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Anthrax This!
By William C. Carlotti, Torrington
I was talking to my friend in Vermont about the news reports about anthrax, and in the course of our conversation he referred to it as "the wool sorter’s disease." Evidently, as I found out later, people who work in the wool industry—from Australia to the United States to Ireland—get the skin form of the disease as often as auto mechanics scrape their knuckles. Or they might get the lung form of the disease as often as the residents who live next to the Con Edison electric generating plant on 14th Street and Avenue D in New York City get tuberculosis. In the case of either form of anthrax, those infected are easily cured with the proper doses of antibiotic unless the symptoms are ignored and untreated—which is also the case with a myriad of other diseases. In fact, the disease is so curable that there are reports of anthrax "envy" (N.Y. Post, October 22) breaking out amongst the major newspapers, newscasters, reporters and politicians who have not been targeted to receive their anthrax missive.
Certainly, those adjacent to Con Edison in Alphabet City who have acquired tuberculosis, if they had their druthers, would positively trade what they have acquired with those who have contracted anthrax—which is probably also the case with those who have acquired black lung disease from work in the coal mines, or those who have acquired cancer from tobacco use, or those who have acquired asbestosis from work in asbestos mining. The distinction between anthrax and these other diseases is that the discovery of penicillin and other antibiotics make anthrax curable and make an epidemic of deaths from anthrax, in a country where these antibiotics are readily available, a highly improbable occurrence. So the only place where anthrax could possibly turn out to be an effective bioweapon would be in a country where the appropriate antibiotic would not be readily available.
As it turns out, the only recent serious epidemic of anthrax occurred in the early 1980s in Zimbabwe, Africa when some ten thousand people contracted the disease (with additional thousands amongst cattle). With the on-site studies by the American anthrax expert, Dr. Meryl Nass of Maine (www.anthraxvaccine.org), it was determined that the strain of bacteria that caused the epidemic was not native to Zimbabwe but, instead, a bioweapon introduced into Zimbabwe. Unlike the current situation in the United States, thousands lost their lives before the disease was brought under control by administration of the appropriate antibiotic. The current trial of Dr. Wouter Basson (dubbed "Dr. Death" by South Africa’s press), former director of South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, has raised issues that may tie the defendant to the events in Zimbabwe.
Anthrax appeared again in the news when in 1990, prior to engaging Iraq in the Gulf War, some 150,000 frontline United States combat troops were mandated to receive an anthrax vaccine provided by Michigan Biologic Products Institute (MBPI), which was then owned by the State of Michigan. MBPI had been the sole source provider of an anthrax vaccine for several decades. It was the first time that an anthrax vaccine had been administered on such a scale.
Whether or not the vaccine was administered as protection because the United States government had previously approved, by way of the U.S. Commerce Department’s Technical Advisory Committee, seven shipments of anthrax and other disease causing pathogens to Iraq between 1985 and 1989 is a matter of conjecture. In turns out that the shipments to Iraq were made, with United States government approval, by the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), a 73-year-old nonprofit company based in Rockland, Maryland which describes itself as "a global bioresource center that stores and distributes biological materials such as cell lines, bacteria, viruses and antisera, clones and other molecular biology materials, fungi, protozoa and algae. The mission of the ATCC is to acquire, authenticate and maintain reference cultures, related biological materials and associated data, and to distribute these to qualified scientists in government, industry and education."
In any case, by 1993 some 75,000 Gulf War veterans had complained of illness, fatigue, sore joints, sleeping difficulty, chronic diarrhea, memory loss and depression, all of which they claim are related to their military service—symptoms which eventually acquired the name "Gulf War Syndrome." Eventually pressure from the veterans forced President Clinton to order a review of the possibility of a link between anthrax and the sick veterans. The Pentagon, in turn, created the Defense Science Board Task Force on Persian Gulf War Health Effects. Deputy Defense Secretary John Deutch (who later became head of the CIA) appointed Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Laureate for medicine and former President of Rockefeller University in New York City, to head up the Pentagon study. Lederberg was also, at the time he headed up the study, one of the ten directors of the ATCC that had shipped the anthrax to Iraq. After about seven months, in 1994, the Pentagon Task Force issued its report in which Lederberg stated: "… there is no scientific or medical evidence that … there were any exposures of U.S. service members to chemical or biological warfare agents in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia."
