A NATURAL OR TERRORIST BIOTERRORISM ATTACK WILL EVENTUALLY HAPPEN

…A staged drill of an emergency bioterrorist attack

Bolton’s decision to eliminate the Office of Global Health Security is nothing new.

Well, the “Hits from the Trump Administration” just keep on coming.

Last week was the third time that the national security community has downgraded the importance of disease and bioterrorism threats in the hierarchy of national security issues.

Our current administration has had a brain-fart and has forgotten that in 2001, anthrax-laced letters killed five and sickened 17 others in multiple states?

Or that in 2014, 11 people were treated for Ebola in the United States, resulting in two deaths and widespread panic that nearly shut down the city of Dallas? Or that smallpox killed more people in the 20th century than all the wars of that century combined?

In eliminating the Office of Global Health Security at the National Security Council, it seems these events have slipped the mind of newly installed national security adviser John Bolton.

This raises a very important question: “What is it about international epidemics and biosecurity that so offend national security professionals that their default approach to the threat is to reorganize and eliminate it as a priority focus?”

Kenneth W. Bernard served as a special assistant to the president for security and health during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.  Bernard had previously been the international health attaché at the United Nations.  Back then, the Health and Human Resources Secretary, Donna Shalala assigned Bernard to report to the Clinton White House, and this was the first time a policy expert was sent to work full time on international health issues at the National Security Council (NSC).

The then National Security Adviser, Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger explained to Bernard that global health threats had the potential to kill huge numbers, to cross borders and to destabilize whole regions. “To dismiss it as a ‘soft’ issue,” Berger wrote, “is to be blind to hard realities.”

In 2001, the incoming George W. Bush administration abolished the Health and Security Office, deciding it was not really the business of the National Security Council. Just a year later, after the 9/11 attack and the 2001 anthrax attacks, former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, the president’s Homeland security director, called Bernard back.  He then reopened the White House Health and Security Office, and both the administration and Congress gave full staff and financial support to building the portfolio.

But after President Barack Obama was elected, the office was abolished yet again. In his second term, Obama eventually was convinced that the creation of his Global Health Security Agenda and the unforeseen Ebola epidemic had mandated the re-creation of a senior director for global health security.  This was a position at the NSC that continued through the first year of the Trump administration.

So Bolton’s decision to eliminate the office is nothing new.  It’s just another repeated mistake of previous administrations.

By this action, the administration has broadcast that health, as a security issue, is totally unimportant.  That is the message that it sends, and more important, that is the message that is heard around the world.

Why does this keep happening, from one administration to the next?  Well mostly, it is pure tribalism.  A functional disconnect exists between health and national security, and it is based on the differing interests and cultures of the security tribe and health tribe. By training and inclination, they just differ on what they perceive as priority issues.

But tribalism is no longer an acceptable justification for the White House downgrading leadership on the national security aspects of global epidemics and bioterrorism. We no longer live in the 20th century where international epidemic threats were relegated solely to public-health experts.

It is time to stop pretending health security is a soft issue just because some want it to be. Epidemic disease, whether natural, accidental or intentional, will recur during this and future administrations, and it will affect whole populations and economies as well as individual lives. 

Leadership at the White House and the NSC is not the whole solution. But without it, we are fighting while gagged and handcuffed.

Copyright G.Ater 2018