Our World

Anthrax dispute suggests Bioshild woes

Anthrax

Anthrax killed five people, left seventeen very ill and terrified the entire country. Ever since five years ago when anthrax swept through the nation they have been looking for vaccines. They were given a 1 billion dollar contract from the U.S. Department of Health and Services to find one. The attacks in 2001 had prompted a Bioshield project, which would promise to build drug stockpiles for another bioterror attack.

They gave the project, called anthrax project, to the company VaxGen in 2004. The contracty was for 877.5 million dollars and was looking for a way to defend the bioweapons from terrorists. The VaxGen said that only three shots were going to be needed to cure this, opposed to the 18 shots for the current vaxine. VaxGen has not been very prompt with the coming of this new vaccine. The original due date was actually in November of 2005.

VaxGen and the government however are coming over a lot of differences with their opinions. They now are going down in the stock market and are threatened by the government to not be paid until they completed a test for this new vaccine.

They are supposed to complete a time worthy, costly, and efficient test on humans to make sure it worked out. VaxGen has recently been blaming the government for all the delays they have been having because of the decrease in the stock and the threats from the government.

I did a blog on this article but I think it is particulary interesting with the new inventions and deadlines soon coming. I didn't even know that they were still looking into a vaccine for anthrax anymore. I thought this was very interesting and a great thing that we are still trying to look for more ways to help with the anthrax situation. It has not been a very big deal anymore but could very possibly come back in the future and to make sure we have a vaccine is great.

Personally, I sort of feel bad for VaxGen and the situation it is in. I think it is partly their problem for the delays in the system, but it also doesn't help with the government being very unsupportive. It is hard enough coming up with a vaccine but it doesn't help that they are losing their profit to help find one. They barely have any money to look into more cure and I think that is putting a huge damper on their success and deadline issues. Please respond and tell me what you think about the whole situation.

posted by Anonymous @ 10/01/2006 07:32:00 PM