By Greg Gordon, News Tribune Washington, D.C., Bureau

Tacoma News Tribune

January 30, 2000, Pg. 1

WASHINGTON - Air Force Maj. Sonnie Bates shrugs off the threat of an enemy attack with invisible anthrax spores that likely would invade his lungs and kill him within days.

But the veteran C-5 military transport pilot is deeply worried that he would be harmed by the Pentagon's mandatory anti-anthrax vaccination - so worried that he refused to take it, risking his 13 1/2-year military career, his pension and up to five years in the brig.

Saying he fears the vaccine caused the illnesses of dozens of other airmen at Delaware's Dover Air Force Base, where he is stationed, Bates last month became the first active-duty officer to reject the Pentagon's safety assurances and disobey an order to begin the six-shot series.

He joins a mounting though proportionately small number of vaccine refuseniks - active-duty servicemen and women, reservists and National Guardsmen - who have bitterly ended their service to their country, surrendered their military benefits and in some cases accepted punishments, demotions and even courts-martial.

The protesters allege the Pentagon is trying to cover up a wide variety of vaccine-related illnesses, and that no long-term studies have been conducted on the vaccine's safety.

"I signed up to die for a foreign cause I might not even understand," said Bates, 35, who is married with three children. "But I'm not willing to give up my health to the point where I can't defend my country or my family."

Virginia Stephanakis, a spokeswoman for the Army Medical Corps, said about 391,500 military personnel have taken the shots as of mid-January, and about 320 refused - mainly reservists or National Guardsmen who have the option to quit without facing jail sentences or dishonorable discharges.

The resisters say the number who refused is much higher, because many reservists and Air National Guardsmen upset about the vaccinations have resigned or retired without stating a reason - particularly pilots worried about health problems that might prevent them from getting airline jobs.

Col. Rob Coffman, a spokesman for the Air Force Reserve, said pilot departures rose by only 25 to 30 in each of fiscal years 1998 and 1999.

Effect on morale

But the requirement to take the shots has sapped morale at some facilities, depleted a number of Air Force Reserve units and prompted members of Congress to propose bills that would make the program voluntary or halt it until safety questions are resolved.

Bates' possible court-martial has escalated the stakes in what may be an unprecedented information war inside the military - one reaching troops around the globe over the Internet.

The Pentagon has found itself pitted against a loosely knit network of present and former military personnel, their relatives and other skeptics who have spent thousands of hours of their own time scouring medical libraries and federal agency records for information about anthrax and the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, then posting what they find on Web sites.

Mike Steward, 29, who was a noncommissioned Army officer at Fort Lewis, said he went to the Internet after being informed in December 1998 that he would be getting the shot. After reading Food and Drug Administration reports on inspections of the vaccine's manufacturer, he said he was so concerned about "the way the vaccine was stored" that he refused.

His rank was reduced from sergeant to specialist, and he was ordered to perform four to six hours a day of extra duty for 45 days, sweeping and buffing floors, taking out trash and doing other custodial jobs.

Then, he said, he was discharged from the military.

"I loved the United States Army," Steward said. "That was my bread and butter, and I miss it. But I don't miss it to the degree that I'm going to jeopardize my health, my wife's health, my future children's health."

Top Defense Department officials and a number of other health experts say there is no evidence that would connect the inoculations to an array of chronic illnesses reported by vaccine recipients, including fatigue, severe joint pain, autoimmune diseases and thyroid damage.

They say the inoculations can only be linked to serious health problems for a tiny fraction of troops, a risk level similar or lower than those from other vaccines.

At a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing last fall, Army Surgeon General Ronald Blanck said he is so confident of the vaccine's safety that he would be willing to "give it to my wife and children ... right now."

But many servicemen and women don't believe the Defense Department or other experts who vouch for the vaccine.

Bates of the Air Force said that "if anybody talks to the troops at this base (Dover) who have suffered the way they have, (he) could come up with no other conclusion than that this vaccine is posing an undue risk. ... They were all healthy prior to the vaccine."

Mistrust of Pentagon's record

The troops' distrust is heightened by the Pentagon's checkered legacy that includes exposing thousands of American troops to radiation during post-World War II atomic tests and to the toxic defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam.

More recently, the Pentagon has been unable to explain the cause of Gulf War Syndrome, which has afflicted thousands of troops since the 1991 war with Iraq.

Skeptical service members question whether the anthrax vaccine will work against more than two or three of the 31 naturally occurring anthrax strains, even though Blanck says the Pentagon has "solid evidence" that it will.

The skeptics note the vaccine's sole manufacturing plant has never passed a Food and Drug Administration inspection since the agency approved the vaccine for more limited use in 1970. The FDA threatened to revoke the plant's license in 1996 for its failure to comply with good manufacturing practices, finding that it lacked quality control and quality assurance units.

