President Bush's $7.1 billion strategy to prepare for a possible worldwide superflu outbreak was greeted with some skepticism by Washington state public health officials, who said there is not enough emphasis on beefing up state and local health resources.

Most of the money would be spent on research and a national stockpile of vaccines and anti-viral drugs. The aim is to overhaul the vaccine industry so eventually every American could be inoculated within six months of a pandemic's beginning.

Such a huge change would take years to implement -- Bush's goal is 2010 -- and his plan, outlined in a speech Tuesday to the National Institutes of Health, drew immediate fire from critics who said it wouldn't provide enough protection in the meantime. States, too, got an unpleasant surprise, ordered to buy millions of doses of an anti-flu drug with their own money.

"I appreciate that the feds want to stockpile anti-viral drugs and improve the work toward getting a vaccine, but we also need basic support for state and local public health departments," said Mary Selecky, secretary of the Washington State Department of Health. She said the proposal appears to represent a $30 million reduction in direct funding for preparedness at the state and local level.

"There seems to be a lack of connection between the strategy and recognition of what it takes to pull off these plans on the ground," agreed Dorothy Teeter, acting director of Public Health -- Seattle & King County.

"It's not that there's too much money being put into (drugs and vaccines)," Teeter said. "It's that there's not enough resources being directed to those who will be responsible for making this work."

The president's strategy earmarks $100 million of the $7.1 billion proposal for state and local preparedness. But the administration's budget had already reduced funding for state and local health departments by $130 million so the proposal actually still represents a cut in funding of some $30 million, Selecky said.

"Our resources have been shrinking for years," said Dr. Ward Hinds, health officer for Snohomish County. Hinds applauded the administration's funding aimed at modernizing vaccine development technologies but said the strategy appears to be heavily weighted by an assumption that pandemic flu is best defended by pharmaceuticals.

"The drugs may be better than nothing, but we shouldn't place too much confidence in them," he said. Nobody knows yet how well Tamiflu or the other anti-viral drugs will work against the current flu virus in humans, Hinds said, and there is not enough to go around anyway.

"It's going to be a very difficult situation," he said, if pandemic flu were to occur this year.

At the same time, Bush sought to reassure a public jittery over the spread of bird flu, a strain of flu known as H5N1 that has killed at least 62 people in Asia since 2003 and caused the death or destruction of tens of millions of birds.

There is no evidence that a human pandemic of H5N1 or any other superstrain is about to start, Bush said repeatedly.

The virus has yet to pass easily among humans, a requirement to become a pandemic. Experts debate whether it ever will, but most believe that a pandemic flu is inevitable some day.

Pandemic flu has struck the United States three times over the past century.

In 1918, 500,000 people in the United States and 20 million worldwide died of what has since been identified as an avian flu.

A pandemic flu could also result from unexpected genetic changes to the seasonal human flus that circle the globe and already cause about 36,000 deaths annually in the United States.

The familiar flu shot -- "I had mine," Bush said in his speech -- prevents or ameliorates the symptoms of seasonal flu. The president's plan would end frequent shortages of seasonal flu shots while also preparing for a wider, more lethal flu outbreak, officials said.

Most public health specialists, despite their misgivings about disproportionately low funding to state and local agencies, called Bush's plan a good start.

"Clearly this is the No. 1 public health issue on the radar screen," said Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota, who advises the government on infectious disease threats.

But stockpiling drugs is not enough, said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who helped lead Senate passage of $8 billion in emergency funding for pandemic preparations last month.

"Stockpiles alone aren't enough without the capacity to make use of them," he said, calling for steps to help states, cities and hospitals prepare for a flood of panicked patients.

A professional organization of disease experts, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said in a statement that "significant issues remain to be resolved, including investment in state and local preparedness, (medical) surge capacity and risk communication."

If a pandemic strikes, the Department of Health and Human Services will direct the medical response.

Today, Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt will unveil the final version of his agency's plan, a document that has been more than a decade in the making.

According to a draft of the plan, obtained recently by The New York Times, the nation is woefully ill-prepared for a pandemic outbreak and, were one to occur, hospitals would become overwhelmed, riots would engulf vaccination clinics and even power and food would be in short supply.

Still to be finalized is a plan from the Homeland Security Department, which will coordinate how the government balances protecting the public with keeping schools, businesses and transportation sectors running.

This report includes information from P-I reporter Tom Paulson, The Associated Press and The New York Times.