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Posted on 09/22/2001 3:29:30 PM PDT by Jean S

In December 1997, then-Defense Secretary William Cohen announced that he would order all 2.4 million men and women in the U.S. armed forces, active duty and reserve, plus civilian Defense employees deemed as "emergency-essential," to undergo vaccination for anthrax.

It didn’t matter whether you were an 18-year-old grunt deployed to the Persian Gulf, or a 60-year-old analyst deployed at a Pentagon desk. You were ordered to undergo a series of six initial shots, and, after that, an annual booster. The crash program would cost the Defense Department more than $200 million.

There was good reason for it.

Anthrax spores are odorless, colorless and tasteless. An unvaccinated person who inhales them normally shows no symptoms for 1 to 6 days. Then, embedded in the lungs, the spores begin to germinate. The victim begins to feel a slight flu-like malaise.

By then it is too late. He has passed the point where any drug can save him. Within a few days, he will die an agonizing death, and his body will become a biological hazard that must be cremated because it is too dangerous to embalm or bury.

For those who see traditional morality as no bar to acts of war, this insidious germ is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

And that is why some of America’s most evil enemies in recent years have stockpiled massive amounts of it.

"Weapons inspectors discovered during the Gulf War that Saddam Hussein maintained an anthrax arsenal sufficient to kill every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth," the Defense Department said in a website posting explaining the vaccination program. "Iraq admitted to the United Nations in 1995 that it loaded anthrax spores into warheads during the Gulf War. In the post-Cold War era, the former Soviet Union admitted to having enough anthrax on hand to kill every person on the planet several times over."

It isn’t only the Pentagon that believes there is a risk the U.S. could be attacked by anthrax.

In 1993, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), a research agency controlled by Congress, published a report titled, "Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction—Assessing the Risks." It concluded that America could be vulnerable to a biological attack launched by a nation-state like Iraq or by a terrorist group.

"Potential biological warfare agents are readily available locally or internationally from natural sources or commercial suppliers," said OTA. "Sophisticated research and development [is] unnecessary to produce commonly known agents."

The bottom line on biological weapons: "Enough for a large arsenal may cost less than $10 million."

The most chilling page in the OTA report featured a map of Washington, D.C. It compared the potential lethal consequences of exploding a 1-megaton hydrogen bomb near the Nation’s Capital versus dispersing 300 kilograms of nerve gas or 100 kilograms of anthrax. The hydrogen bomb would kill 570,000 to 1,900,000 people. The gas would kill 300 to 8,000 people. But the anthrax would kill from 130,000 to 3 million, depending on weather conditions.

And a terrorist could deliver that anthrax with a small private plane.

"[I]n principle," said the OTA, "biological weapons efficiently delivered under the right conditions against unprotected populations would, pound for pound of weapon, exceed the killing power of nuclear weapons."

But the agency added a hopeful caveat: "[O]n the other hand, if warning is provided, effective civil defense measures are considerably easier to take against chemical and biological weapons."

Today, eight years after this report was authored, two obvious questions spring to mind: Could Osama bin Laden have the capability to attack a U.S. city with anthrax? What can the government do to protect us from such an attack?

This January the Defense Department tried to answer the first of these questions in a report titled, "Proliferation: Threat and Response."

"The followers of Osama bin Laden have, in fact, already trained with toxic chemicals," Defense Secretary William Cohen wrote on the first page of this report. "Fears for the future are not hyperbole."

But what about the far more deadly threat of anthrax?

"The Usama bin Laden network’s reported interest in NBC [nuclear, biological and chemical] materials is a key concern in terms of possible future threats to U.S. interests," the report concluded. "The network’s interest in NBC materials has been widely noted since the early 1990s and, in 1999, Usama bin Laden made public statements defending the right of the Muslim community to pursue NBC capabilities."

Bin Laden and Anthrax?

So, if it is assumed that bin Laden has not already developed his own anthrax supply, what are the chances that Saddam Hussein would loan him some to finally finish off the Mother of All Wars? "The likelihood of a state sponsor providing such a weapon to a terrorist group is believed to be low," the report concluded.

This would mean that at least one difference between an all-out war that pits the United States against bin Laden’s terrorist network and an all-out war that pits the United States against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, is that an all-out war against bin Laden may carry a smaller risk of precipitating a retaliatory—or preemptive—anthrax strike on U.S. troops or a U.S. city.

Although bin Laden may be even less inhibited than Saddam about the actual use of a biological weapon (for whatever reason, Saddam did not use anthrax during the Gulf War), bin Laden as of today may not have the anthrax to use. Iraq almost certainly still does.

In 1995, according to Cohen’s report, the Iraqis told UN weapons inspectors (UNSCOM) that they had destroyed all their Gulf War-era anthrax in 1991. But the Iraqis, UNSCOM concluded, "provided insufficient credible evidence to support this claim."

President Clinton’s 1998 Impeachment Eve War against Iraq gave Saddam a pretext to permanently eject UNSCOM inspectors from his country. That ended any realistic chance for the West to thwart Iraq’s renewed production of anthrax. "The UN believes that Baghdad has the ability to reconstitute its biological warfare capabilities within a few weeks or months," reported Cohen, "and in the absence of UNSCOM inspections and monitoring during 1999 and 2000, we are concerned that Baghdad again may have produced some biological warfare agents."

This bring us back to the question of what America can do to defend her cities against an anthrax attack whether it is launched by Saddam, bin Laden, or some other potential enemy. As of today, the answer is: nothing.

"We do not even have sufficient vaccine to inoculate our entire military force," says Rep. Steve Buyer (R.-Ind.), who until recently served as chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel.

Buyer is an Army veteran who received two shots of the anthrax vaccine when he was deployed to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. He used his subcommittee chairmanship to conduct aggressive oversight of Secretary Cohen’s vaccination program, and the Michigan-based company that was supposed to supply the vaccine. "I went through a lot of grief from people on whether the threat was real, and I held the line," said Buyer. "I’m glad that I did."

In June, the Defense Department suspended its program to vaccinate all troops, after only about 500,000 of the planned 2.4 million had been inoculated. "This slowdown provides for a small reserve of FDA [Food and Drug Administration]-released vaccine in the event of an emergency," the department said.

The vaccine became scarce because the only factory in the country that manufactures it was closed in 1998 for renovations and has not been approved for reopening by the FDA. That same year the factory and the license to produce the vaccine were purchased from the state of Michigan by Bioport, which has the vaccine contract with the Pentagon. The company is owned by retired Adm. William Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Lebanese-American businessman Fuad El-Hibri.

Congressional hearings last year revealed that some of the vaccine produced at this factory was improperly labeled, while some did not meet FDA potency standards. In announcing that it was suspending the vaccination program, the Defense Department said, "Actions are being taken to ensure that personnel deployed to high-threat areas have sufficient antibiotics on hand for post-exposure treatment in case of an attack."

Since then, it may be guessed, the number of areas deemed as "high threat" has increased.

There is no vaccine to inoculate the civilian population anywhere.

In 1999, the Working Group on Civilian Biodefense, a group of doctors and medical researchers, published a report in the Journal of American Medicine noting that an anthrax attack by terrorists might be thwarted if already available anthrax detection technology was deployed and stocks of vaccine and antibiotics were created to treat patients immediately after an attack—before they developed the fateful symptoms.

"An accelerated vaccine development effort is needed," the working group said, "to allow the manufacture of an improved second-generation product that requires fewer doses."

Congress should waste no time in approving a Biological Defense Initiative that gets this job done.

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