Lev Sandakhchiev is still the head of Vector. He declined to be interviewed for this account but has steadfastly maintained that no offensive bioweapons research occurs now at Vector. In January of this year, at the Geneva meeting of smallpox experts, Sandakhchiev delivered a paper (and may have caught their flu). In his paper he claimed that Vector did not have any smallpox until 1994, when, he said, Vector had obtained it legally from Moscow. D. A. Henderson was also at that meeting. "It was quite elaborate and quite unbelievable," Henderson said. "I rolled my eyes, and saw other people rolling their eyes at me. We're sitting there, he's presenting us with all this horseshit, and he knows it's horseshit. Sandakhchiev is lying flagrantly."
Four sources have suggested to me that Lev Sandakhchiev was in charge of a Vector research group that in 1990 devised a more efficient way to grow weapons-grade smallpox in industrial-scale pharmaceutical tanks known as bioreactors. The Vector smallpox bioreactors had a capacity of six hundred and thirty litres -- virus tanks big enough for a microbrewery. Once the Vector scientists had worked out the details of variola manufacturing, the results were written up in master production protocols -- recipe books -- and these protocols ended up at the Russian Ministry of Defense, in Moscow. At the time, weapons-grade smallpox was being manufactured by two older methods at a top-secret virus-munitions production plant near the city of Sergiyev Posad, forty-five miles northeast of Moscow. At another virus-munitions plant, near Pokrov, about two hundred miles southeast of Moscow, military virus-production specialists converted the plant to the new Vector method of making smallpox in the large virus bioreactors, but apparently never started the reaction. When one considers that a single person infected with smallpox would be considered a global medical emergency, this is rather a lot of smallpox activity to have bubbling near Moscow. It means that live smallpox virus and the protocols for how to mass-produce it had spread to various places in Russia by the nineteen-nineties. Indeed, live smallpox could be bubbling in reactors now at Sergiyev Posad-no one in the United States government admits to having a clue, and no Russian journalists have seen the place. Peter Jahrling said, "I really think that Vector is out of the offensive BW [biowarfare] business. But Sergiyev Posad is the black hole. We have no contacts there, and the Russians won't allow us to visit the place."
These days, Lev Sandakhchiev has cordial relationships with Peter Jahrling and Joe Esposito. They are eager to draw their colleague into the circle of open international science. During their visits to Siberia, Sandakhchiev has come across to them as warm and human, and desperate for research money to support his institute. Sometimes, candid remarks slip out from the Russians. Jahrling put it this way: "There were tons of smallpox virus made in the Soviet Union. We know that. The Russians have admitted that to us. I was in a room with one of the Vector leaders when he said to us, 'Listen, we didn't account for every ampule of the virus. We had large quantities of it on hand. There were plenty of opportunities for staff members to walk away with an ampule. Although we think we know where our formerly employed scientists are, we can't account for all of them-we don't know where all of them are.' " Today, smallpox and its protocols could be anywhere in the world. A master seed strain of smallpox could be carried in a person's pocket. The seed itself could be a freeze-dried lump of virus the size of a jimmy on an ice-cream cone.
While I was sitting with D. A. Henderson in his house, I mentioned what seemed to me the great and tragic paradox of his life's work. The eradication caused the human species to lose its immunity to smallpox, and that was what made it possible for the Soviets to turn smallpox into a weapon rivalling the hydrogen bomb.
Henderson responded with silence, and then he said, thoughtfully, "I feel very sad about this. The eradication never would have succeeded without the Russians. Viktor Zhdanov started it, and they did so much. They were extremely proud of what they had done. I felt the virus was in good hands with the Russians. I never would have suspected. They made twenty tons -- twenty tons -- of smallpox. For us to have come so far with the disease, and now to have to deal with this human creation, when there are so many other problems in the world . . ." He was quiet again. "It's a great letdown," he said.
For years, the scientific community generally thought that biological weapons weren't effective as weapons, especially because it was thought that they're difficult to disperse in the air. This view persists, and one reason is that biologists know little or nothing about aerosol-particle technology. The silicon-chip industry is full of machines that can spread particles in the air. To learn more, I called a leading epidemiologist and bioterrorism expert, Michael Osterholm, who has been poking around companies and labs where these devices are invented. "I have a device the size of a credit card sitting on my desk," he said. "It makes an invisible mist of particles in the one-to-five-micron size range -- that size hangs in the air for hours, and gets into the lungs. You can run it on a camcorder battery. If you load it with two tablespoons of infectious fluid, it could fill a whole airport terminal with particles." Osterholm speculated that the device could create thousands of smallpox cases in the first wave. He feels that D. A. Henderson's estimate of how fast smallpox could balloon nationally is conservative. "D.A. is looking at Yugoslavia, where the population in 1972 had a lot of protective immunity," he said. "Those immune people are like control rods in a nuclear reactor. The American population has little immunity, so it's a reactor with no control rods. We could have an uncontrolled smallpox chain reaction." This would be something that terrorism experts refer to as a "soft kill" of the United States of America.
The idea that a biological credit card could execute a soft kill of the United States has reached the White House. The chief terrorism expert on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, has sent word through the federal government that getting national stockpiles of smallpox vaccine is a top priority.
