Waging war on  anthrax vaccine

by Meredith Goad

Portland (ME) Press Herald

March 11, 2000

The U.S. military questions her credibility, and some people even call her crazy. It has been implied she has unsavory ties to the Cuban government. In December, a mysterious fire almost burned down her barn...

Dr. Meryl Nass of Freeport is conducting a national campaign against the U.S. military's anthrax vaccine, which she says is dangerous.

What has Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist from Freeport, done to cause such a swirl of speculation? She is considered a national expert and leading opponent of the anthrax vaccine, a series of six shots being given to the nation's 2.4 million active duty and reserve troops to protect them during biological warfare.

While the U.S. military says the shots are safe, others blame them for a variety of physical ailments, including memory loss, rashes, flu-like illnesses, heart problems and bloody diarrhea.

Nass has provided testimony to the U.S. Congress. She served as a consultant to the General Accounting Office when it investigated the issue. She also travels the country giving lectures to soldiers, sailors and pilots worried about the health effects.

And she maintains a Web site of documents she gathered with the help of military contacts and the Freedom of Information Act, which allows public access to many government documents.

After 10 years of studying anthrax and reviewing the research, Nass is convinced that the vaccine is dangerous. She tells military men and women to put their health before their careers and refuse the shots.

More and more people are taking her advice.

"They asked me to go to the (Saudi) desert on one of the deployments for September, and I refused because I'm not taking the anthrax vaccine," says Nancy Lee, a 35-year-old technical sergeant from Eliot who serves full time in the New Hampshire Air National Guard.

"One of the stipulations for going over there is taking the anthrax, and I'm not taking it," she said.

Lee, who attended a Nass lecture on March 4, is going even further: Last week, after 17 years in the National Guard, she told her commander she's resigning over the anthrax requirement.

"There's got to be problems with the vaccine," Lee said. "The (manufacturing) plant never even passed an inspection and was going to be shut down because of it. As far as I can tell, they never produced a good vaccine, so why would you accept that? You wouldn't accept that for your kids. Why should we?"

Anthrax is a bacteria found in domesticated animals. When it is transformed into a biological weapon and inhaled, death occurs in days. It's estimated that at least 10 countries, including Iran and North Korea, have anthrax in their arsenal.

The Army Medical Department reports than 409,398 military personnel have been given 1.5 million doses of vaccine.

The military says that 300 to 500 people have refused to take the shots, which are given over a period of six months, and 620 have had adverse reactions. People who refuse the shots suffer a range of consequences from demotion and loss of pay to court martial.

Nass, who tracks cases and sends out her own questionnaires to people who contact her, claims that the number of bad reactions is much higher. "It really has never been tested properly, and there are many reasons to think that it's not safe," she said.

Last month, a House national security subcommittee issued a scathing critique of the vaccine program and recommended that it be suspended. The subcommittee's report said the vaccine program is based on "dangerously narrow" scientific evidence.

Nass, 48, majored in biology at MIT, then got her medical degree in 1980 from the University of Mississippi Medical School. She's a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Federation of American Scientists, serving
on the organization's Working Group on Biological Weapons Verification.

Nass first got interested in anthrax when she was a part-time faculty member at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Amherst. A group of student activists asked her to look into anthrax research that one of the school's professors was doing for the Department of Defense.

That piqued her interest in the topic, and she began looking into 15 years' worth of anthrax epidemics to see if they could possibly be the result of germ warfare.

"I found one," she said. "The largest reported epidemic of anthrax ever occurred in Rhodesia during the civil war, and sure enough, it was totally different from all the others, and nobody knew about it."

She spent three years studying that 1979-80 epidemic in the country now known as Zimbabwe. She concluded it was biological warfare, and published a scientific paper on her results.

Shortly after her paper was publicized, there was an epidemic of 50,000 cases of blindness in Cuba, which the government there attributed to chemical or biological warfare. Nass was brought in as a consultant, and met with top Cuban researchers.

