More on smallpox: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Ever hear of “Dark Winter”? Me neither. Phil Carter has. Don’t read close to bedtime.

Notes:

1. Time to add the Secretary of HHS to the NSC?

2. Time to get an HHS Secretary who knows something about medicine?

3. Who’s the senior health official at Homeland Security?

Earlier post here. Thanks to Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds for the links.

Brookings will have a paper out and available on line Monday at 10 am.

Via Glenn, here’s the “Consensus Statement” on smallpox as a bioweapon, published in JAMA three years ago. [Link requires subscription, but your organization, especially if it’s a university, may be a subscriber. Or you can pay nine bucks.] It mentions that only some states have mandatory-isolation laws; has anyone followed up on this? It also mentions a three-year lead time to gin up vaccine production capacity. Ugh!

Hey, there, you in the left blogosphere! Yeah, you! This is about ten times as important as Trent Lott, AND it’s a terrific issue to make against Bush and the Mayberry Machiavellis. Smallpox is a major national security issue, and they wimped out on it. Let’s have some noise here!

Next in thread here

Author: Mark Kleiman

Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out. Books: Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken) When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993) Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989) UCLA Homepage Curriculum Vitae Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com