Op-Ed: Anthrax Vaccine Is A Force Protection Facade

by Thomas L. Rempfer and Russell E. Dingle

Special To The Hartford Courant

January 20, 2000

Two years ago, Secretary of Defense William Cohen announced the Anthrax
Vaccine Immunization Program for all service members. The policy was an
effort to protect our nation's armed forces from the threat of inhaled
anthrax produced by a biological weapon.

The vaccine was approved in 1970 for limited use to protect veterinarians and
animal industry workers. The approval of this vaccine was based on a study of
a different anthrax formulation found to be protective for topical or skin
exposure to the disease.

The FDA has consistently found that no meaningful assessment has been made of
the vaccine's effectiveness in humans against inhalation anthrax.
Additionally, the General Accounting Office reported that the long-term
safety of the vaccine has not yet been studied.

To date, only about 15 percent of the military has received vaccinations,
while hundreds have been discharged, punished or court-martialed for
refusing.

The Defense Department's anthrax vaccination policy started as our troops
deployed once again to draw a line in the sand when Saddam Hussein ejected
U.N. weapons inspectors from Iraq in late 1997. Simultaneously, senior
Department of Defense officials were challenged as to how they would protect
the troops from Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

On Dec. 15, 1997, the Pentagon responded by holding a press briefing using an
anonymous spokesman to herald the decades-old anthrax vaccine as a lifesaver
for U.S. troops. The spokesman was asked if this was a step toward a
worldwide biological arms race? His answer was: ``I don't know. It could be,
but I'm not prepared to answer that.''

Needless to say, this dubious doctrinal shift signals a troubling tacit
acceptance of weapons outlawed by international treaties. Coupled with an
apparent lack of a coherent deterrence strategy, this trend could undermine
decades of international restraint in the biological warfare arena.

These concerns are not new. Last summer six congressmen charged that Defense
Secretary Cohen failed to meet his four prerequisites for implementing
mandatory anthrax inoculations. Supplemental testing was terminated by the
Pentagon due to inconsistencies and a plan to educate the troops has evolved
into a series of misrepresentations to sell the program.

The most egregious of the failed prerequisites was Secretary Cohen's
commitment to have an ``independent expert'' review the policy. The Defense
Department chose a Yale University gynecologist to justify the start of
vaccinations even though he told Congress in April that he had ``no expertise
in anthrax.''

Ironically, the Food and Drug Administration has inspected the vaccine
manufacturing plant and refused to validate the manufacturing line. The
problems have included sterility and potency deviations that highlight the
persistent failure of this manufacturer to produce a safe and effective
product.

Regardless of these revelations, the Secretary of Defense continues to order
service members to be inoculated with stockpiled vaccine produced under the
same flawed manufacturing process that the FDA has again found too
unacceptable to approve for production.

These concerns also led four congressmen in November to urge the FDA to place
the Pentagon's use of the anthrax vaccine under an ``investigational
status,'' making it optional. The Senate Veterans Affairs Committee
recommended this same course of action in a scathing 1994 report on 50 years
of Defense Department experiments on service members.

An investigational vaccine status would force the Defense Department to
comply with federal law and give service members informed consent and
warnings about potential adverse effects. The congressmen said the vaccine
should be "investigational" because the military is mandating widespread use
of the vaccine for a purpose for which it was not licensed.

Despite the controversy, service members know that comprehensive force
protection is necessary. Detection devices, external protection,
post-exposure antibiotics and the limited use of vaccines for imminent
threats would provide deterrence to biological warfare without tempting
production of other agents besides anthrax.

These kinds of comprehensive force protection measures, rather than hyping
the threat to justify a substandard vaccine, will renew the trust of military
personnel. The current anthrax vaccine policy, packaged with repeated
misrepresentations to the troops and to Congress, is viewed by many service
members as a joke.

The joke's sad punch line has become the Pentagon's continued lack of respect
for the rights and health of the troops who protect this country with their
lives. With 18 more biowarfare vaccines under development and a presidential
executive order that could allow experimentation on the troops, this
debilitating direction will make recruiting and retaining service members for
our nation's armed forces increasingly difficult.

(Thomas L. Rempfer of West Suffield and Russell E. Dingle of East Hartford,
were members of the Connecticut Air National Guard who had to transfer to
other assignments after they were commanded to research anthrax inoculation
policy and subsequently declined inoculation for them and their men.)

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