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ALL INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN Ig CLASSIFIED @ DATE Lze- 005 BY 60324 uc baw/d KE /clse » Read the introduction <intro.html> » Send an e-card <http://www.perseusbookspromos.com/vaccinea/index.html> The Greatest Story Never Told For the past 17 years, the Army has been working on a new anthrax vaccine that contains no anthrax, and is made with an ingredient that it does not want to name. That ingredient is called squalene. Squalene is an oil. Without it, the new vaccine will not work any better than the old one. In fact, for all intents and purposes, without squalene the new vaccine is the old one. What makes squalene so important is its proven ability to stimulate a strong response from the immune system. That is something the main ingredient of the new vaccine, the now ultra-purified protein secreted by the anthrax microbe—recombinant protective antigen—cannot do by itself. It is too weak. Immunologists have a special name for substances used to boost feeble vaccines. They are called adjuvants. Adjuvants are arguably the most extensively researched pharmaceutical product in the last quarter century that you never heard of. I have used the word adjuvant three times in this paragraph so far and that is probably three times more than you have ever seen it in print before. This is partly because the most effective adjuvants, those formulated with oils, are too dangerous for human use. That is squalene's other proven ability, causing incurable disease, which is why it is such a touchy subject with the Department of Defense. The word adjuvant comes from a Latin word that means "to help." But with oil adjuvants like squalene that term is misleading. Today, only one adjuvant—an aluminum salt called alum—is licensed for human use. All the oil adjuvants are so noxious that their use is restricted to experiments with animals, and even then, governments have written strict regulations to govern how they are used. The classic oil adjuvant, called Freund's Complete Adjuvant, is considered too inhumane to even inject into animals. It does a terrific job of stimulating the immune system, though. Unfortunately, Freund's Complete Adjuvant can cause permanent organ damage and incurable disease. As early as the 1930s, these oil additives were notorious for inducing illness. By the 1950s, scientists knew these illnesses were specifically autoimmune. Today that is their chief use in research—inducing disease instead of preventing it. Scientists studying autoimmune disease cannot wait around for its spontaneous appearance in a lab animal; they inject it with Freund's Complete Adjuvant to reproduce autoimmunity on demand. Oil adjuvants made with squalene equally effective at this job, and regrettably according to Dutch scientists, equally inhumane. , , Autoimmune diseases are chronic and progressively debilitating ailments; some, like