The Most Important Act of the Last Two Decades?

A good case can be made that Project Bioshield is the most important piece of legislation passed in the last twenty years. Passed under President Bush in 2004, Project Bioshield’s primary goal was to create advance market commitments to purchase countermeasures for chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear agents (CBRN). Several billion dollars have been spent in this area promoting anthrax and smallpox vaccines and various antitoxins for botulism and nuclear threats. The record on these advance market commitments is mixed with some notable failures.

The second thing the act did is to reduce some paperwork requirements on purchases and research funding. Those seem fine although the simplified procedure is itself too complex and the amounts such simplified procedures apply to are too small, e.g.

The Project Bioshield Act authorizes the HHS Secretary to use an expedited award process for grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements related to CBRN countermeasure R&D Activity, if the Secretary deems a pressing need for an expedited award exists. The authority is limited to awards of $1.5 million or less.

The third aspect of the act was not considered a big deal at the time but is the one that has proved to be the most important. Project Bioshield created the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). In other words, prior to 2004 the FDA had no clear legislative authority to authorize an unapproved vaccine, drug or device. Without Project Bioshield and the EUA procedure the FDA might have eventually found some way to authorize vaccines before full approval. Britain, for example, used a temporary authorization procedure. Or the FDA might have sped up full approval but given the FDA’s lethargic record it’s easy to imagine that this would have taken months longer than the EUA process. As a result, the EUA procedure created by Project Bioshield probably saved 100,000 or more lives.

Important Addendum: It’s also worth mentioning that the EUA procedure doesn’t just apply to approvals it also allows changes in dosage and labeling. Susan Sherman, the senior attorney with the HHS Office of the General Counsel, noted in 2009 that a drug that had been approved for individual health in a non-emergency might have to be used very differently for public health in an emergency and that the EUA process could be used to adjust to these differences:

“You can change the labeling. You can change the information. You can change the dosage. You can give it to populations for which wasn’t approved.” She continued, “In some sense we had to match up in practice a public health response where you might not have the precise labeling that your physician would prescribe to you. There are a lot of variables that are necessary for the public health responders that don’t necessarily match what the approved drug would look like if you just went to your physician and got it because you had that illness.

In other words, the EUA process was made to allow for procedures such as fractional dosing. It’s too late for fractional dosing in the United States (but we should use it for boosters) but fractional dosing remains a vital tool to deal with the global shortage of vaccines.

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