October 21, 2001, 5:22PM

October 21, 2001, 5:22PM

Second thoughts on anthrax vaccine?

By VERONICA BUCIO

Fear has a way of changing oneâs mind. As pranksters, terrorists and wanna-beâs used an age-old bacterium to play head games and worse with America, I wondered if my mind had changed about the militaryâs controversial anthrax vaccine. Pentagon officials last year called the attempt by the Department of Defense to vaccinate all of our troops a blunder÷but the word fiasco better describes it.

During the two and a half-year program, only 445,000 active and reserve military personnel out of 2.4 million received just one dose of the six-dose, 18-month vaccination regimen. It was estimated that 300 to 500 troops disobeyed the order to take it. Some active troops were prosecuted and discharged, and some reservists, many of them pilots, quit rather than take the shots they considered harmful. The program was cut back in December of last year÷when 60,000 doses were said to be left÷to troops serving in the Persian Gulf and then again in June to troops involved in research and ãspecial missions.ä

The only U.S. company licensed to make the vaccine, BioPort, which for years has been strapped by financial and mismanagement problems, stopped producing it in 1998, after the Food and Drug Administration found numerous violations at its Lansing, Mich., facility. At the time, I considered it a pragmatic issue. Why should troops who joined the military voluntarily be forced to choose between service to country and the fate of their health?

The military, facing low morale and its worst enlistment rolls in decades, could not afford to lose a few of its few good men and women over what a House panel report called an ãundertaking built on a dangerously narrow scientific and medical foundation.ä The militaryâs credibility had been tarnished by the controversies surrounding radiation exposures during
the 1950s, Agent Orange in Vietnam and more recently the still-unexplained Gulf War Syndrome.

Who could blame military personnel for distrusting and questioning the medical validity of the vaccine? But that was then. What about now, when the threat of biological and chemical terrorism is no longer confined to troops stationed in hostile÷or sometimes friendly÷countries? That question led me to former Air Force Maj. Sonnie Bates, the highest-ranking officer to be punished for rejecting the anthrax vaccine. He was fined $3,200, given an official reprimand and ultimately honorably discharged in April last year after almost 14 years of service.

For Bates, the answer is the same now as then. The present anthrax vaccine is unsafe and therefore unlawful, he said, and he filed a lawsuit in May challenging the Defense Departmentâs vaccination program to try to prove it. ãI know a lot of people are saying, ÎIs there a vaccine? If there is, Iâm interested,â ã said Bates, who has a Web site at www.majorbates.com devoted to the issue. ãBut the vaccine is not available. ãThe Defense Department has spent $126 million in the past three years on BioPort, trying to get it to produce a good vaccine, and thereâs just nothing available, not even for troops anymore.ä As a result, a push is being made to get BioPort into compliance within a month, and the company has already made a test batch of the anthrax vaccine. And that, Bates said, is the problem. ãThe current vaccine, the one that is trying to be manufactured by BioPort, hurts people. ãI worked with [15] people in my squadron who were unable to perform their duties,ä said Bates, who flew with the 9^thAirlift Squadron at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

äAfter they took this vaccine, it injured them. Thereâs no doubt in my mind, and thereâs no doubt in their minds that it injured them.ä The illnesses reported by his former colleagues, which were documented in a statistical survey of all the squadronâs 270 members, and others throughout the military even now, he said, are similar to Gulf War Syndrome symptoms. ãThese illnesses mirror that to a T.ä Bates is hopeful, however. ãI think there will be a new vaccine developed. This vaccine is antiquated. Itâs too crude, and the ingredients are formulated so you can have an inconsistent batch. Therefore they have made a new, more contemporary vaccine, but it hasnât been approved for licensure.

I think that newer vaccine will be approved sometime in the future, I really do.ä For the sake of the military÷and perhaps one day for us civilians÷I hope so, too. Because while the fear of anthrax may change some minds, it doesnât change reality: Controversy still surrounds the manufacturing and safety of the anthrax vaccine. And that is still a bad pill.

Bucio, an editorial writer, is a member of the Chronicle Editorial Board. veronica.bucio@chron.com