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vaccine was safe. Nevertheless, what the government then did not do was telling. The FDA never licensed the vaccine, or the oi] adjuvant, for human use. The Fort Dix experiment was the first time Army doctors and scientists injected an oil- boosted vaccine into U.S. troops without informed consent; there is now clinical evidence that it was far from the last. For more than a half century, factions in military medicine and in the U.S. public health establishment have actively campaigned to get an oily vaccine additive licensed, seemingly at any cost. The Emperor's New Clothes When scientists at Fort Detrick, following Joe Jemski's 1992 talk, reviewed the existing literature on the Wright vaccine, it didn't look good. Even with 6 shots, the vaccine did not protect very well. Guinea pigs vaccinated with the licensed human vaccine died when exposed to certain strains of anthrax. In 1986 the bad news got worse. In discovering that the licensed vaccine protected against the Army's old weapons strain, Vollum - from which the vaccine had been derived - Stephen Little and Gregory Knudson also discovered 8 more-anthrax strains for which the PA vaccine did not work. Among them was the now notorious Ames strain that was mailed in 2001 anthrax letter attacks. Like the Army's previous research, the data confirmed that a live spore vaccine provided better protection against more strains. "The fact that the spore vaccine provided protection against all isolates tested suggests that other antigens may play a role in active immunity," they concluded. Which would argue for a live anthrax vaccine, but Fort Detrick's scientists expressed an age old concern about problem with living vaccines that could be traced all the way back to Pasteur: "Since this vaccine is a live immunogen," they warned, "safety factors must be considered before its use." Little and Knudson did not rule out the possibility of resorting to a live spore vaccine, but that is not what they then chose to pursue. When they, along with Fort Detrick scientists Bruce Ivins and Sue Welkos, began working on a new anthrax vaccine, they chose a design that was all the rage at the NJH—subunit plus adjuvant. "Subunit" refers to small fragments of a germ. For safety, NIH scientists were using subunits of lethal viruses like HIV to be the chief component of their new generation of genetically engineered vaccines. These ultra-pure vaccines, which reduced an immunization to mere molecules from a microbe, were safe, but at a price. They were weak. In some cases, they afforded no detectable level of protection at all. This is why the NIH wanted an adjuvant more robust than alum for its new vaccines. The subunit that Little, Knudson, Ivins and Welkos chose for the Army's new anthrax vaccine was a little surprising. It was protective antigen—the same main ingredient in the vaccine they were trying to replace. Although all the data from both U.S. and British military experiments from the 60's forward indicated that more components of the anthrax microbe needed to be in any effective anthrax vaccine—a fact that even Little and Knudson acknowledge in their 1986 paper—Fort Detrick's newest generation of anthrax investigators did just the opposite. In fact, they did one better. With recombinant DNA technology, their new vaccine would eliminate every extra molecule of anthrax unrelated to protective antigen. It would be purest PA formulation ever made, and would hence be the weakest anthrax vaccine ever made. Remember, in immunology, purity equals