Long Shot

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New Republic

November 5, 2001

On The Hill

Long Shot

By Crowley

If you're scared witless by the anthrax horror spreading across the country,

take heart: The government has an anthrax vaccine that will immunize you and let

you chuck that recent Cipro prescription. There are, however, a few small

drawbacks. There's only enough vaccine on hand for at most 4,000 people. The

vaccine requires months of painful shots before taking effect. The one factory

that produces it has been dormant for three years--and it's so tangled in red

tape that no one knows when it will be running again.

In other words, for all practical purposes, there is no available anthrax

vaccine. How did this happen? After all, while almost no one believes the

current anthrax threat warrants nationwide inoculation, a plentiful and

efficient vaccine would come in awfully handy right now for postal workers,

police, firefighters, and perhaps even that segment of the public neurotic

enough to risk minor side effects for peace of mind. What's more, some

scientists think the anthrax vaccine could be a highly effective treatment for

the disease, even after infection.

Unfortunately we're out of luck. And the reason is political shortsightedness,

paranoid conspiracy theories, and bureaucratic sluggishness. Yes, a Manhattan

Project-style effort against bioweapons may produce plenty of good anthrax

vaccine within a couple of years. But try explaining that to the postal worker

who has to sort the mail tomorrow morning.

Anthrax terrorism may have surprised most Americans, but it shouldn't have

shocked any government leader who has been paying attention. Scientists and

federal officials have been warning for decades that anthrax could become a

terrorist weapon of choice-- warnings confirmed by the discovery of large

anthrax stockpiles in the arsenal of Saddam Hussein following the Gulf war. But,

nonetheless, top military and government leaders didn't make countering the

threat a priority. In 1991, for example, Army officials discussed creating a

massive civilian vaccine stockpile--if for no other reason than to show that the

United States was prepared. But at a time of shrinking military budgets, the

plan never left the drawing board. (Pentagon officials questioned even the

affordability of a more limited plan to inoculate U.S. troops.)

The Clinton years proved no better. The administration's response to the

bioterror danger was typified by National Security Adviser Lake's

response to a 1994 warning from renowned microbiologist Lederberg. " Do I

really have to worry about that? " Lake said, according to the book Germs:

Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. " I've got enough on my plate right

now. "

Over subsequent years, as terrorist episodes accumulated--the 1993 World Trade

Center bombing, the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo gas attack in the Tokyo subway, the 1995

Oklahoma City bombing--administration officials paid greater lip service to the

anthrax threat, but that was about it. In 1997 Defense Secretary Cohen

terrified Cokie with a five-pound bag of sugar on the ABC talk show

" This Week, " warning, " This amount of anthrax could be spread over a city--let's

say the size of Washington. It would destroy at least half the population of

that city. " But Cohen's proposed response--a plan to vaccinate all 2.4 million

members of the U.S. armed services--would have done little for the civilian

population of Washington or any other city. What's more, it wasn't even fully

implemented. The program was interrupted due to logistical problems after

inoculations began on only 520,000 troops.

In 1997 Bill Clinton finally took a personal interest in

bioterrorism--bizarrely, after reading Preston's The Cobra Event, a pulp

thriller about a killer virus that makes people claw out their own eyes. Soon

afterward Clinton called a bioterror attack " highly likely " and, in his final

two budgets, sought huge spending increases for biodefense. In 1998, for

instance, he proposed $51 million to help create " a civilian stockpile of

antidotes, antibiotics and vaccines " --including anthrax vaccine. But according

to The New York Times, Health and Human Services officials talked Clinton out of

new money for vaccines, convincing him to shift it to antibiotics and other

priorities. The following year Clinton considered a plan to vaccinate police

officers, firefighters, and other " first responders. " But that idea, too, went

nowhere. The United States didn't even have enough vaccine to inoculate its

soldiers.

But indifference was only one reason the government didn't aggressively pursue a

vaccine. Another was hysteria--in particular the minor frenzy provoked by the

Pentagon's effort to vaccinate U.S. troops. The program began during the Gulf

war, when then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and then-Joint Chiefs of Staff

Chairman Colin pushed to inoculate 150,000 American soldiers. Yet this

relatively uncontroversial plan became a political disaster following Cohen's

1997 decision to extend the vaccinations to all U.S. troops. After early

recipients of the vaccine complained of side effects ranging from ringing ears

to swollen testicles, the program quickly became a vessel for free-floating

distrust of the government, fueled by paranoia over a possible " Gulf War

syndrome " that was still raging among well-organized veterans. Thousands of

troops, most of whom had been stationed in the Gulf, complained about strange

maladies that doctors were never able to identify and which some chalked up to

psychological stress. Mistrust of the government skyrocketed when the Pentagon

belatedly admitted that troops destroying Iraqi chemical weapons might have been

exposed to them, kindling memories of Agent Orange.

