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CNN Talkback Live

America Speaks Out: The Anthrax Case -- Real Threat or Isolated Incident?

Aired October 09, 2001 - 15:10   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
TAVIS SMILEY, GUEST HOST, TALKBACK LIVE: Does the Florida anthrax case scare you?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Very frankly, we are unable to make a conclusive statement about the nature of this as either an attack or an occurrence.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMILEY: One man is dead, another exposed to anthrax. Do you see this as an isolated case or a sign of things to come? And should America be worrying about protection?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We need to dramatically upgrade the CDC.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMILEY: Anthrax: from prevention to fear, how is it affecting you?

Welcome to TALKBACK LIVE: "America Speaks Out." I'm Tavis Smiley in for Bobbie Battista all week long. Thank you for joining us.

It is a hot topic. You've been watching CNN, you've been seeing coverage of it all day today. People are talking about anthrax, but should you be afraid? Is it a real threat or a perceived threat? Is America's new fear of terrorism making this anthrax case more frightening, perhaps, than it should be?

I think a good place to start our conversation is with the facts, and so we go to CNN's Mark Potter in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Mark, how are you, sir?

MARK POTTER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I'm fine, Tavis. How are you?

SMILEY: I'm doing the best I can. Thanks for coming on.

Let me start by asking you what we know at this hour, given all the anthrax developments taking place on this day.

POTTER: Well, there are certainly more questions than answers. Officials still don't know why one man was killed, another, a coworker, was exposed to anthrax, and why traces of anthrax were found in the building where they both worked, a magazine publishing company in Boca Raton.

What we are awaiting right now, and maybe an hour or so this afternoon from now, is some interesting lab results. We talked to Doctor Jeanne Malecki a short while ago. She runs the Palm Beach County Health Department. She says that they're looking for lab results in the case of Robert Stevens, who, you may now remember, was the man who died last week from anthrax.

Last week and over the weekend they took samples from his house. Swabs and samples and materials, household items. They also took samples from the grocery store that he went to and his workplace, and all the places that he frequented, in an attempt to see if they could try to find out where this anthrax came from. And they sent it all off to a lab. They may be getting those lab results back today, and if so, she says, she will try to make that information public. So we are awaiting that.

The FBI is here in full. They're over at the building in Boca Raton, going through the building with CDC investigators. They're looking at mail that went into the building, they're looking at people who had access to the building. This is a widespread investigation, but as yet, they do not have answers. And that is what is propelling this investigation along. They want to get to the bottom of this as quickly as they can.

SMILEY: Let me ask you how the people in the surrounding area where you are -- people in Florida -- how are they dealing with this? I mean, across the country, of course, this story is gathering steam and people are talking about it, it seems, ad nauseum, on all of the television networks. But how are people -- I'm concerned, or interested, rather -- in Florida taking this? Are people leaving the area? Are they quarantining themselves? Are they running out to buy masks? I mean, what's the reaction there from the public?

POTTER: Well, nothing like that from the public. People are watching this carefully. They have been told by health officials that this is a rare case, that it cannot be transmitted from person to person. But if you talk to the people who were in the building and who are being tested, and people who work there or who visited there are being tested and they are being given antibiotics as a precaution, of course they are very concerned. And they're awaiting test results, which could take days if not longer, and the anxiety levels there among some of them are pretty high.

So far, about 750 people have been tested, maybe another 50 expected today. Another 50 beyond that. Those people certainly are aware, but I don't want to describe a sense of panic here in Florida. People are concerned. People are watching this. They know it's one case of a man who contracted the disease. One so far exposed to it. One building where a trace element was found. That's where it centers right. Now, whether it goes beyond that, we do not know. But Floridians are aware of that, watching closely but not panicking.

SMILEY: That's good new, Mark, if people are watching it closely but not breaking out into panic. And we're delighted that you had time to come on to talk to us. Thank you, Mark, down on West Palm Beach, Florida.

