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The anthrax attacks that followed 9/11 did more than frighten Americans — they helped create the legal, regulatory and biosecurity framework that later enabled the government’s response to COVID-19, according to Dr. Meryl Nass.
Speaking at the Turning the Tide: 9/11 25 Years Later conference last week in New York City, Nass drew a direct line between the anthrax letters of 2001 and the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s worth thinking about the similarities between the COVID experience and the anthrax letters because it seems that both were inside jobs planned by the same cabal for the same purpose,” Nass said.
Nass, an internal medicine physician who has conducted extensive research on biological warfare and anthrax, outlined what she sees as striking parallels between the two events.
“Each had an uncanny, scripted simulation preceding it,” she said, pointing to the Dark Winter tabletop exercise in 2001 and Event 201, a pandemic simulation, in 2019.
“Each was blamed on countries the U.S. government had already targeted,” Nass said. The anthrax attacks were initially blamed on Iraq while COVID-19 was blamed on China.
“A huge, expensive biodefense gravy train resulted after each of them,” she said.
Both events were also accompanied by “a massive amount of false narrative construction and control of the media to project the false narratives.” And neither received a serious investigation into who perpetrated the event, according to Nass.
In addition, both crises “led to a mushrooming of the surveillance state,” Nass said.
‘We got fear propaganda pumped out 24/7’
The anthrax letters began arriving in the weeks after 9/11, as Americans were already on edge. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to media outlets and government offices, killing five people and infecting another 17.
Nass said the attacks opened a new public-health pathway that ultimately led toward “a surveilled, totalitarian and technocratic state.”
“As the hysteria from 9/11 wound down, the anthrax letters appeared and we got fear propaganda pumped out 24/7,” Nass said.
She highlighted several consequences that followed the anthrax crisis, including a continuing fear of contagion, repeated pandemic scares, billions of dollars in biodefense spending, a growing emphasis on vaccines and looser regulations governing medical products.
The pattern has repeated itself again and again, she said. “How many jinned-up pandemics can they pull off?”
Nass listed 11 disease threats that she said major media outlets “tried to scare us with” during the 25 years since 9/11: SARS-1, H5N1 avian flu, Zika, swine flu, three types of Ebola, Marburg, SARS-2, monkeypox and hantavirus.
She also pointed to the dramatic growth in government biodefense spending.
“We were spending less than a billion dollars on biodefense before the anthrax letters,” she said. “In the decade following, we went to $6 billion to $7 billion a year. And then in the decade after that, we went to $10 billion to $11 billion a year.”
During the Biden administration, officials were seeking nearly $20 billion a year for biodefense, she said.
‘Congress went crazy … expanding liability shields’ for drug manufacturers
Nass said one of the most consequential changes came through federal laws that made it easier to deploy medical products during national emergencies while shielding manufacturers from liability.
“After the anthrax letters, Congress went crazy legalizing the use of unlicensed pharmaceuticals and expanding liability shields for them,” she said.
The Project BioShield Act of 2004 created the framework for emergency use authorizations and provided billions of dollars for vaccines and drugs intended for pandemics and biological warfare.
Nass said an unlicensed drug or vaccine could be used during a national security emergency if public health officials thought “it was more likely than not that it would be useful.”
“So a very low bar to start using unlicensed drugs and vaccines,” she said.
The 2005 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, or PREP Act, provided liability protections for certain medical countermeasures used during declared emergencies.
According to Nass, these changes were critical during COVID-19 because they created a system for rapidly deploying medical products while eliminating manufacturers’ legal risks.
“The PREP Act … legalized the use of liability-free vaccines and drugs that might or might not be licensed,” she said.
She also criticized the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016, which protected manufacturers from legal claims for vaccines recommended to pregnant women.
“The nastiest thing was to remove liability for all vaccines that are recommended during pregnancy,” Nass said. “So if anything happens to the fetus or to the pregnant mother, there is no liability.”
‘Biosecurity agenda is not actually about protecting the public’
Nass said the post-anthrax expansion of biodefense eventually evolved into a broader global biosecurity agenda.
She pointed to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, which was established to accelerate the development of vaccines and other countermeasures against pandemic threats.
