Spin doctors: Tommy Thompson is not a bioterrorism expert. So why does he play one on TV?

Washington Monthly, Sept, 2002 by Garance Franke-Ruta

AMERICAN MEDIA INC. PHOTOGRAPHER Robert L. Stevens was feeling sick when he returned home to Palm Beach, Fla., last Oct. 1 after a trip to North Carolina. By the time his wife admitted him to Palm Beach County Hospital the next morning, Stevens was delirious with fever. The symptoms suggested anthrax poisoning, and preliminary tests could not rule it out, so blood samples were sent to the Florida state health department laboratory and to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. Two days later, a team of CDC anthrax specialists arrived to work with the Palm Beach County health commissioner. On Oct. 4, the diagnosis was announced: Stevens had anthrax. Yet even though September 11 was fresh in the minds of Americans, the Bush administration inexplicably played down his illness. "It appears that this is just an isolated case," Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy Thompson announced that day at a White House news conference. "There's no evidence of terrorism" Stevens died the next day.

Thompson was, of course, quickly proved wrong. The truth about Stevens's case soon emerged--four more people were killed by anthrax-laced letters sent by a bioterrorist still at large--and with it the embarrassing fact that the Bush administration had essentially botched the job of communicating with the American people. Famous for its message discipline, the White House had insisted that its HHS secretary be the lone voice on bioterrorism. Yet, from the outset, Thompson had made a host of elementary errors, suggesting, for example, that Stevens might have contracted anthrax by drinking stream water, something health experts and science reporters immediately knew to be false, given the symptoms he displayed. Such misstatements quickly eroded Thompson's credibility. But reporters had no one else to turn to. "The feds basically put a gag on the local officials and the state officials, too," recalls Sanjay Bhatt, medical reporter for The Palm Beach Po,. This gag order extended to CDC officials, as well. "All questions were directed to Atlanta or Washington, and for about a week we didn't get any response from either to our questions, which we submitted both in writing and over the phone" During the first weeks of the largest biological terror attack in U.S. history, when the need for accurate public-health information was at a premium, government experts were effectively silenced.

More than any other government agency, the CDC's mission is to get accurate information to the public as quickly as possible, so that public health officials and citizens can respond appropriately. The main avenue of dissemination is through the news media. Bush's decision to marginalize the agency's press office in favor of Thompson and his close minions interfered with this mission. Reporters couldn't get their calls returned and as a result, complained New York Times medical reporter Lawrence K. Altman, produced stories that were "often conflicting and occasionally inaccurate" In other words, by centralizing authority, the Bush administration ensured that the public got information that was unreliable and slow in coming. In the absence of reliable information, the public succumbed to national panic. There were runs on gas masks and Cipro, creating shortages that could have led to supply problems had the attacks been more widespread.

In the year since the attacks, the Bush administration has put a great deal of effort into addressing the nation's vulnerabilities. But in the case of the CDC, that effort is likely to make things worse, not better. Rather than bulking up the agency's staff and freeing it to do its job, during the past year the White House has further tightened its grip on the agency concentrating more authority in HHS under Thompson. Were a bioterrorism attack to take place today, reporters--and by extension, the public--could expect not experts and scientists, but more Tommy Thompson and more runaround.

Kooped Up

The CDC press office wasn't always so ineffective. It has proved adept at handling the local press when discrete problems arise in specific locations, such as the outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in Philadelphia in the mid-1970s or the first Hantavirus outbreak in four Southwestern states in 1993. In Philadelphia, the CDC quickly identified the pathogen responsible for sickening the American Legion veterans and calmed a panicked city. After a mysterious respiratory infection killed 11 people--many of them young, otherwise healthy Navajos--CDC officials rapidly identified a Hantavirus as the culprit. While scientists worked feverishly to identify the virus, press officers handled the local media, quelled rumors, and convinced worried Native Americans that the threat to their health was being taken seriously.

But the agency doesn't perform nearly as well when it has to handle highly politicized diseases, especially those that attract widespread attention from the nation al media. The best example of this problem is the story of the AIDS virus.