The article on “Changes in U.S. Biosecurity Following the 2001 Anthrax Attack” published in journal of Bioterrorism & Biodefence.

On September 18, 2001, anonymous letters laced with anthrax spores were dropped in a mailbox in Trenton, New Jersey, en route to multiple national news organizations. A second mailing in early October had refined the spores into an easily-inhalable powder and targeted two U.S. senators. The most recent bioterror attack in U.S. history had begun, and spurred a national frenzy in the wake of 9/11. In all, just 17 people were hospitalized and only 5 died, but the event instigated an order-of-magnitude increase in biodefense spending and transformed the entire biodefense landscape over the following 15 years.

In 1954, Congress authorized a medical volunteer program termed “Project White coat” to extend the biodefense program and help develop medical countermeasures to known threats. The program operated alongside the offensive bioweapons program through 1969, when the Nixon administration renounced all development, production, and stockpiling of biological weapons and maintained that the U.S. would retain only small quantities of infectious agents to develop medical countermeasures. Three years later. 

In 1972, an agreement was reached between more than 100 nations at the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention “never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain” biological agents or toxins.

American biosecurity initiatives became entirely defensive, and few major policy changes occurred for nearly three decades until the second term of the Clinton administration. In 1997, the U.S. formally defined “Biologically Select Agents or Toxins” (BSATs) as agents with the “potential to pose a severe threat to public health and safety”.

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