Now to sort out the medical facts and the fears of this anthrax breakout, at least in this isolated case in Florida, CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta is here. And we're delighted to have him.

Dr. Gupta, I think there are all kinds of questions our audience has. I want to get out of the way and make room for them, but let me start with some pretty basic and fundamental questions for those who are concerned about this. What is anthrax?

SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: That's a good place to start. Anthrax is a bacteria. It happens to be a bacteria that forms spores. Those spores are actually -- you think about them, they're actually variants of the same bacteria. The spores are a little different, though. They're very resistant to environmental changes. They can last in the soil for a long time, and they can actually infect people, either through the skin -- the skin the most common way of infection, 95 percent of the infections happen this way.

You can swallow it, or you can breathe it in, which is what we've been hearing so much about. The reason the breathing it in is important is because that's the one that can kill you 90 to 100 percent of the time, if it's untreated.

SMILEY: In this case, we are told, at least, we believe -- it's been reported, I should put it that way -- that this case of anthrax in Florida, we believe was through a letter. How does anthrax -- how does a bacteria that can kill you come in the mail?

GUPTA: You know -- and there's still a lot of speculation going on right now by exactly how this got into the building. From -- in a letter form, basically you would put a bunch of spores, which, incidentally, are very small. We're talking micron in size, here -- a lot of them, thousands of them together. You can't taste them, you can't really see them. They don't have any smell.

And someone would have to breathe in a large quantity of these spores to actually get an infection. What we're dealing with here is two people who were exposed, one person who subsequently went on to get an infection and subsequently died from that. The other person just had an exposure, did not actually develop anthrax, the infection.

SMILEY: How do you treat it and how do you prevent it?

GUPTA: Well, I should just say right away, there's not a lot that we know about anthrax, and part of that is because in order to study something, you'd have to actually study it on human beings. That is, you'd have to actually knowingly expose people to something that people think is deadly.

SMILEY: But yet it's been around for a while. It's not a new discovery, it just happened last week.

GUPTA: That's right. It has been around for a while. It's, in fact, one of the earliest bacteria that people were actually able to classify. And a lot of what we know from it comes from an accident that occurred in the former USSR back in 1979, where a canister of anthrax was released into a population, about a million people. About 79 of those people actually were -- got exposures. Sixty-eight of those people died.

What we learned from that is that there are antibiotics that can treat it. You've heard a lot about Ciprofloxacin as being one of the antibiotics that works well in the laboratory and in animals. Again, we don't know about how well it works in humans, although they expect that it would work well on humans as well. And it works best if you treat it before symptoms actually start. So...

SMILEY: As I have read, there are somewhere between six to eight -- depending on what article you read -- between six to eight biological weapons that might have some reasonable -- might be reasonable to use on an attack against people that you're trying to wipe out. What does anthrax rank on that particular list? Is easy to deploy, or more difficult to deploy?

GUPTA: Well, the World Health Organization considers anthrax to be the No. 1 biological terrorist risk. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily to deploy. In fact, if history teaches us anything, it's a very difficult bacteria to actually turn into a weapon.

There was a terrorist group in Japan, you may remember, that tried to deploy anthrax, in addition to things like sarin, which is a nerve gas. They got absolutely no injuries, no deaths from deploying that anthrax up to seven different times.

It's very difficult to actually take the anthrax, you have to grind it up, you have to dry it. And then you have to turn it into particles that are going to float in air and actually can be breathed in by an individual. That's hard to do. In the process, you may render the bacteria inactive, not as powerful as it once was. It's a difficult process.

So that whole process of actually taking this bacteria and turning it into a weapon is not easy. That's not to say that it isn't dangerous if it does happen, but it's not easy.

SMILEY: That's good news, I think, that it's not easy.

GUPTA: That is good news.

SMILEY: We have to take a break. We'll come back in just a moment and continue our conversation. Dr. Gupta is going to remain with us, and we've got some bioterrorism experts we're going to bring in. Most importantly, our audience wants to get in on this conversation. We'll do all that in just a moment. You're watching TALKBACK LIVE. Stay where you are.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SMILEY: Welcome back. Let's set aside the Florida case for a moment and talk about the use of anthrax as a weapon. Is it possible? Is it a threat?

