Where Al Qaeda and Health Care Collide

Who would have guessed there would be a connection between the current Health Care debate, and what's missing from it, and al Qaeda? Not me, until I read this article recently,
Let America Have The Smallpox and Anthrax Vaccines. Why is this important? Aren't we done with that whole smallpox thing? And Anthrax - wasn't that just a scare up on Capitol Hill?

Turns out, we should be mighty concerned:

“I sleep like a baby,” says U.S. Air Force Colonel Randy Larsen (Ret). “Every three hours, I wake up screaming.”

It’s little surprise that Larsen has such trouble getting shuteye. As executive director of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, Larsen spends his days and many nights visualizing mushroom clouds over U.S. cities and emergency rooms clogged with victims of biological attacks. Among his many solutions to America’s WMD challenges, this may be the easiest: Let Americans get immunized against smallpox and anthrax.

“Smallpox and anthrax are our two biggest biological threats,” Larsen tells journalists gathered here on November 16 by the Heritage Foundation. “Smallpox and anthrax are the only biological threats for which we have FDA-approved vaccines. We have enough smallpox vaccines for every American, but not enough anthrax vaccines even for 10 percent of our population. Once we increase that supply, we can take these two risks off the table.”

Let's stop there - why is there only sufficient vaccinations for 10% of the population for a deadly biological threat? Why are we not getting them? Why are they not discussing this as a critical component of ANY health care reform? Just wondering. And for good reason:

Voluntarily immunizing Americans against these two diseases would deter terrorists from plotting such attacks. Even vaccinating some Americans would create “herd immunity,” whereby those who stay healthy would impede an epidemic’s progress, much as firebreaks retard advancing infernos.

Larsen’s commission offered this sobering conclusion last December: “Unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.”

Holy crapoli - that is a most sobering assessment. It gets worse: In an October 21 progress report, this bipartisan board cautioned that “a one- to two-kilogram release of anthrax spores from a crop duster plane could kill more Americans than died in World War II,” specifically, 380,000 (emphasis mine). “Clean up and other economic costs could exceed $1.8 trillion.” “Dark Winter,” a June 2001 high-level simulation exercise, assumed that a covert smallpox attack would infect 3.3 million Americans, one-third fatally.

A biological attack’s psychological impact would be incalculable, especially if healthy Americans saw their smallpox-infected neighbors as contagious “enemies” to be shunned.

That is a staggering number - more people could be killed by a relatively small amount of anthrax than died in WWII. And the idea that smallpox-infected people would be shunned, and viewed as "enemies" is a threat I can see played out in my mind's eye, unfolding like a Hollywood movie.

There is more, and this will make you sit up straight in your chair:

America’s Islamofascist enemies have stayed busy in this sphere.

“I was directly in charge…[of] the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax,” Khalid Sheik Mohammed told a Guantanamo military tribunal on March 10, 2007. KSM was 9/11’s chief architect and al-Qaeda’s self-described “Military Operational Commander.”

The Commission’s crop-duster scenario was conceived after Americans discovered two Afghan anthrax laboratories. “The 9/11 Commission Report” says Jemaah Islamiah agent Yazid Sufaat “would spend several months attempting to cultivate anthrax for al Qaeda in a laboratory he helped set up near the Kandahar airport.”

Interestingly enough, Sufaat was captured thanks to information that American interrogators gleaned after waterboarding KSM. Had America not dampened KSM’s nose, US soldiers or civilians already might have had Sufaat’s anthrax up their nostrils.

“Four pounds of anthrax…carried by a fighter through tunnels from Mexico into the US, are guaranteed to kill 330,000 Americans within a single hour,” laughed Kuwaiti professor and terrorist sympathizer Abdallah Al-Nafisi in a speech broadcast February 2 on Al-Jazeera and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. “One person, with the courage to carry four pounds of anthrax, will go to the White House lawn, and will spread this ‘confetti’ all over them, and then will do these cries of joy. It will turn into a real ‘celebration.’”

Four pounds - smaller than a regular size bag of flour - is all it would take to kill 350,000 Americans. It boggles the mind, or at least, mine.

With our current border control issues, I think we can all see how this could happen. Especially when I tell you that the Obama Administration, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to CUT the number of border patrol agents, by a total of 384. I thought that was ridiculous when it was just a matter of the current stream of illegal immigrants getting into our country as is, much less when the specter is raised of an Anthrax-bearing al Qaeda terrorist is coming through the tunnels.

There are, of course, issues with widespread vaccinations:

Today’s dilatory federal rollout of swine flu shots offers little confidence that government can deliver smallpox and anthrax inoculations with speed and tranquility, especially after a shocking attack turbocharged public anxiety.

Instead, these vaccines should reach thousands of hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices now. Americans calmly could request them during routine medical visits, rather than overwhelm government agencies amid widespread panic after thousands of citizens have fallen ill — or worse.

Al-Qaeda and other vicious killers surely have a “To Do” list of horrors they would love to hurl at us infidels. Let’s deny them at least these two potential murder weapons.

Mr. Murdock, a New York-based commentator to HUMAN EVENTS, is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

I don't know about you, but this scares the bejesus out of me. Our borders are already porous, through no fault of the border control guards - there are simply too few of them, and fewer now, thanks to Obama. I cannot even IMAGINE the logic - or lack thereof - that went into that decision, but this very real scenario, by a respected member of the Intelligence Community, should give us all pause.

There is a solution, though, and a relatively painless one at that. Vaccinations would solve the immediate problem, and minimize the potential threat. The time is not soon enough, especially if an attack of Anthrax is imminent. Even still, better to begin now than wait until it is too late.

Now, about those border guards...