Over the last year, the U.S. government has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug -- although there is a good deal of uncertainty over whether it is necessary, and even whether it will work. Senior officials took unusual steps to secure the contract for Siga Technologies, whose controlling shareholder is billionaire and longtime Democratic Party donor Ronald O. Perelman.
When Siga complained that government contracting specialists were resisting the company's financial demands, the lead negotiator for the deal on behalf of the administration was replaced.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
“The contract calls for Siga to deliver 1.7 million doses of the drug for the nation's biodefense stockpile. The price of approximately $255 per dose is well above what the government's specialists had earlier said was reasonable ... [S]mallpox was eradicated worldwide as of 1978 and is known to exist only in the locked freezers of a Russian scientific institute and the U.S. government. There is no credible evidence that any other country or a terrorist group possesses smallpox.”