-Caveat Lector- nytimes.com
Is Camel Pox Coming? October 21, 2001 By MAUREEN DOWD WASHINGTON John McCain called to try to talk me down. I put aside "Scourge," the book I was reading about smallpox - "It covered the skin with hideous, painful boils, killed a third of its victims, and left the survivors disfigured for life" - and listened. "There's nothing wrong with being afraid," the senator said in that soft, reassuring voice. "Every time I heard the guard's key chain rattle when he came to my cell at an odd hour, I felt fear, but it didn't incapacitate me." Easy for him to say. He's a national hero who was tortured in Vietnam. I'm a spoiled yuppie who desperately wants to go back to a time before we'd heard of microns and milling, aerosolization and clumps in the alveoli. Mr. McCain advised me to channel my fear into something productive. O.K. I am channeling my fear of terrorism into a fear of bureaucracy. Many government officials here do not yet have a grip on an enemy etched in disappearing ink. Washington is rife with contradictory signals. The White House urges us to go out while Dick Cheney is under wraps. Congress urges us to stay calm and go about our business while the entire House takes a powder at the first sign of powder. We are supposed to shop till we drop, literally, as the F.B.I. and C.I.A. warn of major attacks at any moment. The capital is the heart of confusion. The U.S. has been at war with the Taliban for two weeks so . . . we can reinstate the Taliban? The Post Office is sending us mail warning us . . . about opening mail? Nothing seems to track: Gov. George Pataki said he was taking Cipro but wouldn't get tested. Senator John Breaux said he got tested but might not take Cipro. Dan Rather said he hadn't been tested or taken Cipro. Tom Brokaw ended the NBC news with "In Cipro we trust." I went to the White House, seeking some answers from Tom Ridge at his briefing on Friday. But he looked a bit like a big Pennsylvania deer in the headlights. He didn't even know what CNN had been running - that an assistant to a New York Post editor had contracted anthrax. When Mr. Ridge said they didn't know if the anthrax came from a foreign or a domestic source, he was slapped around by Helen Thomas, doyenne of the homeland. "And why are you so slow in finding the actual source?" she asked tartly. "I mean, is it that difficult really?" Tommy "Plenty for Everyone" Thompson was still buddying up to the pharmaceutical industry, refusing to break Bayer's patent to ensure generic Cipro for everyone. A grandfatherly looking man stood at the edge of the stage. Mr. Ridge introduced him as D. A. Henderson, head of his science advisory committee and "the father of the eradication of smallpox." At first I was relieved to see Dr. Henderson, a public health legend. But I began to fret that he was like a detective brought out of retirement to catch a criminal he thought he'd locked up long ago. I ran into my colleague Judy Miller, a bioterrorism expert, and asked if we should be worried about smallpox, camel pox and mouse pox. "We should be worried for the next few years," she said briskly, "and then we'll be fine." The next few years? An F.B.I. swat team descended on a mailbox in the Jersey suburbs, but the agency still has no idea who's doing the mailings or where the anthrax was procured or made, and hasn't had one big break in the Sept. 11 investigation. The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. keep telling reporters how close they came to breaking up the hijackers' plot - if only they had had cooperation from the other agency. It's irritating to hear lame after-the-fact excuses in romance, but it's infuriating to hear them in national security. The F.B.I. is remaking itself to focus on counterterrorism. But when it can't figure out the last attack, how can it prevent the next? I called a reporter who's covered Central Asia and the Mideast. I said, despite news of an anthrax letter sent to the Times's Rio bureau and postmarked New York, I would get beyond my phobia about germ warfare. "Anthrax is not the problem," he agreed. "I'm afraid we're going to have a nuclear exchange in the next four weeks. Sharon's about to go to war with the Palestinians. India could use that as a cover to provoke Pakistan. Then Pakistan might nuke India. All these friction points will be a huge test of Bush." 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