The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA) is a public health act originally drafted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to aid the United States' state legislatures in revising their public health laws to control epidemics and respond to bioterrorism. The CDC's draft was revised by the Center for Law and the Public's Health, a collaboration between Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University. By December 21, 2001, the act was released to state legislatures for review and approval. Critics immediately charged that the MSEHPA failed to protect the general public from abuses arising from the tremendous powers it would grant individual states in an emergency. The MSEHPA provisions also went beyond the scope of addressing bioterrorism while disregarding medical privacy standards. As of August 1, 2011, forty states have passed various forms of MSEHPA legislation. Draft The initial public health emergency proposal was drafted by the CDC in 1999. Still in the CDC's draft form, Lawrence O. Gostin, an attorney and professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. began reworking the document during the anthrax letter attacks in 2001, using funds provided by the CDC. Gostin's produced a preliminary draft on October 23, before releasing a second draft in December 2001. Gostin stated that it took him three to four weeks to prepare the act. The preliminary draft named the National Governors Association, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Association of Attorneys General, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, and the National Association of County and City Health Officials as collaborators without Gostin contacting them. The second draft, dated December 21, 2001, made the revised statement on its title page that the law was a "draft for discussion … to assist" those organizations. Criticism The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons claimed that the draft used sweeping language to the extent that it "could turn governors into dictators" since the MSEHPA gave governors the authority to declare public health emergencies, and afterward force vaccinations on the general public without their informed consent. The deployment of state National Guards could be used to administer the vaccines or substances. Legal liabilities for drug companies which manufactured the vaccines and/or substances were removed. ACT-UP/San Francisco protested the MSEHPA, stating it was a potential assault on gay men who could be rounded up en masse as vectors of disease, and the leaders of ACT-UP were jailed for