May 22, 2002

SECRET ANTHRAX VACCINATIONS

MORE HUMAN GUINEA PIGS AND MORE HARM

By Meryl Nass, MD

When an announcement comes out of the Pentagon at 4 pm on a Friday, you know it’s something they are trying to bury. This Friday, it was the long-awaited announcement about what was to happen to the anthrax vaccine immunization program.

The immunizations are starting up again, but they are going to be used only for "at-risk" troops, and they are going to be SECRET!

Last time secret vaccinations were announced was during the Gulf War deployment, and the excuse then was that we didn’t have enough vaccine for everybody. We were told we had to fool Saddam, so he wouldn’t know who to attack with anthrax. So our troops were sworn to secrecy regarding whether or not they received anthrax vaccine, and the vaccinations went unrecorded in troops’ shot records.

If Saddam read TIME magazine, he’d have known that we were short of vaccine, but that a sizable minority of our troops were vaccinated.

Later, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses acknowledged that accurate vaccination records were central to understanding the role of vaccines in GWI, and compensating soldiers appropriately for illnesses following vaccination.

Saddam is again the only credible enemy who might attack troops with anthrax. We have more vaccine now, and the newly opened plant can produce 2 million doses yearly. So why not vaccinate everyone, and let Saddam know we’re ready for him this time?

Here are some possible answers:

1. The vaccine won’t protect against what Saddam has.
2. If the program is stopped altogether, that could be viewed as a tacit acknowledgment that the vaccine is either unsafe, ineffective, or both, which would not look good in court.
3. There are several lawsuits now in federal courts, which seek damages for both illnesses and deaths following vaccination. DOD stands to lose a lot of money if the plaintiffs prevail. Therefore, the Defense Department brain trust decided to restart the vaccine program in such a way that vaccinations will be undocumented, making it difficult or impossible to sue for benefits later.

Servicemembers are again guinea pigs for whatever the top military doctors want to inject into them.

I should admit that I’m not surprised. I predicted this weeks ago, when troops reported being given undocumented vaccines and developing symptoms typical of anthrax vaccination afterward. The sad fact is that this is nothing new. Only the Pentagon acknowledgment is new.

Troops routinely serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs and vaccines. Bet you didn’t know that as many as a million soldiers received anthrax vaccinations between the Gulf War and 1998, when the anthrax vaccinations officially began.

I almost fell off my chair when FDA let this slip at an IOM meeting I attended.

You won’t find the vaccinations in soldiers’shot records, though. It was simply a grand experiment, so large that statistics were apparently unnecessary. Had vaccinated soldiers been placed in an environment where anthrax was used, the military docs would have accepted our congratulations for their cleverness.

It’s illegal and it’s unethical to inject people with a drug or vaccine without their knowledge. But in the military, that’s the way it’s always been done.

Get ready for Gulf War Syndrome Act II, as our hapless soldiers become ill, but can’t point to anything that might have caused it.

But there is an upside! Nobody at the Pentagon has to say they made a mistake, and nobody has to say they’re sorry. And think of the taxpayers’ money they are saving!