Joining us now, Bruce Clements. He's from the Center for Study of Bioterrorism at St. Louis University. Larry Johnson is the former deputy director of the State Department's office of Counterterrorism. And Charles Patrick Garcia is a former CIA agent.

Let me start with you, Mr. Garcia, and ask you whether or not this is an isolated incident, as you see it, or this actually means something, in terms of a threat to the American public?

OK, first of all, let me correct. I was not a member of the Central Intelligence Agency. I was a military intelligence person that trained governments in how to counteract threats from bioterrorism.

SMILEY: My apologies.

CHARLES PATRICK GARCIA, BIOTERRORISM EXPERT: The doctor said that it's not easy to deliver anthrax into the population. And I'll tell you something else that's not easy. It's not easy to take four aircraft, hijack them, put them into the World Trade Center and our own Pentagon. But with dedication and know-how, these things can be done. And that's why we have to take the threat very, very real.

Anthrax, as a weapon, if it's taken by a state that knows how to use it, if they took 220 pounds and they delivered it properly, upwind of, let's say, the Capitol, we could expect 130,000 to three million deaths very quickly. That is the capability of this weapon. And there's others. We're not talking about probably a more Is that capability of this weapon. There is others we are not talking about probably a more devastating biological weapon, which would be smallpox.

We know that Iraq, which is a state that supports terrorism, we know that Iraq high-level intelligence official met with Mohamed Atta, who was the ringleader of the terrorists in the United States, admitted in 1995 to the U.N. that they produced anthrax and put them on their warheads during the Gulf War, and our own inspectors that went into Iraq after the Gulf War were amazed to find the amount of anthrax that Iraq had could kill every man, woman and child in the world.

SMILEY: Mr. Clements, let me ask you the same question.

(CROSSTALK)

SMILEY: Yes?

LARRY JOHNSON, FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: Larry Johnson, here. This is getting unnecessarily alarmist. Start putting the credentials on the table. I have been through live agent training. I have been involved with scripting the terrorism exercises, and used the first anthrax exercise with the U.S. military forces that have that mission.

Now, in the world of possibilities, anything is possible. But Dr. Gupta had it exactly right. No. 1, this is not something that somebody can just step into the garage and start manufacturing. And he had it exactly right with respect to (UNINTELLIGIBLE). There, they had the desire. They wanted to do it.

And there's no doubting the fact that bin Laden and his followers would like to do this. But wanting to do it is not enough. You have got to have the scientific and technological capability. You've got to have the money. You have to have the infrastructure, and with all of that, it's still difficult to do.

Now, the biggest threat comes if a country decides to engage us. But at this point, that's not what we're talking about, and I think it is unnecessarily alarmist to start talking about killing millions of people when that's not what we're facing. Because the fact of the matter is, you've got one person dead from anthrax, and you had more people die in that hour last night from an automobile accident. So that is irresponsible.

SMILEY: Mr. Johnson, let me follow up, since your argument is that it would be a more real threat if there were a country engaged in this kind of attack, potentially.

JOHNSON: Absolutely.

SMILEY: How likely is that to happen?

JOHNSON: I think it's unlikely at this point, for this reason. No. 1, Iraq, who has developed these capabilities and who did use them, they used bioagent, but they used chemical agent more often than not. They also discovered in trying to use it that while, theoretically you can kill millions, more often than not, they were as likely to kill their own soldiers, their own personnel, because the problems with predicting weather, the problems with predicting temperature and moisture.

All of these environmental factors come into effect. If you can perfectly predict weather, if you have full confidence of who the weapon is going to affect, then I'd say, yes, you should push it up as a higher probability. But we're not there yet.

SMILEY: All right, Mr. Clements, let me let you get on this. A real threat or an isolated incident? How do you see it?

