◆ SpookStack

If this was completely at odds with everything Army scientists had found over the previous three decades, it was because the Fort Detrick team had added something new to the formula. It was a kind of trick, though not in the sense of something fraudulent or deceptive. The Army's scientists made no effort to conceal what they did. Quite the contrary, they reported this trick in great detail. It was an old trick. In the 80s, scientists at NIH had been promoting the use of oils in vaccines again. By now, there was a new crop of oily vaccine boosters hot off the lab bench. It was the oil emulsions that helped transform the Army's hapless protective antigen formula into a potent single-shot vaccine. Dr. Bruce Ivins informed the workshop gathering in old cathedral city of Winchester that he had added three different adjuvants to his one-shot wonders. One was called "Tri- Mix," another "DeTox," and a third was "SAF-1," which stood for Syntex Adjuvant Formula I. They were all made with bacterial scraps from truly noxious microbes like Salmonella typhimurium and Mycobacteria tuberculosis. The British scientists from Porton Down tried a different tack—adding a preparation to the British anthrax vaccine made from the whooping cough germ, Bordetella pertussis. At Winchester, the Porton contingent called their approach "microbial supplementation." All of these adjuvants relied on bacteria, or portions of them, to stimulate the immune system. The three additives used by Fort Detrick, however, differed from Porton Down's in one very significant way. The Fort Detrick additives were all emulsified in oil. The oils were only supposed to be "vehicles" that conveyed the bits of bacteria through the bloodstream. SAF-I, which provided less protection than the other two, contained the oil squalane. The two adjuvants that helped provide complete protection from Ames in guinea pigs, Tri- Mix and DeTox, were emulsified in squalene. At the time, no one at Fort Detrick or the NIH seems to have been aware that these oils were themselves immunostimulants. Having invested decades into refining protective antigen to a singular purity, Ivins et al. were essentially polluting this new ultra-pure vaccine with extraneous antigens to make it work. That is what an adjuvant was—extra antigenic material for a vaccine that had been purified to such an extent that it could no longer do the job it was designed to do. Perhaps it was the importance of their apparent breakthrough that blinded these scientists to what they had done. Whatever it was, it prevented them from seeing the absurdity of their new creation, or its risks. A fully intact microbe presents dozens of different chemical binding sites an antibody can latch onto. Each of these sites is a separate target for a multi-front attack by the immune system. In pursuit of purity, Army scientists had removed all of the targets of anthrax germ but one. Now they had a dubious product that they were determined to improve, and they did it by adding targets from germs other than B. anthracis. Instead of adding more antigenic material from the anthrax microbe - as Lincoln had suggested in the 60s and as Turnbull and Melling had done in the 80s—the Fort Detrick team incorporated pieces of completely different germs. This was Rube Goldberg immunology. The Army's vaccine whiz kids had devised the most convoluted, expensive and time-consuming way conceivable to make a virtually identical product—protective antigen—and then added material that essentially diverted