They also charge the Defense Department's passive reporting system has grossly understated the percentage of vaccine recipients who suffer adverse health effects, citing two military studies indicating that 43 percent to 48 percent suffer "systemic" reactions - more than just irritation in the area of the injections.

"There are lots of things that have happened, even though they deny it," said Lt. Col. Jay Lacklen, 53, the chief pilot for the Air Force Reserve's 326th Airlift Squadron at Dover, who believes the shots gave him rheumatoid arthritis, a painful autoimmune disorder. "They ought to stop and investigate what they've already done."

One soldier's reaction

Another soldier at Fort Lewis, who requested anonymity, said he received at least one anthrax vaccination while serving in the Persian Gulf during the 1991 war. He said that since then, he has experienced long periods of extremity numbness, severe joint pain and thyroid problems, as well as rashes.

One hour after he took the third shot in the new anthrax series, he said, he developed a severe headache "that lasted and grew for six days." He said that a brigade doctor told him he had suffered an allergic reaction, but when he asked later if he could be excused from further shots, "she declared that I had not had an allergic reaction ... turned her back to me and walked away."

So many airmen questioned the safety of the vaccine at Dover that Col. Felix Grieder, the base commander, temporarily halted the vaccinations in May 1999. A short time later, Grieder was replaced and transferred to the Pentagon.

Retired Lt. Col. Redmond Handy, an Air Force reservist in Washington, D.C., who quit over the shots and surrendered his full colonel's rank, said he suspects that the vaccine may be the mysterious cause of Gulf War Syndrome, even though government committees have found no such link.

The Pentagon first used the vaccine during the gulf war, inoculating about 150,000 U.S. troops.

In December 1997, before deploying a large U.S. force to the gulf during another confrontation with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Defense Secretary William Cohen ordered the vaccinations for all military personnel in three phases, beginning with troops facing deployment to the Middle East and South Korea.

With Gulf War Syndrome creating clouds of suspicion, Cohen; Gen. Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and other top-ranking Pentagon officials took the shots themselves to inspire confidence in the vaccine.

But the Pentagon had only a single source for the vaccine, a stockpile produced by the now-defunct Michigan Biological Products Institute, a state-owned laboratory that the FDA licensed to make the vaccine in 1970. FDA inspection reports over the last four years, citing numerous deficiencies in the way the vaccine was made and stored, have fed the unease of military personnel.

The General Accounting Office reported that FDA inspectors were denied access to the plant from 1970 to 1993 because they had not themselves taken the anthrax vaccine.

In 1998, the state sold the plant to the BioPort Corp. Awarded a $130 million contract to provide the vaccine, BioPort soon halted production at the plant for renovations. Since then, BioPort has been unable to pass an FDA inspection allowing it to reopen the facility.

That has left the Pentagon to rely on the plant's vaccine stockpile. Although the FDA originally limited the vaccine's shelf life to three years, the agency has allowed the plant to use the old vaccine so long as it conducted supplemental tests to ensure its potency, purity, safety and stability.

Age of vaccine

Distrustful troops worry about the age of the vaccine and note the plant's FDA approval provided only for its use in protecting people who might develop lesions after coming into skin contact with anthrax-infected animals - a far less dangerous disease than anthrax inhalation.

In March 1997, deputy FDA commissioner Michael Friedman told the Pentagon that, despite "a paucity of data regarding the effectiveness of anthrax vaccine for prevention of inhalation anthrax," the vaccine could be used to inoculate troops for that purpose.

The only human study was conducted in 1962 in New Hampshire goat-hair mills where workers had a history of developing skin lesions from anthrax. Philip Brachman, a former epidemiology chief at the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who headed that study, said that the only five plant workers to contract lethal inhalation anthrax had not been vaccinated.

While those data were statistically insignificant, he said, taken together with later monkey studies "it appears as if the vaccine would be effective against inhalation anthrax, too."

But Brachman cautioned that changes in the way the vaccine has been made since then "have never been evaluated up until the present time" and that he is unsure of the vaccine's safety if it is given in combination with other vaccines.

But Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), who has proposed legislation that would make the shots voluntary, called it "a tragedy when this nation loses one man or woman who wants to serve this country over the fact that the Department of Defense has not done its job to convince (the troops) that this shot is safe."

Lawrence Korb, a former assistant defense secretary who oversaw personnel and readiness in the Reagan administration, said he believes the Pentagon handled the vaccine issue "rather clumsily" by making the shots mandatory.

Korb noted the State Department, whose embassy employees also are at risk, has made its anthrax vaccine program voluntary.

Once it was decided to make the shots mandatory, Korb said, Pentagon officials had "no choice" but to impose discipline.

Since there appears to be no imminent threat of an anthrax attack, Korb said, he would recommend the Pentagon temporarily shift to a voluntary program, telling the troops: "If you don't want to take it we understand, until we clear up the problems."