Anthrax Vaccine Safety Complaints Part Of Ivins Case
By Dave Altimari, The Hartford Courant, Conn.
Aug. 6–A few months before he was targeted in the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle sent a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld questioning whether the anthrax vaccine the military was giving soldiers was unsafe and should be discontinued.
The letter, obtained by The Courant, was written with the help of a number of Connecticut officials. They were concerned about complaints from local National Guard members who refused to take the vaccine because they feared it would make them ill.
Apart from raising the issue of the vaccine’s safety, the criticism may have had an unintended effect. NBC News reported Tuesday that federal authorities today will reveal that those same complaints could be among the motives in the anthrax attacks that left an Oxford woman and four others dead.
The suspected killer, Bruce Ivins, was one of the Army’s lead scientists on the anthrax vaccine and was angered by suggestions that it made recipients ill, NBC reported.
Investigators also are expected to allege that Ivins may have mailed anthrax to generate renewed interest in saving the vaccine and in encouraging the military to spend more money developing a new vaccine — one that he helped produce and may have stood to profit from.
Ivins committed suicide Aug. 1 as federal authorities prepared to file charges against him.
The Courant has learned that Ivins might have had access to Daschle’s letter — or at least may have been aware of its potential chilling effect on the vaccine program — because he was a member of a panel that the government convened to study the vaccine’s effectiveness. One of the letters containing anthrax was mailed to Daschle.
The committee was formed by the Department of Defense before the anthrax mailings and was still meeting at the time the letters were mailed, according to Chairman Jack Melling. He is the former head of Porton Down, the British equivalent of U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, where Ivins worked.
In the letter to Rumsfeld, Daschle raised concerns that the vaccine didn’t work and may have made soldiers sick. He noted that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves drugs only after they are proven safe and effective.
“A growing number of people believe that the use of the anthrax vaccine as currently formulated to protect humans against inhalation of anthrax spores fails to meet this test,” wrote Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat. “We all acknowledge that the threat posed by biological weapons, including anthrax, is a real one that the Administration and the Congress have a responsibility to address.”
The letter, also signed by then House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, was sent to Rumsfeld on June 21, 2001. The first anthrax letters were postmarked Sept. 18, 2001. The anthrax-laced letters sent to the offices of Daschle and Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy were postmarked Oct. 9, 2001.
Ottilie Lundgren, 94, of Oxford, was killed in November 2001 when she opened an anthrax-laced letter that passed through the same sorting machine in a New Jersey postal facility as the letter to Daschle.
Daschle could not be reached for comment Tuesday night. He has criticized the FBI investigation of the anthrax letters and the agency’s refusal to update him and other victims on their progress. The FBI is expected to meet with the victims and their families today and might release documents that authorities say link Ivins to the crime.
Daschle got involved in the anthrax vaccine issue through U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, whose office represented Connecticut National Guard members who refused to take the anthrax vaccine.
Blumenthal said Tuesday that attorneys in his office worked closely with Dodd and Daschle to craft the letter to Rumsfeld.
“We were strongly questioning the efficacy and the safety of the vaccine and were looking for anybody who could help us,” Blumenthal said.
After the anthrax letters were discovered, talkes about halting the vaccine’s use stopped. In 2004, a federal court halted production because the vaccine wasn’t properly licensed; the FDA OK’d it in 2005.
Among the documents and reports used to win FDA approval were four studies, all involving Ivins, performed at USAMRIID. The testing was done on animals.
Federal sources have said new DNA testing allowed them to determine that the anthrax used in the letters came from Ivins’ work area at USAMRIID. While the scientific advancement helped isolate where the anthrax came from, proving that Ivins produced it would have been more difficult because several other scientists had access to the material.
For the past year, the FBI has followed Ivins, retraced his steps around the time of the 2001 mailings and interviewed numerous scientists who worked with him on producing the anthrax vaccine.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Ivins stood to make money on a patent for the next generation of the anthrax vaccine through a contract the government awarded to VaxGen, a California company. But the company was never able to produce a new vaccine.
Melling said Tuesday that Ivins’ work on the committee was the main reason Ivins was honored in 2003 with the Decoration of Exceptional Civilian Service, the highest honor given to non-military employees of the Defense Department.
Melling said he was surprised to hear Ivins’ name associated with the anthrax mailings. “He came across to me as kind of an ordinary guy who certainly didn’t seem to have any chip on his shoulder or have any crazy ideas,” Melling said.
—–
To see more of The Hartford Courant, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.courant.com.
Copyright (c) 2008, The Hartford Courant, Conn.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.