In this climate, conspiracy theories ran rampant. Websites promoting a Black

Helicopter view of the world sprang up across the Internet. " anthrax vaccine:

cure or conspiracy? " asked one. " President Clinton won't take the vaccine

because he's no fool. " Zealous lawyers, including Mark Zaid of the Madison

Project, a crusader against government secrecy, took the opportunity to dredge

up every embarrassing Pentagon document that he could legally acquire. For

instance, when Zaid found a draft army memo that would indemnify potential

vaccine manufacturers from the " unusually hazardous " legal risks of the job, he

treated it as proof the Pentagon didn't trust its own program. In a typical

press release, Zaid said the Pentagon might have used methods similar " to that

which we condemned the Nazis [for] performing 50 years ago ... our troops have

been used as guinea pigs. " Zaid had willing allies in Congress, like

Clinton-hating Indiana Congressman Dan Burton, whose House Government Reform

Committee released a scathing report last year accusing the military of a " post

Gulf War panic over apparent weaknesses in chemical and biological warfare

defenses. " And the mass media took the paranoiacs seriously, with newspapers

around the country--as well as glossy magazines like People and Vanity

Fair--writing sympathetic accounts of the vaccine critics. Soon the Pentagon was

confronted with hundreds of troops who were risking court martial or leaving the

service altogether rather than take the vaccine.

To be sure, the vaccine isn't perfect. Its regimen of six shots over 18 months

is slow and difficult to administer. And, says Gigi Kwik of the s Hopkins

University Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, " It's not pleasant. It

burns. " But it's still basically safe, according to the Food and Drug

Administration and the Centers for Disease Control. In February 2000, The Wall

Street Journal reported that just 620 of the 400,000 vaccinated troops reported

side effects, and only six of them had vaccine-related symptoms requiring

hospitalization.

Ironically, the same paranoia that resisted inoculation with the current vaccine

has also impeded research into better ones. When a researcher in Amherst,

Massachusetts, began work on a promising new anthrax vaccine in the late 1980s,

for instance, he was protested by the Quaker-led American Friends Service

Committee, which petitioned local officials to declare the town " a biological

warfare research-free zone. " And when, less than a week before the September 11

attacks, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had been secretly

conducting advanced anthrax vaccine research in Ohio, the news was presented as

a disturbing sign that the United States might be violating the spirit of a

global bioweapons ban.

In addition to negligence and paranoia, there is a final culprit: good,

old-fashioned, bureaucratic boondoggle. It had been clear for years that the

creation of an effective and plentiful vaccine couldn't be left to the private

sector--bioweapon vaccines have never promised much in the way of profits. Until

recently, pharmaceutical companies didn't believe there would be widespread

public demand and worried that production might be hazardous and would

permanently contaminate their equipment. Indeed when the army encouraged drug

companies to develop a better anthrax vaccine as far back as 1985, according to

Germs, none so much as bid for the contract.

In the aftermath of the Gulf war, the Defense Department decided it needed

plentiful doses of anthrax vaccine. A special team of scientists, known as

" Project Badger, " was charged with figuring out how they could be made. At the

time the sole U.S. supplier of the vaccine was a small, antiquated laboratory

owned by the state of Michigan. In 1994 Project Badger recommended that the

military create its own federal vaccine facility in Arkansas or land.

Military scientists also recommended that the United States invest in a new

vaccine, based on recent breakthroughs in DNA research, that might be easier to

produce and administer. But the military stuck with the Michigan lab instead,

issuing it a large contract and leaving the parallel research with scant

support. " DoD picked the wrong fork in the road, primarily because they thought

it was cheaper and easier, " says Larry Halloran, a House Government Reform

Committee staffer.

Things got worse in 1998, when the state of Michigan sold the lab to BioPort, a

company whose board of directors included retired Admiral Crowe, the

former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one of the few high-ranking

military officers to endorse Bill Clinton in 1992. Since the sale to BioPort,

the lab has not made a single dose of anthrax vaccine. Despite receiving $126

million in Defense Department expenditures over the past three years, it has

failed to meet FDA regulations--despite warnings that date back to the mid-'90s.

" In retrospect, the whole notion of turning this over to a new contractor

instead of an established pharmaceutical company looks questionable, " Tara

O'Toole of the s Hopkins biodefense center told The New York Times this

month.

So now the United States must wait for BioPort--itself still awaiting FDA

approval to resume production--to begin churning out the millions of doses it

agreed to deliver years ago. Of course, once the doses are delivered, it will

still be another 18 months before anyone is safely inoculated. The government

could always abandon BioPort and build its own plant--but that, according to

Halloran, would take about seven years. Which means that if the Defense

Department had made the proper decision in 1994, the assembly line would be

running today.

MICHAEL CROWLEY is an associate editor at TNR.