ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two specific public health responses to 9/11, the treatment of those exposed in the anthrax by mail attacks, and the proposal for new state antibioterrorism legislation. The public health or military authorities that make unapproved or partially-tested drugs and vaccines available, should only do so if they are prepared to recommend their use. In Blindness, Nobel Prize laureate Jose Saramago chronicles the quarantining of the first victims of a plague of blindness. Many Americans were temporarily blinded on September 11 by the smoke and debris in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There is no reason for civilians to have to trade safety for liberty in an emergency in which unapproved or partially-tested drugs or vaccines are made available. The choice to use them should continue to be an individual's choice, as it properly was for civilians in the case of the anthrax vaccine.
