By Nicholas Regush

Beware premature celebration. How can one be pleased about a battle won when danger still lurks around the corner - in this case, civilian danger. It seems that the U.S. military, hounded by critics of its anthrax vaccine, is biting the bullet and will redirect much of its supply for civilian use.

It has taken at least five years for the medical giants of the military Establishment to perhaps realize that you can,t keep pushing a mandatory anthrax vaccine program for more than two million service members when the vaccine is poorly-tested, essentially a scientific scam, and has probably already harmed thousands.

So, what do you do when the obvious becomes even more obvious? You decide, as the military did, that you pretend that the vaccine is very much safe and effective and you give it as gift of sorts to the American public. Nice.

The new policy (but who knows how this might change) appears to be centered on providing this crude, fantasy vaccine to military scientists working in labs and to troops thought to be at highest risk. Part of the stash reserved for civilians will go to so-called "first responders" or medical and rescue personnel in case of an anthrax attack. The rest will be put aside to protect some of the civilian population of the United States.

I'm sure you,ve heard the old saying: If it smells like a skunk and looks like a skunk, then it's probably a skunk. This is the message we need to keep in mind when purveyors of deception - and that includes the bigwigs at the FDA, the Institute of Medicine and the military and the vaccine manufacturer, Bioport, - try to convince us that the current anthrax vaccine has been proven safe for use against inhalation anthrax, which would be the feature of a weaponized attack. No such science has ever been done in a convincing fashion. A bunch of mixed-message guinea pig studies and a few studies with a total of 65 monkeys is not classic science. In fact, what it amounts to upon close inspection is junk science.

I would dearly love to be on the same podium with the military's medical brain trust as they stumble and fumble to explain the actual data surrounding the "safety" and efficacy" of the anthrax vaccine. To score points, they would have to hypnotize the audience and induce some sort of brainwashing on the spot. It's that bad.

Over the past five years, many critics of the vaccine have extensively documented the following:

*The vaccine has never been approved by the FDA for use against inhalation anthrax.
*The vaccine has been used illegally by the military because it forced service members to have the injections without informed consent. The vaccine is "experimental."
*The military has kept terrible records on who was given the vaccine.
*The military has made it difficult for its physicians to report side-effects to federal health authorities.
*The product insert for the vaccine is badly outdated and misleading.
*The military continues to vastly underestimate the harm done by the vaccine.
*The vaccine has never been tested for long-term safety.
*The study that was used to justify licensing the anthrax vaccine against cutaneous anthrax was, at best, a marginal study, statistically-speaking.
*Inhalation studies with guinea pigs showed survival rates for the vaccine varied from 23 to 71 per cent, depending upon the strain of anthrax used.
*The best survival in mice was about 10 per cent.
*In the studies with 65 rhesus monkeys, the survival rates were high for two strains of anthrax but there is no method available today to compare the immune responses of these monkeys to humans. There is no signal or "marker" in the immune defense process that is similar to both species.
*The vaccine may offer some protection, but as the Government Accounting Office put it: "but to what extent, against what amount of anthrax, against which strains, and how long protection lasts, are not known."
*An anthrax attack may involve a genetically engineered strain that the vaccine cannot fight.
*Animal tests run in a lab do not mimic battlefield conditions.

I know a few people who would run circles around the military brain trust if they ever tangled publicly on the above points. The military position, as expressed in congressional hearings and to reporters over the years, is rife with speculation and misleading statements about the vaccine's safety and efficacy.

In Canada, in May, 2000, a military judge issued a remarkable judgement, ruling that the anthrax vaccination requirement (in the Canadian forces) infringed upon a serviceman's "right to life, as well as liberty and security of a person, as enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms."

The defendant in the case, a court martial, was then ex-sergeant Michael Richard Kipling.

He had refused the vaccine injections (as did so many service members in the U.S.).

The testimony really boiled down to a battle between Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist from Maine (and now also a columnist at redflagsweekly.com) and Dr. Arthur Friedlander, who was then a high-level military scientist at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease at For Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.

It wasn,t even close. Reading through the transcripts of the trial, one gets the very strong feeling that Nass is the only expert on the scene. The judge certainly found her testimony on the lack of safety and efficacy of the vaccine compelling. In the end, he concluded that the vaccine that was intended for Kipling "was unsafe and hazardous and could be responsible for the important symptoms reported by so many persons who received that vaccine."

Unfortunately, many U.S. service members have not had the opportunity - yet - to present their arguments in court, but I'm betting that, in time, many will.

Meanwhile, the civilian population of the U.S. is becoming the beneficiary of a vaccine that amounts to a game of "Russian Roulette."

Nice.

RECOMMENDED READING

The Court Martial of Michael Richard Kipling