BRUCE CLEMENTS, CENTER FOR STUDY OF BIOTERRORISM: I think it's somewhere in between the two sides that you just heard. I mean, it is certainly a threat. It's a legitimate threat that we've got to address as a nation, and I do want to say this: As individuals, there is not a lot we can do, and there are people taking inappropriate steps right now, like buying gas masks and stockpiling antibiotics in their homes. And that's not the right response.

We have to address this threat as a nation, just as we do other forms of terrorism, like the hijacking of aircraft. And so we do have to have a balanced response, and it is a legitimate threat. But to successfully carry out a large-scale event where you impact millions of people -- technically, that is extremely challenging and not very likely.

SMILEY: Now that so many Americans are indeed, it would seem by those who are watching all the talk about anthrax and the rise in TV ratings -- now that this is out there, I wonder whether or not you think that our government is doing -- that the U.S. government is doing a good job, in terms of its preparedness, for whatever might come down the pike, in terms of biological terrorism.

CLEMENTS: Well, we've made some fundamental errors in the past, in that as a nation, we've lumped together bioterrorism with all the other forms of terrorism. And as a result, if you look at the kinds of programs that have been developed, most of them involve first responders: fire, police and EMS.

But the difference between most terrorist events and a biological event is that your first responders change. And now you have your primary care physician, your health department employee, your emergency department staff -- those are the people who need more training, more planning, more exercises. And so we need to do more.

Now, one good thing about what we're seeing in Florida is, first of all, it's good news that people are not panicking. That's very good news. The other bit of good news that's coming out of Florida is, it appears that a lot of the measures we've taken over the past several years are working, in that we quickly identified that initial sentinel case, we responded appropriately, we are treating other people who are at risk. And that's good news.

SMILEY: Let's get the audience involved. Chris, who do you have over here?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is Tony. Go ahead.

TONY: Yes, I think the only legitimate threat we have right now is the possibility that this isolated incident evolves into mass hysteria. Because of the difficulty in actually producing the anthrax vaccine and the fact that this hasn't happened anywhere else, or anywhere else major, I don't see any reason to get too concerned.

Tavis, I'd like to make a comment.

SMILEY: Sure, go ahead.

GARCIA: Two things. First of all, there was a comment made that, you know, in -- last night, there was probably more people that died of automobile accidents. But let's look at inhalation anthrax. In the last 100 years in the United States of America, how many people have died of inhalation of anthrax? Only 18. The last one to die in the United States was about 25 years ago. I live in Boca Raton, about two miles away from where this happened. And it's very strange to me that this gentleman, Robert -- the gentlemen that died, Robert Stevens, on Friday, lives about three- quarters of a mile away from the airport in Lantana where Mohamed Atta, as early as August, was training, and about 40 miles south of a small airport where they have crop dusters.

SMILEY: Mr. Johnson, it seems to me there's difference, though, between being terrorized and terrorism. And I don't know that there has been a link drawn between this anthrax incident in Florida and the terrorist attacks this nation has undergone -- underwent about -- actually four weeks ago today.

I don't know that a direct line has been drawn there, and I want to ask you where you think the media is in this, and whether or not you think the media is doing -- is engaged in responsible journalism, or raising the level of hype about this?

JOHNSON: Some are engaged in responsible journalism and some are engaged in hype. I mean, look, yeah, we've had one person die from anthrax. OK, how many people have died from asthma attacks and heart attacks brought on by hysteria over this threat? And I'm not just trying to be funny. I think there are some people -- I've talked to too many people who do not have the kind of background and experience that I have, that are legitimately frightened.

And what we need to understand is anything is possible in this world. And let's start from there. It's possible. But the reality is, the United States is not asleep at the switch with this and has done a number of things to take steps to protect Americans.

SMILEY: Hold that thought. I have to break right quite. Before I go to break, Dr. Gupta, as I read, some of same symptoms -- this is the flu season that we're about to get into, the cold season -- some of the same symptoms that exist for anthrax are the same symptoms as a common cold. I hope hysteria doesn't break out and people are lined up at doctors' offices trying to find out whether or not they've been stricken with anthrax.