In spite of every effort to thwart them, the Gulf War veterans continued to pursue their claims for treatment of the symptoms that are, by their assessment, the consequence of their service in the war. Gradually information began to surface that indicated a possible connection between the mandated anthrax vaccine and the illnesses of the Gulf War veterans. The claims of the veterans began to receive official credibility in the Rockefeller Report to Congress in 1994 that stated: "The records of the anthrax vaccine are not suitable to evaluate safety … particularly when given in conjunction with other vaccines," as was the case with the Gulf War troops. In addition, Colonel Friedlander, head of Bacteriology at Fort Derrick, was reported to have stated in 1994 that: "No assessment of the effectiveness of the vaccine against inhalation anthrax could be made because there were too few cases." At the same time, it became known that the vaccine administered to the Gulf War troops was different than that which was originally licensed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—it was of a different composition, from a different anthrax strain, with a different adjuvant, and a different manufacturing process.
In the meantime, the FDA was issuing violations to the Michigan Biologic Products Institute which culminated in a violative inspection in November 1996. The inspection was followed by a Notice of Intent to Revoke MBPI’s license for the manufacturing of the anthrax vaccine on March 11, 1997. The FDA stated: "The firm did not establish or follow lab controls, cleaning schedules, and they did not separate/ define areas to prevent contamination or mix-up; … did not clean/ maintain equipment, calibrate equipment or instruments … ; did not store components to prevent contamination; and there was no identification and control of rejected components …"
According to a letter dated April 3, 1998 from the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Department of Defense became aware of the fact that in December of 1995 the State of Michigan had decided to sell MBPI. In spite of the FDA Notice, MBPI continued to ship anthrax vaccine to the Department of Defense until January of 1998 when it fulfilled the quantity required by its contract. By July of 1998 Michigan got rid of its liability by approving the sale of MBPI, and by September of 1998 it concluded its sale to BioPort Corp. for $25 million. Scarcely a month later Bio Port received a $25.7 million sole source contract with the Department of Defense, which was subsequently increased to $49.8 million, to supply the anthrax vaccine. The Pentagon also agreed, as part of the deal, to advance BioPort $18.7 million to cover its debts.
The company that has the controlling voting equity in BioPort is Intervac LLC. Admiral William J. Crowe, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Ambassador to Britain and Chairman of the President’s foreign intelligence advisory board, has a 22.5% share of the voting stock of Intervac LLC that he acquired, according to his spokesman Jay Coupe, without spending a cent. In the meantime, BioPort has not been able since 1999 to secure a manufacturing license from the Food and Drug Administration to produce the anthrax vaccine. If BioPort receives the FDA license, they intend to have the current stockpile of vaccine tested for use in the start of the newest Pentagon-ordered inoculations of 2.4 million military personnel. These inoculations require six doses over an 18-month period at a cost of approximately $12 a dose.
Since the Pentagon ordered the vaccinations in 1997, four hundred military personnel have refused along with scores of others—mostly pilots in the National Guard—who have resigned rather than submit to inoculation. They point to serious adverse reactions from the shots in addition to those mentioned above, including aseptic meningitis, Guillain-Barre syndrome and lupus. They cite victims who call themselves the "walking dead," many of whom have testified before Congress since 1997.
In the meantime, with Congress closing its doors as a result of the anthrax-tainted letter received by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, the New York Post reports (October 26) that the anthrax spores that Senator Daschle received and those received by an employee of the Post were not genetically altered and both were from the Ames Laboratory (in Iowa) anthrax strain that is widely used in United States bioweapons research. Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the anthrax Daschle received could have come from 30 or 40 places in the United States that are affiliated with universities, medical centers or veterinary facilities.
All of which should make us begin to wonder about the amazing coverage that reports of this very curable anthrax is getting in the news—front-page stories, in-depth analyses, television interviews with disease experts, etc.—reports smothering pages and hours of news in all of the major newspapers and magazines and on television channels. Consider also the closings of post offices, a newspaper, legislatures and government offices. Maybe, just maybe, we’ve just anthraxed ourselves in the foot.
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