As if Jesse Helms wasn’t enough. North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, has introduced legislation – S. 1873, the Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005 - supposedly to “provide the Department of Health and Human Services with the additional authorities and resources necessary to partner with the private sector to rapidly develop drugs and vaccines to protect the United States from deliberate, accidental and natural incidents involving biological pathogens, such as avian influenza.”

While it sounds fantastic on the surface -- who wouldn’t want smart partnering and collaboration between the government, academia and pharmaceutical companies to develop innovative medical countermeasures? -- the small exemption Burr prescribes, but forgot to mention in his press release deals with freedom of information.

In an article, Secrecy Is Infectious: Bill Would Shield Biomedical Research, Washington Post’s Christopher Lee reports that, unlike any other federal agency, this Department of Health and Human Services spin-off would receive full exemption from the Freedom of Information Act. Burr’s office claims to “necessary to prevent information from falling into the wrong hands.”

First off, if Burr has access, it’s already in the wrong hands. While 40 year old FOIA allows agencies to withhold certain information for national security reasons, this exemption would shield the new agency from oversight with more teeth than that given to the CIA or NSA.

Before becoming President Bush’s chief domestic policy advisor in January, Claude Allen was a top aide at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) where he had been installed by none other than Karl Rove. (Someone who really is able to distinguish between secrecy in the name of national security and treasonous leaking for political gain.)

Allen was the driving force to replace science-based sex education with the failed policy of teaching that only abstinence prevents AIDS. Like Jesse Helms, for whom he once worked as a top aide, Allen saw to it that safe-sex materials were deleted from its Web sites and forced AIDS related agencies into adopting mandatory new rules stressing the failure of condoms in curtailing the spread of AIDS.

In an article, The Bush Theocracy, in LA Weekly in January, Doug Ireland wrote:

Notorious for his anti-abortion stance, at HHS Allen helped use its regulatory powers to turn Title 10 of the Public Services Act — which Bush père had championed — away from family planning and the promotion of condom use and into an abstinence-only program. In his Virginia years, Allen’s Christian-right extremism led him to endanger the health of children. Then Allen worked to defeat legislation that provided health insurance for children of the working poor, largely because the program covered abortion services for rape and incest victims under the age of 18. "When the law was ultimately enacted, Allen was faulted for not enrolling children quickly enough, and admitted that ‘abortion was the sticking point’ delaying the enrollment of children," as People for the American Way (and civil rights groups like the NAACP) pointed out last fall when they successfully opposed Bush’s nomination of Allen for a federal judgeship. "In this episode, Allen proved himself to be so adamantly opposed to reproductive rights that he found it preferable for poor children to go without health coverage than to risk an underage sexual-abuse victim having access to state-funded abortion services."

Oh yes, these are the people who deserve FOIA exemptions to cover up their hate-filled hypocrisy.

Secrecy in the name of national security or to perpetuate a radical, right wing agenda that shields the citizenry from such things as safe sex information that would save the lives of children, or policies that are responsible for deaths of genocidal proportions in Africa owing to failed polices based on religion instead of science?