The effort started four years ago. So far, the government has little to show except numerous meetings among agencies, with no hope of vaccine anytime soon. The Department of Defense has put all its vaccine efforts into something called the Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program, which is run by the Joint Program Office for Biological Defense. People inside the military don't want their names used when they talk about the Pentagon's efforts. "It's a fucking disaster," said one knowledgeable military officer who has had direct experience in the matter. Last year, the Pentagon hired a systems contractor called Dynport, headquartered in Reston, Virginia, to develop and make a number of different vaccines for troops. The smallpox-vaccine contract calls for three hundred thousand doses, at a cost of $22.4 million, or seventy-five dollars a dose, with delivery now scheduled for 2006. (The date has been pushed back at least once already.) This amount of vaccine could be made in about fifteen flasks the size of soda bottles. There are 2.3 million people in the armed forces, and they have several million more dependents. "Three hundred thousand doses is not enough vaccine to protect anyone -- not even our troops. It totally ignores the fact that smallpox is contagious," one military man said. "These guys ought to be buying tank treads and belt buckles. They know nothing about vaccines."
The Department of Health and Human Services (H.H.S.) has been given the responsibility by the White House for producing a stockpile of smallpox vaccine large enough to protect the American civilian population in case of a bioterror event; originally, the idea was for H.H.S. to consider hiring the military's contractor, Dynport, to make forty million extra doses, in addition to the three hundred thousand that Dynport was making for the Pentagon. (Any such initiative would require competitive bidding.)
At a series of meetings at H.H.S., a top Dynport executive said that forty million doses could be quite expensive. One scientist asked if a group of knowledgeable people could be drawn together to come up with an estimate of costs. The Dynport man answered, "Yes, we can do a study that will list the questions that need to be asked. It will cost two hundred and forty thousand dollars and will take six weeks."
Somebody then asked how much it would cost to answer the questions. The Dynport official responded, "That will be a different study. That study will cost two million dollars and will take six months."
With that, one scientist at the meeting burst out, "This is horseshit! We're asking an encyclopedia salesman if we need an encyclopedia!"
The C.E.O. of Dynport, Stephen Prior, said that the situation is more complicated:"The civilian population is very different from the military. There's an age spread from newborns to the elderly, there's more compromised immunity, with AIDS, chemotherapy, and organ transplants. And possibly thirty-five per cent of people have never been vaccinated. So it's not just scaling up the manufacturing."
Another knowledgeable observer is the retired Army General Philip K. Russell, M.D., who gave the order to send biohazard troops into Reston in 1989 to deal with a building full of monkeys infected with Ebola. Russell said to me, "Many of us are afraid that Dynport won't deliver the goods without wasting an inordinate amount of money."
However, H.H.S. has quietly opened talks with other potential contractors, preparing to solicit bids to make a civilian stockpile of smallpox vaccine, though there has been no announcement. "The effort at H.H.S. still isn't organized," D. A. Henderson said. General Russell said, "If smallpox really got going, people should be most concerned about a lack of effective leadership on the part of their government."
I WANTED to get closer to smallpox virus. In Joe Esposito's lab, at the Centers for Disease Control, there was a test going of a biosensor device for detecting smallpox. It was a machine in a black suitcase. It could detect a bioweapon using; the process called the polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R. -- the same kind of molecular fingerprinting that police use to identify the DNA of a crime suspect. The suitcase thing was called a Cepheid Briefcase Smart Cycler, and it had been co-invented by M. Allen Northrup, a biomedical engineer who founded a company to make and sell biosensors. He was there, along with a cluster of other scientists.
Esposito, the official guardian of one half of the world's official supply of smallpox, handed a box of tubes to a scientist in the room. Two of the tubes contained the whole DNA of smallpox virus but not live smallpox. The DNA drifted in a drop of water; it was the Rahima strain. Two other tubes contained anthrax. The samples were snapped into slots in the machine.
Northrup turned his attention to a laptop computer that nestled in the machine. Northrup is a chunky man with a mustache and reddish-brown hair. He tapped on the keys.
We waited around, chatting. Meanwhile, the Cepheid was working silently. It showed colored lines on its screen. In fifteen minutes, the anthrax lines started going straight up, and someone said, "The anthrax is screaming." Finally, one of the smallpox lines crept upward, slowly. "That's a positive for smallpox, not so bad," a scientist said. Emergency-response teams could carry a Cepheid suitcase to the scene of a bioterror event and begin testing people immediately for anthrax or smallpox. The machine is priced at sixty thousand dollars.
Afterward, Joe Esposito went around collecting the used tubes. The smallpox-sample holder -- a plastic thing the size of a thumbnail-had been left on a counter. I picked it up.
Esposito wasn't about to let anyone walk off with smallpox. "Leave me that tube," he said. "You are not allowed to have more than twenty per cent of the DNA."
Before I handed it to him, I glanced at a little window in the tube. When I held it up to the light, the liquid looked like clear water. The water contained the whole molecules of life from variola, a parasite that had colonized us thousands of years ago. We had almost freed ourselves of it, but we found we had developed a strong affinity for smallpox. Some of us had made it into a weapon, and now we couldn't get rid of it. I wondered if we ever would, for the story of our entanglement with smallpox is not yet ended.
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Classic fatal smallpox. |
Hemorrhagic smallpox; about one hour before death. Thick hemorrhage occuring in the mouth and from the lungs. Smallpox virus is extremely contagious in the air |
Fatal hemorrhagic smallpox in a twelve-year-old girl, 1970s, Bangladesh. A genetically - engineered strain of smallpox might produce unusual symptoms such as these. Here, the eyes are filled with blood, and blood blisters form in the mouth and inside the body.
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Hemorrhagic smallpox. |
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They were never vaccinated. I think the vaccinations stopped at least 21 years ago.
This is too much of a threat. Vaccination must be re-instituted on an emergency basis.