At a joint hearing on Sept. 13, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Alexander Garza said the DHS is putting the "final touches" on preparations for "soliciting groups who would be interested in participating in this pilot project," reported NationalJournal.
The DHS was working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recruit two federal offices and two state offices in the trial initiative, according to earlier news reports. It also has been answering questions about the pilot project from state and local agencies as well as nongovernmental organizations.
"As you can imagine, this is a very complex endeavor," Garza said, referring to challenges in implementing the Defense Department's mandatory anthrax-vaccination program. "So it is no small feat to do this time."
The initiative would offer select state and local officials the option to accept a federally funded course of anthrax vaccination doses and would consider broader distribution, senior medical officials with the DHS and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Global Security Newswire in April.
Another vaccine initiative that has been in the works is the postal plan, a program that would use the nation’s letter carriers to deliver medical countermeasures to the public. “The postal plan puts letter carriers on the street to deliver medications in the event of such an attack,” said Peter Nowacki, a USPS spokesman in Minneapolis, told Emergency Management in 2010. “Mail delivery would be curtailed, and they would just be going house to house delivering the medication along with information sheets telling people how to take the medication or whether they could take the medication.”
The first dry run of the postal plan was in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in May 2012 as part of Operation Medicine Delivery. In less than 12 hours, 40 teams made of up one postal worker and one law enforcement officer attempted to deliver simulated medication to approximately 33,000 households in the area, Security Management reported. According to the Minnesota Department of Health, 1,674 homes were missed due to issues including dangerous dogs and mail slots that were too small to deliver the medication through. In addition, one neighborhood was inaccessible due to high water from heavy rains.
“We think that this exercise really established that the postal option is a viable way to get medicine to the public quickly in an emergency,” Minnesota Department of Health spokesman Buddy Ferguson said during an interview in May with Security Management.
This article has been updated.