The trip damaged her credibility among some military people who hear of her concerns about the anthrax vaccine but wonder who they should believe – Nass or their superiors.

"They said I had dinner with Fidel Castro," Nass said, laughing. "I've never met the guy."

Nass began getting calls about the anthrax vaccine in 1998. People told her they'd taken the shots, and now were suffering from problems such as bloody diarrhea, vomiting and wheezing. Some were coughing up blood. Could it be the
shots? they asked.

"And I said, 'No, the shot doesn't do that. No vaccine will do that,' " Nass said.

Her opinion changed when she began digging into the research on the vaccine, and a crusade began. Nass estimates that she's had contact with about 1,000 people through phone calls and her Web site.

"I'm in kind of a funny position because everyone I talk to is in the military, and I've been portrayed as either a peacenik or a Fidel Castro sympathizer," she said. "I think it's been quite interesting that the people who got to know me early on were a bunch of pilots and some officers in the military, and they trust me completely. They've done their own research, and
they know that everything I've given them is above board."

One of those people is Dr. Craig Uhl of Monarch Beach, Calif.

Uhl was a U.S. Navy Medical Corps Officer who served in the Bosnian conflict and worked with the elite Navy Seals. Last year, he left the Navy rather than be forced to give anthrax shots.

"I can't turn aside what I am," he said, "and I'm not going to inject somebody with something I think is dangerous."

When Uhl first started hearing stories from other military doctors about strange reactions from the anthrax shots, he started researching the subject himself. One of the tools he used was Nass' Web site at www.anthraxvaccine.org.

Uhl says he liked being able to read actual FDA reports and other documents on the Web site so he could reach his own conclusions. He has also e-mailed Nass with questions and comments.

"She's always been given a bad rap for being this anti-military type when she's not at all," he said.

Uhl's research led him to the conclusion that some of the lots of anthrax vaccine are causing extremely high reaction rates, and other lots are causing no reactions at all, creating a kind of "Russian roulette."

"When you look at the root writings, it's very obvious that any doctor who took 10 minutes to investigate it would realize that there's some serious quality control issues with the manufacture of this vaccine," he said.

A spokeswoman for the Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program would not comment specifically on Nass' work or her credibility, but noted that there are no "reputable medical organizations," including the Centers for Disease Control,
that disagree with the military's decision to require the shots.

"We know that we have science on our side," said Virginia Stephanakis of the Army Medical Department.

In addition to the work on her Web site, Nass has traveled the country as a lecturer. She is paid only for her expenses. She is never allowed to appear on military bases. Sometimes, military doctors or flight surgeons show up at her talks to challenge her. Once, she says, a base in Georgia threw a big party to compete with her appearance there.

Nass has even been told by her military friends that she might be in danger, and she is convinced that a fire in her barn Dec. 10 was no accident. Nass was out of state when it started, and her roommate had to go to the hospital with smoke inhalation.

If that sounds a little paranoid, that's what Aimee Normandeau thought, too.
"I was kind of skeptical about the whole barn thing," said Normandeau, a 33-year-old staff sergeant in the New Hampshire National Guard who attended the March 4 meeting at Nass' house with Nancy Lee.

"I heard a comment from one person who said, 'Well, word has it that she's a wacko.' But after having met her, I don't see that at all," she said. Normandeau has also decided not to take the anthrax vaccine.

Nancy Lee said she was also warned by her colleagues before visiting with Nass. She tossed aside those criticisms after meeting Nass and comparing her evidence with the material she had been given by the military.

"Up until that point, there were days where I really thought 'Am I doing the right thing?' " Lee said. "I almost felt crazy about it because the people I work with, none of them have a problem with (the vaccine)."

This week, Lee decided she could no longer consider herself a productive member of her unit. She's now looking for work in the private sector.

"I don't feel like I've got an alternative," she said.

Beth Murphy, library assistant, contributed research for this story.
Staff Writer Meredith Goad can be contacted at 791-6332 or at:
mgoad@pressherald.com