Congress appropriated funds for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1998 to acquire a stockpile of pharmaceuticals and vaccines to counter any biological or chemical threats to the country, as well as to be prepared for outbreaks of diseases that could cripple the U.S.
The program was originally called the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile (NPS), but it has since been expanded to include much more than just medicines. On March 1, 2003, the NPS became the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) program and went from being managed by the CDC to being jointly managed by DHS and HHS and the CDC.
Medical supplies from CDC’s Strategic National Stockpile are worth just over $7 billion. Learn more: June 28, 2016
No one is talking, but it is believed there are six secret facilities around the U.S. where the SNS stockpiles are located. And just so readers know, the Ark of the Covenant is not packed away in one of the facilities. But the size of the warehouse in the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark would aptly describe the actual size of one of the SNS warehouses.
A National Public Radio reporter was given a tour of one of the SNS facilities. Nell Greenfield-Boyce is the first reporter ever to visit a stockpile site, she was told. She had to sign a confidentiality agreement and cannot describe the outside of the facility, although she says it was huge.
Greg Burel is the director of the Strategic National Stockpile program at the CDC. He told NPR’s reporter, “If you envision, say, a Super Walmart and stick two of those side by side and take out all the drop ceiling, that’s about the same kind of space that we would occupy in one of these storage locations.”
There is a very good reason why the warehouse locations are kept secret. “If everybody knows exactly what we have, then you know exactly what you can do to us that we can’t fix,” says Burel. “And we just don’t want that to happen.” Today, the value of all the medical supplies is worth over $7.0 billion.
The inventory of supplies stored in the warehouses includes millions of doses of vaccines against bioterrorism agents like smallpox, antivirals in case of a deadly flu pandemic, medicines used to treat radiation sickness and burns, chemical agent antidotes, wound care supplies, IV fluids and antibiotics.
The NPR reporter noticed a caged and locked area in the warehouse and asked what was stored there. She was told by Shirley Mabry, the logistics chief for the stockpile, that this was where painkillers that could be addictive were kept, “so that there’s no pilferage of those items.”
Besides medications, vaccines and antivirals, there are rows upon rows of ventilators, all kept in a constant state of readiness. Mabry said they are recharged once a month and sent out every year for maintenance. The purpose of the ventilators? To keep sick or injured people breathing. There are also a number of prepacked shipping containers, called push-packs, stocked with 50 tons of goods, ready to be sent out at a moment’s notice to public health officials if needed.
What about expiration dates?
That is the one big wrinkle in the whole setup, expired medications and vaccines. When medications expire, they are replaced. This is particularly true of liquid medications like insulin, IV antibiotics, and a few others. Most medications have expiration dates ranging from one to five years.
Also, there are some medicines in the stockpile that are very powerful, very exciting, and very expensive. They expire in one to two years. The point is, while the cost of replenishing stocks of medications continues to go up year after year, the funds allocated for maintaining the SNS facilities remains flat says Dr. Tara O’Toole, a former homeland security official. “This is an unsustainable plan,” she says. “And we don’t think there’s enough money to do what the stockpile says it must do, already.”
Has the nation’s stockpile ever been used? The SNS program was first used in June 2001, when 200 ventilators and related supplies were sent to Houston in the wake of Tropical Storm Allison. Three months later, SNS provided items following 9/11.
