Smallpox, big risk. (Scan).(Brief Article)

Don't feel bad if you missed the 1995 movie 12 Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt--unless you spend your time trying to foil terrorist plots. The flick wasn't a critical success by any stretch, but it provides a simple plan for anyone looking to inflict maximum damage with a bio-terrorist agent.

In the film, a mad scientist nearly destroys the world by igniting a devastating plague with a deadly virus. The doctoral demon doesn't release his killer pathogen in a single city, as most of our government planners have gamed, but by traveling to half a dozen major cities and releasing his bug at each stop. Now that takes real ingenuity.

Well, not really, but somehow our government has failed to consider this scenario. Current plans for combating a potential attack with smallpox, clearly one of the most deadly of the possible bio-terror agents, call for selective vaccination at the site of an attack. What's really needed is mass vaccination before an attack and the development of drugs that can nix the infection as easy as antibiotics can treat pneumonia.

Why should we take smallpox so seriously? We know the Soviet Union was able to weaponize the deadly virus successfully. And we should just go ahead and assume that other rogue nations did not relinquish their stockpiles of the killer agent, as promised.

A terrorist attack with this virus doesn't need to be delivered by zooming missiles. It can be as simple as a handful of terrorists infecting themselves and coughing their way through the subways of our major cities. It kills one third of its victims and leaves others horribly disfigured, sometimes blind.

Right now, the government's official plan is to combat an attack by "ring vaccination." Federal health officials would fly the vaccine to the scene of an attack and quickly vaccinate as many of the local people as they can. It's a good plan if the virus springs up in a single location. If it is released in just a few other cities, ring vaccination is folly.

Federal officials have expanded their plan to include the vaccination of as many as 500,000 "first responders"--mostly emergency medical people and hospital workers. But the government still won't allow private citizens to get voluntary vaccinations--out of fear that the (minuscule) risk posed by the vaccine is more sinister than ...