Remembering the Anthrax Attacks

Guest Opinion

The 25th anniversary of the anthrax attacks is marked on September 18, one week after 9/11. September 18, 2001, was the date the anthrax letters were mailed to their intended victims.

Between 9/11 and the receipt of those anthrax-filled envelopes, I wrote an op-ed for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal print newspaper, published September 22, 2001. In it, I suggested that we would be completely unprepared if 9/11 had been a bioterrorism attack.

The first victim of the attack, Robert Stevens, a photo editor for The Sun tabloid at American Media Inc. (AMI) in Boca Raton, Florida, was hospitalized on October 2, 2001, and it was announced that he had been infected with anthrax on October 4, 2001.

Then other news began to unfold, followed by the largest FBI investigation in the history of the organization.

Letters were mailed with weapons-grade anthrax, which would infect anyone who tore open the envelope and inhaled the highly refined anthrax spores. Letters were sent to some members of the U.S. Senate, a journalist, and we may never know who else.

The envelopes were opened in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, resulting in a yearslong shutdown to clean the air ducts throughout the building that might have trapped the spores. The postal service facilities known to have handled the identified weaponized letters were also closed for cleaning.

Five people died and 17 were infected by anthrax from these envelopes. Although this number is small compared with the thousands who died on 9/11, it was the horrific result of a bioterrorism attack on America.

It changed the way the U.S. Postal Service worked, the way we mail our letters and packages, and the way mailrooms opened their mail.

It also gave rise to about 10 new federal statutes, including a small part of the PATRIOT Act that criminalized bioweapons and weapons of terror; changes in how biological agents are handled, inventoried and accounted for in research; how emergency services are organized in hospitals and disaster scenes; how crop-dusting security measures are taken; and how food, farm animals and crops are tracked in order to intercept attempts at bioterrorism attacks on the food supply.

In addition, the need for more high-level biocontainment laboratories was found to be essential for analyzing all the anthrax samples being collected, as well as for understanding potential bioweapons and developing countermeasures and vaccines to protect against them.

Since the 1940s, the United States had USAMRIID, the Army’s biological weapons laboratory, which at one time manufactured biological weapons before they were banned by international agreement in 1973.

But now university research and private-sector research went much farther than military uses. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led by Director Anthony Fauci, created a framework for research centers that would be funded to coordinate all of this needed research.

This became the Regional Centers of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases Research. They were funded for a little more than a decade, and then the program was ended under the Obama administration, which no longer had bioterrorism as a priority.

Further, President Obama put a moratorium on gain-of-function (GOF) research by ending federal funding for it in 2014, but only for a few viruses, including SARS and MERS. Then, in 2018, the moratorium was rescinded.

The risks are weighed against the benefits to decide if such research should be conducted, and it is my opinion that GOF research never outweighs the risks.

In 2003, a SARS outbreak in China’s Guangdong region resulted in deaths around the world among those exposed to the initial case. At the time, researchers concluded that the virus had made a leap from civets in a wet market to humans. Sound familiar?

However, there is still a likelihood that this was a laboratory release. After the SARS outbreak, laboratories in Beijing conducted research that resulted in two accidental infections of laboratory researchers between 2002 and 2004.

How Should We Remember the Anthrax Attacks?

On August 10, 2026, D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced H. Res. 1480, honoring the victims of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The resolution recognizes Joseph Curseen Jr. and Thomas Morris Jr., postal workers at the Brentwood, D.C., postal facility who died after exposure to anthrax-contaminated mail that was processed through the Brentwood facility.

It also honors the three other people who were victims of the mail attacks, as well as the other three people killed and the 17 people who became ill. The resolution was referred to the House Oversight Committee. This is the third term in which Norton has introduced the resolution.

The two postal workers died after being sent home by their health care clinics, which failed to recognize that they were infected with anthrax despite worldwide 24/7 news coverage of the anthrax attacks—and right in the center of Washington, D.C.

The first victim’s family settled for an undisclosed amount after filing a wrongful-death action, and the second victim likely received an undisclosed settlement as well.

Robert Stevens’ estate filed suit against the federal government for negligent operation of the military biological laboratory that was eventually identified as the likely source of the anthrax processed by the primary suspect in the anthrax case.

Although the federal government enjoys sovereign immunity, it does not enjoy that same immunity for grossly negligent behavior. However, the case never reached trial while the FBI investigation was ongoing, and ultimately a settlement of $2.5 million was paid to the Robert Stevens estate.

Just before the FBI was going to make an arrest of the alleged perpetrator, Bruce Ivins, a research scientist at USAMRIID, the military laboratory in Maryland, committed suicide.

So there was no resolution of the case, only closure.

No commemoration.

Bioterrorism Lessons

We should commemorate those who died and those who were injured in the anthrax attacks, and we should also remember the lessons of the attacks.

The U.S. learned more about preparation and treatments over the years through dedicated funding for Centers of Excellence at universities following the anthrax attacks. More laboratories were built, and two main high-containment laboratories were added to the U.S. infrastructure.

International collaborations also led to funding foreign laboratories for collaborative research. The downside was that there was no inventory of the BSL-3-level laboratories that were growing in number. Another concern was the risk of working in foreign laboratories with safety protocols that were less stringent than those we would require, despite intensive training provided to these laboratories.

In the decades that followed, the U.S. learned from this research about preparation for pandemics that followed: SARS in 2003; bird flu in 2006; swine flu in 2009-2010; the Ebola outbreak in 2014-2016; and COVID-19 beginning in 2020.

However, the earlier support for research inspired by the anthrax attacks during the George W. Bush administration was all but gone by 2020. By then, discoveries involving vaccine platforms and much more knowledge about the workings of bacteria, viruses and prions had become part of the U.S. arsenal against a bioterrorism attack.

While we have some recent experience with pandemics, we have to remain vigilant to the fact that there are many ways bioterrorism may occur—through the food supply system, the farm network, the air, water or food.

From that, we should remember that bioterrorism will likely not come in envelopes the next time.

To read more articles by Professor Sutton go to:  https://profvictoria.substack.com/ 

Professor Victoria Sutton (Lumbee) is a law professor on the faculty of Texas Tech University. In 2005, Sutton became a founding member of the National Congress of American Indians, Policy Advisory Board to the NCAI Policy Center, positioning the Native American community to act and lead on policy issues affecting Indigenous communities in the United States.