By David Willman, Los Angeles Times
A company controlled by a longtime political donor gets a no-bid contract to supply an experimental remedy for a threat that may not exist.
Reporting from Washington— Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work.
Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world’s richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.
When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company’s financial demands, senior officials replaced the government’s lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show.
When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing.
Siga was awarded the final contract in May through a “sole-source” procurement in which it was the only company asked to submit a proposal. The contract calls for Siga to deliver 1.7 million doses of the drug for the nation’s biodefense stockpile. The price of approximately $255 per dose is well above what the government’s specialists had earlier said was reasonable, according to internal documents and interviews.
Once feared for its grotesque pustules and 30% death rate, smallpox was eradicated worldwide as of 1978 and is known to exist only in the locked freezers of a Russian scientific institute and the U.S. government. There is no credible evidence that any other country or a terrorist group possesses smallpox.
If there were an attack, the government could draw on $1 billion worth of smallpox vaccine it already owns to inoculate the entire U.S. population and quickly treat people exposed to the virus. The vaccine, which costs the government $3 per dose, can reliably prevent death when given within four days of exposure.
Siga’s drug, an antiviral pill called ST-246, would be used to treat people who were diagnosed with smallpox too late for the vaccine to help. Yet the new drug cannot be tested for effectiveness in people because of ethical constraints — and no one knows whether animal testing could prove it would work in humans.
The government’s pursuit of Siga’s product raises the question: Should the U.S. buy an unproven drug for such a nebulous threat?
Well I would definitely challenge that the smallpox vaccine stockpiled by the U.S. would do anything for the disease if there was an outbreak. There’s no study showing any smallpox vaccine was ever effective, and it certainly makes no sense to say giving a vaccine after exposure to the disease is going to provide any protection (that’s never been proven either). But to point out even sillier claims is that the Los Angeles Times article states that the vaccine will prevent death within four days of administration. Now you and I and everyone else knows they did not test this. They did not infect people with smallpox and give one group the vaccine while another group got a placebo, then check to see the death rate in each group. I wish the Los Angeles Times would do real journalism and either print only what they know, or fully research claims they read before simply repeating them. But I guess if we had real journalism then our media as we know it today would cease to exist. I, however, am all for that.