◆ SpookStack

Health Service "in collaboration with the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board." At the 17-year mark, academia got involved too. An AFEB scientist on the faculty of the University of Michigan School of Public Health organized yet another follow-up. No one, it seemed, wanted to be left out of such an important experiment. And the experiment that seemingly had no end. Twenty-one years after Salk first injected unsuspecting soldiers with a theoretically new and improved flu vaccine, the Fort Dix troops were under the microscope yet again. The list of sponsors included many of America's most respected public health institutions: the National Academy of Sciences- National Research Council, the American Cancer Society, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Public Health Service and the Commission on Influenza of the Armed forces Epidemiological Board. USAMRDC bankrolled this study, just as it did the first one. What was remarkable about this 21-year project - involving the military, civilian public health authorities and a major university - is that at no time during its execution did any of the scientists involved publicly discuss whether it was ethical to run a medical experiment on people without telling them. If these doctors had any concerns, they did not publish them. Long before the last study was completed, AFEB proposed the adoption of an experimental flu vaccine with oil for everyone in the military. In 1963 and 1964, AFEB recommended injecting every man and woman in the armed forces with the new vaccine. The board also recommended that Department of Defense also commence studies with oil added to tetanus and diphtheria toxoids, and polio vaccines. , Army doctors seemed determined to add oil to every vaccine they could. Here is what they were not telling anybody. By 1964, the year when everyone in the military was supposed to get immunized with an oil-boosted influenza vaccine, the Army. already knew the risks this vaccine presented for a very specific type of illness. AFEB's Colonel Abram S. Benenson had drawn up a list of diseases that investigators should watch out for in veterans injected with the oily flu vaccine at Fort Dix. Benenson's list read like the contents of a chapter on autoimmune disease in an immunology textbook. It included multiple sclerosis, myelitis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, uveitis, neurodermatitis circumscripta and disseminata, amyloidosis, lupus erythematosus, dematomyositis, scleroderma, chronic pericarditis, Raynaud's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, rheumatoid myositis and acute glomerulonephritis—all of them autoimmune diseases. The final study on the Fort Dix troopers had data that none of the previous ones had: autopsy results. The soldiers had grown older and many of them had died. Epidemiologists, mainly working for the National Research Council and the American Cancer Society, reported a "significant excess of deaths" in soldiers given the oil-boosted vaccine, which the investigators related to "ill-defined vascular lesions of the central nervous system." They attributed this fact to the greater number of autopsies available for the soldiers given the oil-boosted vaccine. But there were hints of a problem with autoimmunity. Ten percent of the soldiers studied, who were injected with the oil-boosted vaccine, developed a "collagen disease," which is a term doctors used to use interchangeably with autoimmune disease. Still, the number of patients in this study was too low to extrapolate any reliable conclusions from the data. That did not prevent government and military doctors from doing just that. They concluded that the oily flu