GUPTA: Well, someone made a comment too soon, you need to walk the line between justified fear and just complete logic. I think that the symptoms can be very similar to the flu. There are some good tests out there to try and figure out whether or not you've actually been exposed and whether or not you're infected.

A lot of the doctors, a lot of the microbiologists I've spoken to about this said, you know, certainly that may be warranted in certain situations. If you think you're at risk, you think you might have been exposed, there are tests out there, and maybe a test would be a good place to start. Probably self-medicating with antibiotics is not a good place to start. That can cause problems down the road as well.

SMILEY: We've got to break once again. We'll continue in a moment. You're watching TALKBACK LIVE on CNN. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: You're seeing a heightened sense of awareness, you're seeing government officials do everything in the government's ability to get information to the people on the ground, to answer all questions.

And I think also at a time like this you're going to see increasing reports, because people are becoming more sensitive, more aware, even if those reports deal with the flu or other symptoms.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMILEY: Welcome back to TALKBACK LIVE. A couple of your e- mails. "I am a teenager, and I feel as though all of this has made our generation lose its care-free life. But I also feel that this anthrax situation is just an isolated one. If it wasn't, don't you think a lot more than one or two people would be infected?" Kathleen in Gainesville, Florida.

And Glenn in Birmingham, Alabama: "We are in denial about this anthrax situation. There is not this much coincidence in the world. If this doesn't wake us up, then God help us all." Glenn, in Birmingham, we thank you for your e-mail.

Eileen in New York on the phone, thanks for calling. You're on the air and I'm glad you called.

EILEEN: Thank you very much. I think even if the Florida case was a genuine terrorist thing, there's far too much panicking about anthrax and other biological threats. Anthrax, in particular, isn't contagious, and biological weapons in general are so unpredictable and inefficient.

SMILEY: Is that true, Dr. Gupta? Is it not contagious?

GUPTA: That is true. Anthrax, I think everyone agrees that it does not spread from human to human. An important point.

SMILEY: All right. To our audience. Who do you have over here, Chris?

CHRIS: This is Betty, and Betty's a nurse.

BETTY: Thank you. I would like to ask the physician how long can the bacteria live as a spore and under what environmental conditions does it spread. Like wind, rain?

GUPTA: Right. The spores again are actually just a variant of the bacteria. The bacteria forms the spores. The spores can be very resistant to environmental changes. They can persist in soil for decades even.

Also, if the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) spores actually get into your body, it can be up to 60 days before they germinate and subsequently cause problems. Statistically, most of the spores will actually cause their problems, if they're going to, within the first seven days, though.

SMILEY: Jason, North Carolina.

JASON: Yeah, I have a question about whether this is an isolated incident or some sort of terrorist attack. Is there access for other people other than states or people involved with anthrax research to get anthrax and do a single isolated attack on somebody they don't like?

SMILEY: Mr. Clements, do you want to respond to that, you or Mr. Johnson?

CLEMENTS: It's...

JOHNSON: Well -- go ahead, Mr. Clements.

CLEMENTS: Oh, it's really difficult. I mean, in the United States right now, there have been a lot of laws that have been enacted in recent years to make it very difficult for someone to get ahold of a sample of anthrax, unless they have a legitimate need for it in terms of research or vaccine development, pharmaceutical industry.

But the primary concern, I think, that we have at this point is the possibility of state-sponsored terrorists where those organisms are provided: the seed cultures or the weaponized form of anthrax may be provided to terrorist organizations by rogue nations.

SMILEY: Chris, Glenda is over there with you, I believe.

GLENDA: I wanted to know why is it that after 25 years are we now seeing two cases of that, and what is the difference between the symptoms of a could and the symptoms for anthrax.

JOHNSON: Could I answer the question on the 25 years? It's one of those things, I don't think we should be in the game of trying to predict when it will happen. Let's accept the possibility that it will happen.