CEPI’s goal of making vaccines available within 100 days represented a dramatic departure from the traditional development timeline, Nass said.
“It normally took 10 years or more by the time a vaccine could be rolled out for use,” she said. “But all of that was going to be thrown in the trash.”
To achieve that speed, countries around the globe would need to loosen regulatory requirements and establish liability protections, according to Nass.
“CEPI was working on all of that,” she said. “Trying to get … the [World Health Organization] WHO involved, which would then sort of produce its own guarantees or licenses for drugs and vaccines and would use very minimal … regulatory standards. And then they would try to impose these WHO standards on all the other countries.”
Nass said the same approach helped create the conditions for the COVID-19 response, which included developing, authorizing and deploying vaccines and other medical products at unprecedented speed.
Nass also challenged the premise behind the pandemic-preparedness system — that governments must develop products in advance for unknown future threats.
“What will we face? We don’t know,” Nass said. “But we have to start making products anyway, even though we don’t know what we need.”
She argued that repurposed drugs could be deployed more quickly during a respiratory pandemic — but said governments and the WHO suppressed them because they offered fewer financial opportunities.
“There’s no money to be made from them,” Nass said. “And this tells me that the biosecurity agenda is not actually about protecting the public, but it is about protecting the industry and government.”
Anthrax case involved ‘creating a lurid … narrative and repeating it over and over’
Nass also challenged the official account of who carried out the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The FBI concluded in 2008 that Dr. Bruce Ivins was responsible. Ivins died by suicide three days before the FBI’s announcement, after the bureau said it planned to pursue him as the perpetrator and seek the death penalty, according to Nass.
Nass, who knew Ivins, said the case against him was never adequately established. “The case is unsolved, although the FBI would like you to believe otherwise.”
Nass said the FBI focused on Ivins despite what she described as substantial evidence pointing elsewhere.
“The FBI had publicly chased [seven other scientists] in their search to find a patsy that they could pin the case on,” she said.
The National Academy of Sciences later concluded that the available scientific evidence could not establish the origin of the anthrax spores in the mailed letters. Nass said that finding undermined the FBI’s conclusion.
Nass posted a blog in 2010 with more than 20 reasons why Ivins could not have been responsible and “how the FBI had deliberately fudged the case.”
“By creating a lurid Ivins narrative and repeating it over and over and over, most Americans still wrongly think the case was solved, and Ivins did it,” Nass said.
A similar strategy unfolded during COVID-19, when officials and media repeatedly promoted narratives about the virus, its origins and the appropriate public-health response, according to Nass.
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Global biosecurity initiative ‘a very, very lucrative and special industry’
Nass said she sees the anthrax attacks as the starting point for a system that ultimately made the COVID-19 response possible.
She warned that expanding international biosecurity programs could bring more surveillance, emergency powers, vaccine mandates and centralized control over public health.
The potential scale is enormous, Nass said. She cited estimates that a globally coordinated biosecurity initiative, such as the proposed WHO BioHub System, could cost $30 billion to $40 billion a year.
The proposed system would facilitate the sharing of biological materials with “epidemic or pandemic potential,” according to the WHO website.
She also described biodefense as an unusually lucrative industry because governments determine what products are needed and they shield manufacturers from liability.
“There are no standards or rules,” Nass said. “Nobody knows what products you need, what vaccines or drugs, what tests … how many doses … how many gowns, how many masks or gloves.”
Nass said manufacturers simply persuade government officials to fund their products.
“You get a contract. You can charge almost what you want. You’re almost certain to be granted a liability shield,” she said.
That system makes biodefense “a very, very lucrative and special industry.”
Nass urged the audience to resist efforts to give international organizations greater control over health emergencies, and oppose the creation of global pathogen-lending libraries and press Congress to end emergency-use and liability protections.
“Ending those liability shields is the most critical thing we can do,” she said.
The legal and regulatory changes that followed the anthrax attacks created tools that were later used during COVID-19. Those tools need to be dismantled “so we, the people, will be saved from junk drugs and vaccines and maybe deliberately dangerous drugs and vaccines,” Nass said.
“And we should never again allow the government or WHO to control the medical care that you receive,” she said. “We’ve already been there once.”
Watch Nass’ full speech here:
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