As if what had happened on 9/11 wasn’t terrorizing enough, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War), just days later, a biological weapons attack unfurled across the East Coast and in the state of Florida:
Envelopes laced with weaponized anthrax bacteria were sent through the U.S. mail to two U.S. senators and the offices of several national news organizations, including ABC, CBS, and NBC. When one of these anthrax-filled letters, addressed to Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, was opened inside the mailroom of the Hart Senate Office Building (part of the U.S. Capitol complex), the country suddenly realized it was under biological attack.
The Capitol was shut down. Thousands of congressional staff were tested. Major U.S. postal facilities closed. Twenty-two people in four states contracted anthrax disease. Five died. Horrific, yes, but a mass-casualty attack it was not. Unlike the 9/11 attacks, which were quickly attributed to Al Qaeda, responsibility for the anthrax letters, still contentiously debated, has never formally been solved.
Inside the federal government, the anthrax attacks weren’t just a wake-up call; they became a call to arms. A biological agent could easily be used as a weapon—this kind of an attack was cheap to mount, difficult to attribute, and capable of producing massive impact.
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In 2004, Congress launched Project BioShield—a federal program designed to accelerate the research and development of vaccines and other medical countermeasures—pouring billions of dollars into biodefense.
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This influx of investments fueled innovative vaccine platforms, antiviral drugs, and state-of-the-art diagnostic tools, fundamentally reshaping the nation’s scientific landscape. Across Washington, D.C., and beyond, the power center shifted toward secretive biodefense research, much of it classified. Transparency all but disappeared.
A biodefense industrial complex emerged. And with it, a vast expansion of high- and maximum-containment Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) and Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratories across the United States, and around the world.
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Before September 2001, the U.S. government operated just two BSL-4 laboratories, one military, at Fort Detrick in Maryland, and one civilian, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. After 9/11, the number of BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs surged. Over the next five years, dozens, then hundreds, then more than 1,000 of these new, high- and maximum-containment biosecurity labs were built. A congressional audit in 2007 found there were at least fifteen BSL-4 labs and 1,356 BSL-3 labs in the United States alone. Even more alarming, no one was monitoring any of it.
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“‘Gain-of-function’ is a euphemism,” insists the former presidential advisor Andy Weber. “‘Gain-of-function research’ is another way of saying ‘biological weapons engineering,’” he warns.
Dr. Thomas Ehrhard, former special assistant to the deputy secretary of defense, has even harsher words for gain-of-function, almost certainly because of the knowledge he has acquired running classified biological war games at the Pentagon.
“Gain-of-function is evil,” says Ehrhard. No nuance there.