And then the natural question follows, very rarely are we going to be able to detect it in advance. What's happening in Florida is ideal. One person contracted it has died, the public health service has sprung into action, and are dealing with it effectively.

If we were attacked across the nation, I doubt if we would have the capability to respond, but that is so difficult, really it's almost impossible for it to take place.

So what is going right now, it's within the capability to manage. We should expect -- there could be other things in the future, but it's not going to destroy us. That's the point.

SMILEY: Dr. Gupta, do you want to respond to that?

GUPTA: Yeah, and I'd like to just add on to that as well, that we, you know, we're in a hyperaware, vigilant state right now with regards to anthrax. You have people -- someone said that it's probably too much of a coincidence over the last 25 years we haven't had a case. There's also a possibility, after talking to some of the microbiologist, that in fact there may have been some cases in hospitals that were actually chalked up to unknown or infection of unidentifiable origin.

But now, since we're really looking for the anthrax, perhaps that's part of the reason that we found some. .

SMILEY: Chris, what do you have over here?

CHRIS: Patti.

Patti, go ahead.

PATTI: I'm really curious. My understanding was that this started out as a disease (UNINTELLIGIBLE) animals. How did it go from an animal threat to a human threat?

GUPTA: Well, anthrax is something that we actually know quite a bit about. It's actually one of the first bacteria that we were able to identify. It's something that does occur naturally in some animals, but even back over generations, people who deal with wool -- in particular, goat fur -- did contract anthrax, as I mentioned earlier typically through the skin. But there have been cases of inhalational anthrax, and someone mentioned 18 cases even in this century, from 1900 to 1976.

SMILEY: Mr. Johnson, what do you say to young people like Kathleen in Gainesville, Florida, who sent us this e-mail that I read a few moments ago who feel that this is -- this is not good for her generation, that she said her generation has lost its care-free lifestyle.

What do we say to people who -- that will help them feel less defenseless about a biological attack, or is there nothing we can say, quite frankly?

JOHNSON: We are -- in terms of being able to predict it ourselves, we're defenseless. In terms of the U.S. government putting out intelligence, and combining intelligence and law enforcement information, we have a better chance of doing that. But there are other threats out there that, you know, teenagers are more likely to die of drunk driving than -- than they ever will die of anthrax.

So I think, if anything, it promotes a care for life, and a commitment in bringing us together as a nation, there are lot of problems that we can begin to address in a united fashion.

And this war that's started against terrorism is not going to be over in six months or a year. It's got some very tough problems down the road to solve. And we have to recognize that there will be potential threats, but that our ultimate strength lies in each other and not panicking.

SMILEY: Speaking of young people, Trevor is with us from Tennessee. And Trevor, how old are you, Trevor?

TREVOR: 13.

SMILEY: 13. What's your question or comment?

TREVOR: I'm not really scared at all because I know people that have died of anthrax, but I've really never even heard of anthrax problems.

GARCIA: Tavis, I have a comment to make.

SMILEY: Sure.

GARCIA: We have another fact. My job here isn't to be alarmist, but I think that having -- being an ostrich and having our heard inside the sand doesn't allow us to put the facts on the table and arrive at creative solutions.

In 1992, we discovered after the fall of the Soviet Union that unbeknownst to the rest of the world they were undertaking a massive biowarfare campaign that had 65,000 scientists: microbiologists, pathologists, and experts in aerosol physics that were working in this program. They were producing 100s ton a year of both anthrax and smallpox.

The United States government has come to the conclusion -- and this is a conservative estimate that they have made -- that 7,000 of those scientists are now displaced, they're out of work, and either working for foreign governments or foreign organizations.

So to sit here and say, well, we shouldn't have mass hysteria -- we shouldn't.

SMILEY: Doc...

(CROSSTALK)

GARCIA: But we should recognize that there is a problem...

(CROSSTALK)

GARCIA: Yeah, go ahead.

