25 Years After the Anthrax Attacks, America Remains Vulnerable

On Sept. 19, 2001, Robert Stevens headed in to the offices of the Florida-based tabloid, Sun, where he worked as a photo editor. Waiting there was a letter: an unusual note, inside an envelope filled with a grainy white powder.

Mr. Stevens closely examined the letter before returning to work. It was, after all, unlike the publication’s usual mail: tabloid tips and notes from readers. But within days of opening that envelope, Mr. Stevens developed a deadly disease: inhalation anthrax.

He was the first of 22 people — primarily journalists, politicians and postal workers — to develop anthrax after handling powder-filled letters contaminated with a lab-grown strain of the bacteria, and the first of five people who died from the disease between October and November 2001.

The anthrax attacks further terrified a nation already on edge in the weeks after Sept. 11. Just as the Qaeda attacks had upended the country’s national security priorities, ushering in a sweeping electronic surveillance program and new rules for travelers at the airport, the anthrax attacks prompted a rethinking of the government’s approach to biosecurity.

Within weeks of Mr. Stevens’s death, new detection systems and response protocols were put in place around the country, and the federal response shifted from monitoring naturally occurring pathogens to seeking out man-made threats.

Now, 25 years later, experts warn that many of the systems put in place in 2001 have stagnated, leaving the country once again vulnerable. The technology meant to alert officials to a biological attack, experts say, is inefficient and outdated and the federal response remains largely uncoordinated and underfunded.

Biological threat detection systems developed in the wake of the 2001 attacks, such as the aerosol sample collector, BioWatch, have never been significantly updated. And attempts to modernize such devices with faster-acting or more precise detectors have been canceled for lack of funding.

Additionally, the money and research needed to create and deploy updated systems have been hindered by a disorganized federal response. Until 2018, the government lacked a comprehensive biosecurity strategy, leaving various agencies to plan unilaterally.

Recent outbreaks, including those of Ebola, Covid and Mpox, have highlighted just how unprepared the United States is for the next big biological threat, whether intentional or natural.

“Bioterrorism remains a real threat and in fact, I think, we’re seeing some acceleration,” said Shane Kappler, a biodefense expert at MedStar Health and Georgetown University’s National Center for Health Security and Resilience.

Aftermath of the Anthrax Attacks

“You transport yourself back to that time, and it’s hard to describe to folks today, but terrorist attacks on our soil just felt imminent,” said Christopher P. Currie, who leads the Government Accountability Office’s reviews of biodefense strategy.

To quickly meet the threat, researchers looked for existing biodefense technologies they could adapt. One then under development, the Biological Aerosol Sentry and Information System, or BASIS, was intended to detect harmful biological substances in the air at outdoor events; the goal had been to have the system ready in time for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

At 1 a.m. on the morning after Mr. Stevens died, researchers working on prototypes for BASIS were called in for work at the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories. They were given the task of adapting an existing system to detect threats in transit hubs, like airports and train stations. Two days later, on Oct. 8, the new version — named BioWatch — began to be quietly deployed around the country. Within 45 days, the program was up and running in 20 jurisdictions.

“Think of it as a vacuum cleaner,” said Jeffrey Stiefel, who ran the BioWatch program from 2004 to 2008. “It pulled air into these filters. The filters would then be collected once a day and then taken to a laboratory where they would be analyzed.”

After two years of relative secrecy, the BioWatch program was announced as a project of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, during President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address. Since then, BioWatch has undergone few changes despite being the subject of several critical reports from the Government Accountability Office. Attempts to replace or supplement it with more modern programs have been unsuccessful.

One of the key complaints about BioWatch is how long it takes to detect a threat. Because the system relies on workers to manually collect samples and bring them to a lab for testing, there is a 12 to 36 hour delay between collection and identification.

Over the years, researchers worked to streamline the program, hoping to one day create a single device that could sample biological materials pulled from the air and test them. A prototype of this new detector was tested, but was never rolled out. After several years, the technology upgrade was canceled, in 2014.

“It was not wrong to want instant detection of bio threats,” said Mr. Currie. “But unlike explosives or chemicals or other types of things — even radiation for nuclear devices — it’s almost impossible to immediately detect a bio threat because it has to be sent to a lab.”

One problem with BioWatch as the nation’s first line of defense is its limited range of detection. The program was designed to identify between five and eight airborne biological agents deemed the most threatening at a given time. Selected pathogens typically included those that cause anthrax, plague, tularemia and smallpox.

Furthermore, for a filter to detect pathogens in a well-ventilated or outdoor space — the areas in which a BioWatch unit is typically deployed — they would have to be released in very large quantities or very close to the detector.

Addressing those problems with new or improved programs has been difficult, in part because several government agencies are responsible for biosecurity. A single, cross- government biodefense strategy was not adopted until 2018, and the current strategy still relies on several agencies at disparate funding levels dividing the work of planning, detecting and responding to biological threats.

“Agencies are all doing their own thing in their own mission space, and in many ways, doing a good job of it,” Mr. Currie said. “But I think the challenge is that there’s nobody really in charge at the top that can direct resources to different areas, or make decisions about where priorities should lie between the agencies.”

The New Era of Biological Threats

The investigation into the anthrax attacks had lasted nearly a decade before federal investigators ultimately tied them to a single perpetrator: Bruce Edwards Ivins, a biodefense researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, who died by suicide in 2008 before charges could be brought against him.

In the years since the letters were sent, deliberate biological attacks have, at times, taken a back seat to accidental and natural threats, like Covid.

“The biggest change since 2001 is scope,” said Raj Panjabi, who served as a White House National Security Council director during the Biden administration. “The government went from bracing for one kind of attack, in that case anthrax, to planning for natural, accidental and deliberate biological threats.”

But, in some ways, the chances of an intentional attack are higher now than they were a quarter of a century ago. Advances in artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and gene-editing technology have made it easier for bad actors to engineer pathogens.

This spring, experts warned that A.I. chatbots were dispensing advice about how to make pathogens more dangerous, leading A.I. executives to call for more stringent controls on the fabrication of DNA. And in September, Anthropic said it had blocked several attempts by people possibly trying to weaponize pathogens.

Adding to frustrations about the government’s failure to meet the threat is that promising detection technology is being developed by the private sector and not being used.

“There’s an abundance of really compelling technology in biotech that just languishes,” said Jake Adler, an engineer and chemist who recently founded Pilgrim, a biodefense company aimed at creating faster-acting detectors for airborne biological threats.

But before new systems can be put in place, experts said, gaps in funding and governance need filling.

“I was once told by a senior leader in government that it’s much easier to persuade people to put out the fire in front of their eyes than the fire they can’t see,” Dr. Panjabi said. “Biodefense is a slow-burning fire.”