By Howard L. Rosenberg
ABCNEWS.com
March 12
— That ominous cloud of anthrax Pentagon bio-defense planners
fear may fog some future battlefield could actually have a silver lining for
Lansing, Mich.-based Bioport Corp. — and for its most visible corporate
director, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William J.
Crowe Jr.
That’s because the company is the only licensed U.S. manufacturer of
anthrax vaccine. Less than a month after it took over the business from the
state-owned Michigan Biologic Products Institute (MBPI) last September,
Bioport landed an exclusive $29 million contract with the U.S. Department of
Defense to “manufacture, test, bottle and store the anthrax vaccine.”
According to former Central Intelligence Agency military analyst
Patrick Eddington, the estimated $60 million worth of anthrax vaccine
Bioport is expected to produce for the Defense Department over the next five
years could just be the beginning.
“The Pentagon has a $322 million, 10-year program to develop at least
three, and perhaps as many as a dozen additional biological warfare
vaccines,” Eddington told ABCNEWS. “These have never really been tested, and
most importantly, no one has provided data to validate the threat.”
Vaccinations Begin
Whether or not the threat of any biological attack — including one with
anthrax — is valid or not, last May the Defense Department began a program
to vaccinate all 2.4 million soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines against
the anthrax bacterium. The Pentagon pays $4.70 per shot and each member of
the armed forces is supposed to get six shots over an 18-month period.
That’s a huge, guaranteed market for Bioport’s product.
Less than a year ago, Bioport’s predecessor, MBPI, was under fire from
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for sloppy record-keeping after an
inspection report raised questions about the anthrax vaccine’s potency and
sterility. The FDA even threatened to revoke the facility’s license. Just a
few months later, Bioport emerged as a leading bidder to take over the
troubled company and purchased MBPI for $25 million after the Pentagon
promised to ante up $15 million to renovate the plant.
Bioport’s
Multinational Directors
Bioport Corp. was created solely to take over the assets of MBPI by Adm.
Crowe, his partners in a company called Intervac L.L.C. and a group of
former managers of the Michigan-based institute.
It is Intervac that has the most interesting history. According to
Crowe’s associate and spokesman, Jay Coupe, Crowe owns 22.5 percent of
Intervac shares, though he hasn’t “invested a penny” in the venture.
Another 30 percent of Intervac shares are owned by Nancy El-Hibri, a
mother and homemaker in suburban Maryland and the rest of the company is in
the hands of “I&F Holdings,” a company directed by Nancy El-Hibri’s
father-in-law, Ibrahim El-Hibri, a Venezuelan citizen, and her husband, Fuad
El-Hibri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent.
Fuad El-Hibri appears to be the real day-to-day director of Intervac
and is listed by Dun & Bradstreet as the “chief executive” of Bioport. Mrs.
El-Hibri laughed when questioned by a reporter for ABC about Intervac and
referred the network to her husband who did not return a call.
Experts in defense policy suggested that the Pentagon would be highly
unlikely to approve the sale to a foreign national of a company that is the
sole manufacturer of a vaccine considered vital to national security.
Indeed, Coupe stresses that between Mrs. El-Hibri and Admiral Crowe,
the majority of the stock in Intervac is held by Americans, since Mrs. El-Hibri
is a U.S.-born citizen, her husband Fuad was educated at Yale and has
applied for U.S. citizenship and Admiral Crowe “served this country for 51
years” including two terms as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the
Reagan administration and as ambassador to the United Kingdom from
1994-1997.
How
Bioport Finds the Admiral
According to Coupe, when Crowe returned from England in 1997, he was
approached by Fuad El-Hibri’s father, Ibrahim El-Hibri. The elder El-Hibri,
whom the admiral had met a decade before, invited Crowe to serve on the
board of Intervac.
“The admiral is commonly referred to as the person who bought this,”
says Coupe, “and while I don’t want to minimize his involvement, he’s had no
financial involvement either way — giving or getting any money.”
Coupe says that Crowe’s ownership of Intervac stock gives him a 13
percent share of Bioport.
Coupe took umbrage at the suggestion by anthrax vaccine critics that
Crowe was profiteering on the vaccine’s production: “The idea that he would
do anything to jeopardize the American troops he led for half a century is
ridiculous. He spends a lot of time working on Bioport because he wants to
make sure it works and they produce a good product. Both he and I have been
vaccinated against anthrax. He believes in the anthrax vaccine and
vaccination. He also believes the threat {of anthrax as a weapon} is real.”
The Bioport anthrax vaccine production line is currently operating and
going through tests. The company expects to begin producing the vaccine for
distribution to the Defense Department this summer.
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Howard
L. Rosenberg is a producer for ABCNEWS’ 20/20. He is the author
of Atomic Soldiers (Beacon, 1980) and has written for numerous
newspapers and magazines. |
|
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S U M M A R Y
A single company,
Bioport Corp. stands to make a lot of money from U.S. government contracts
to manufacture the anthrax vaccine.
Click
here for the
transcript of Sam Donaldson’s report on the Anthrax vaccination
program required for all members of the armed forces.
|
W E B
L I N K S
U.S.
Department of Defense
Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention
American Gulf
War Veterans Association
Anthrax-no
“The Pentagon has a $322 million, 10-year program to develop at least three…
additional biological warfare vaccines. These have never really been tested
and most importantly, no one has provided data to validate the threat.”
Patrick
Eddington, former CIA military analyst
|
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