Boxes of medical supplies stacked high in government warehouses to help citizens in the event of a public health emergency.
"If everybody knows exactly what we have, then you know exactly what you can do to us that we can't fix," Greg Burel, director of the program told National Public Radio in a 2023 interview.
NPR science writer Nell Greenfieldboyce recently visited an SNS. She was told she was the first reporter ever to visit the secret warehouses, and she had to sign a confidentiality agreement not to describe the location or the exterior of the facility.
The government recently hired a firm called Gryphon Scientific to analyze how well the stockpile could respond to a range of health disaster scenarios.
The brief shelf life of some of the newer medicines is a problem for the SNS. "These are often very powerful, very exciting and useful new medicines, but they are also very expensive and they expire after a couple years," explained Dr. Tara O'Toole, a former Homeland Security official who is now at In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit that helps bring technological innovation to the U. S. intelligence community.
Local public health officials have had severe budget cuts and are underfunded, Petersen told NPR. "Over and over, I heard worries about this part of the stockpile system."
O'Toole said, "We have drastically decreased the level of state public health resources in the last decade. We've lost 50,000 state and local health officials. That's a huge hit." She commented that emergency drills would be helpful, adding, "The notion that this is all going to be top down, that the feds are in charge and the feds will deliver, is wrong."
https://madgewaggy.blogspot.com/2024/06/whats-government-hiding-from-public.html
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