Philip Smith, MD, discussing, "Why Nebraska?"

14 April 2022

Philip Smith: That’s the $24,000 question. Why Nebraska? Because it doesn't seem logical, but then when you think about it, it made sense, because—first of all we thought of it, and other people—nobody else really came up with the idea at that point. Things changed after Ebola, I can tell you, but Nebraska's in the center of the US. There were only two other biocontainment units, one in Atlanta, Emory University, and one at USAMRIID. And they were both two-bed units and they were both on the East Coast. We had a number of other things going for us as well. We had the fact that we had both civilian and military airports with dual access to the civilian and to the military casualties that might lead us to activate our units. And Dr. Hinrichs had built a BSL-3 laboratory that was very good and safe and capable of dealing with pathogens like this. So for all those reasons, it just fell into place, it had to be in Nebraska.

From the McGoogan Health Sciences Library Special Collections and Archives