JOHNSON: There's an important point here. No. 1, the U.S. government has not had its head in the sand. Back in 1990, I was involved with an interagency U.S. government exercise that was preparing for the possibility of confronting these kinds of weapons during the Gulf War.

After 1995, the sarin gas attack in Tokyo, the Nunn-Lugar amendment, it went through, and there was a substantial upgrading in devotion of resources, both domestically as well as internationally, to preparing to deal with these types of contingencies.

If this was 15 years ago, I would say, OK, we are not as prepared as we can be. But what we're seeing today in Florida is not people running around in panic, not people ignorant. We are seeing a very methodical, coordinated approach.

SMILEY: Mr. Johnson, let me interrupt, though. With all due respect -- and I think, I can only believe that you are right about this. But I'm imagining people watching right now listening to you talk about how prepared we are, that our head as a government, the U.S. government's head has not been in the sand. And yet, if you told me that about somebody hijacking airplanes and running them into the World Trade Center, I (UNINTELLIGIBLE) prepared for that as well.

JOHNSON: No, actually, Tavis, if you go back -- if you go back and look at my testimony before Congress in 1995 on the issue of aviation security, we were saying then there were security measures that should have been in place 10 years ago: quite different.

We've known for a long time the vulnerabilities in aviation security. Those went unaddressed for too long. But on the issue of chem-bio, the U.S. government has been taking -- taking immediate steps.

(CROSSTALK)

SMILEY: So you're telling me that our government, the U.S. government, is better prepared to deal with biological terrorism than we were with having airplanes hijacked (UNINTELLIGIBLE)?

JOHNSON: Yes. We have spent -- I'll tell you this much. We've spent more money over the last five years in preparing to deal with the possibility -- the slim risk of chemical and biological than we have in taking the concrete steps we knew -- knew needed to be taken to protect airplanes.

GARCIA: Let me ask you...

(CROSSTALK)

SMILEY: One -- one second. Dr. Gupta, the anthrax debate notwithstanding, again, I keep going back to this research, at least that I keep reading, that smallpox is a much greater threat, poses a much greater threat to the American public even more so than anthrax.

GUPTA: Well, you know, and a lot of people have talked about various biological agents. Smallpox, one of the big distinctions -- first of all, it's a virus. Anthrax is caused by a bacteria.

But probably the biggest distinction of note is that smallpox can be transmitted from person to person, Tavis. And that's an important point. That's something -- you know, we treat it as an eradicated virus now. But if it were released, that's something that could actually be transmitted from person to person.

SMILEY: Who's that trying to jump in on this?

GARCIA: Tavis...

SMILEY: Yes. GARCIA: ... let me -- let's talk about preparedness, because one of the guests is saying let's talk about how prepared we are to fight anthrax. I'd like him to answer one question. June 11th, four months ago, the Department of Defense issued a press release. In that press release, they basically said they were pretty much curtailing the vaccination of all military personnel in the United States. They'd vaccinated close to 600,000. The reason they were stopping the vaccination program is because they only had 24,000 doses of the anthrax vaccine stockpiled.

JOHNSON: That's not the reason. No, that's not the reason.

GARCIA: And it only...

JOHNSON: That's not the reason.

GARCIA: And they need to have six shots, OK, in order to be properly vaccinated.

(CROSSTALK)

SMILEY: Let me get a -- let me get a -- let me get a quick response.

(CROSSTALK)

Let me get a quick response and then to the audience. Go ahead, Mr. Johnson.

JOHNSON: That's not the reason. There was a substantial protest within the military ranks who didn't want to go through with it.

GARCIA: The protest -- I'm a lawyer as well. The legal battle that they're fighting is part of it, but it's more the FDA has put together...

JOHNSON: It was a significant portion of it.

GARCIA: ... (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

Let's talk about creative solutions for a second.

SMILEY: Let's take a break first.

Hold that -- hold that thought, Mr. Garcia. Let's take a break first. We'll come back and continue our conservation lively. TALKBACK LIVE on CNN is what you're watching. We're back in just a moment. Stay where you are.

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