends your enemies back to the vaccine drawing board. But your designer pathogen can still get people on your own side sick, which means you'll need to develop a new vaccine, too.

Is sharing vaccines just inviting bad people to develop pathogens to get around them? Or is sharing vaccines a way to make bioweapons less useful for anyone who might want to use them? If we somehow got a worldwide system of effective vaccine development and distribution up and running, would it even seem worth the trouble to use targeted pathogens against your foes?

Maybe it would solely for the psychological impact of it. The possibility that our enemies could harm us -- indeed, could use us as weapons against each other -- with invisible pathogens that we don't even realize we're carrying or spreading until it's too late will well and truly freak people out. Even if it only happens once or twice, on a large enough scale, it can make us feel more vulnerable than we're accustomed to feeling. If the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001 are anything to go on, that can lead a nation to some bad choices.

Still, I don't think hoarding our vaccines is the best response to the possibility that bioweapons might be used against us. First off, if we want to continue to be able to travel (and to receive travelers), we need the whole herd vaccinated. Second, we may want to consider that citizens of "hostile nations" may be significantly less hostile if they see their supposed enemy sharing medical resources like vaccines with them.

Actually, I wonder whether the biggest hurdle to biodefense in the U.S. would be getting our own population to line up for vaccines. Even if it was possible to produce enough vaccine fast enough, could officials convince enough of the population to get the vaccine? Recall that plenty of people opt out of reasonably safe vaccines for illnesses like measles, mumps, and the flu. In the event that officials called for widescale vaccination against smallpox, the fact that the vaccine itself can have serious complications (including death**) would surely complicate matters.

Still, the political and financial costs of aggressive preventative measures like vaccination would likely be less than those from mounting a defense after an attack. Would we be willing or able to establish quarantines, shut down work places, detain people? In the event that infected people eluded detention, would we be prepared to take them out to prevent them from spreading contagion? Remember how attached people in the U.S. are to their individual rights, especially to move freely. Also notice that detention in the aftermath of a bioattack will not be a matter of rounding up members of one particular political, religious, or ethnic group that the population suspects of sympathizing with those who launched the attack. The pathogen won't care where your sympathies lie.

In light of the challenges the U.S. would likely face preparing for, or responding to, an attack with biological weapons, it strikes me as wrongheaded for us to make it harder for other nations to keep their people safe, too. We're one big germ pool, and helping each other is necessary to fully protect ourselves.

Finally, given the inability of a bioweapon to distinguish between a combatant and a civilian, actually using bioweapons runs afoul of the recognized rules of war. You knew that already.
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*Alternatively, if your bioweapon of choice uses an infectious agent endemic among your people but to which your enemies are unexposed, your side's natural immunity can do the job.

**The deaths from vaccination are estimated at less than one per million. If that one person is someone you love, though, the low frequency probably isn't so comforting.