by John Day

 Bangor (ME) Daily News

 February, 19, 2000

 As Time magazine sees it, the mounting rebellion by U.S. military personnel against being inoculated with the anthrax vaccine has put Defense Secretary Bill Cohen between a rock and a hard place.

 In truth, Cohen was supposed to be an Abuja, Nigeria, Thursday when the House subcommittee on national security released a report calling for a halt to the Pentagons mandatory program to six times implant a genetically altered version of one of the most deadly biological toxins known to man into the arms of Americas 2.4 million active and reserve troops. Never having been to Abuja, I dont know if its the rock or hard place. Bad weather in Africa, however, sent Cohen home to Washington one day ahead of schedule to quell a serious Pentagon public relations problem.

 It was Cohen, you may recall, who raised the national consciousness over anthrax when he went on television in 1997 during the one of the Clinton administrations dust-ups with Saddam Hussein displaying a five-pound bag of Domino sugar. Were a package of similar proportions containing anthrax released into the air, Cohen told the TV audience, half the population of Washington, D.C., would be dead by the end of the week.

 The nub for Cohen is he may have made anthrax seem a bit too scary. The House subcommittee report found that a small percentage of the servicemen and women inoculated to date about 600 of 450,000 have complained of side effects ranging from dizziness to severe thyroid problems serious enough to warrant a day off from work. About 350 active-duty and reserve personnel have flatly refused to take the mandatory anthrax shots. Some of them have been threatened with court-martial proceedings.

 Rep. John Baldacci thinks the Pentagon should err on the side of caution.

 [Their] attitude is, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, said Baldacci, who reported that Maine Air National Guard personnel have raised strong concerns to him about the vaccine. In the past, Baldacci pointed out, defense officials denied there were any health problems resulting from Agent Orange, the Vietnam-era chemical, and fought against reimbursements for health problems resulting from the so-called Gulf War syndrome. Concerns about the anthrax vaccine complaints led Baldacci to sign on as a co-sponsor to legislation introduced by Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y, that would suspend the anthrax program until a third-party medical study resolved all doubts about the vaccines safety. David Lackey, the communications director for Sen. Olympia Snowe, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Snowe will call for hearings on the issue, but is not ready yet to back an inoculation moratorium.

 Charles Cragin, who is Cohens point man on the anthrax dispute, made this point at the outset. Cohen, the Pentagons top-ranking official, and Cragin, two-time Maine gubernatorial candidate, have taken the series of six anthrax shots. There was a bit of swelling, Cragin conceded. As an overall medical experience, however, he said the Pentagons typhoid inoculation scared him more.

 Frankly, I thought the [subcommittee] report reaffirmed our program, said Cragin, who pointed out that the anthrax vaccine was first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1970 and has been in common use for decades. Much of the information about the anthrax vaccine is being circulated on the Internet, and some of it is misinformation, the Cohen aide said. Cragin said a reserve unit major confronted him during a visit with peacekeeper troops in Kosovo recently to demand that the vaccine be tested on human subjects. To do that, Cragin pointed out, would mean exposing half the test subjects to anthrax, unprotected by vaccination, for comparison to the inoculated group. But the uninoculated test subjects almost certainly would die.

 One of Cragin's other responsibilities as undersecretary for reserve affairs is setting up a nationwide network of 27 mobile teams comprised of specialists ready at a moments notice to respond to terrorist biological-warfare attacks like the one that targeted Tokyos subway system.

 John S. Day is a Bangor Daily NEWS columnist based in Washington, D.C.