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° é, ~ is THE PENTAGON'S TOXIC SEGRET-Vanity Fair Article Page 9 of 10 side effects in animals. But Asa believes she has evidence that the British also boosted at least one of their vaccines with squalene. In 1998, she tested five British veterans suffering from symptoms similar to those of Gulf War syndrome. Four were positive for antibodies to squalene. (The British Ministry of Defence denies using squalene in vaccines given to Gulf War troops.) Among the 1991 coalition allies, the United States, Britain, Canada, and the Czech Republic have reported possible Gulf War-related illnesses. Of these, the first three admit to immunizing troops against biological-warfare agents. Production of anthrax vaccine in unlicensed facilities did not end with the war. On August 29, 1991, six months after Iraq's surrender, the army surgeon general approved a $15.4 million contract for a company called Program Resources, Inc. (PRL), a National Cancer Institute subcontractor that managed some of N.C.I.'s labs at Fort Detrick. Contracts were drawn up for fiscal years 1992 and 1993. In a secret Pentagon log kept continuously between August 8, 1990, and February 7, 1992, there are numerous references to the army's expanded vaccine-production program, but no record of any decision to halt it or to cancel the contract with P.R.I. Chuck Dasey, a spokesman at Fort Detrick, says that no anthrax vaccine was ever produced through the contract. Presumably, the vaccines made during the Gulf War are part of the stockpile now being administered in the wake of the D.O.D's December 1997 decision to immunize all 2.4 million people in the armed services against anthrax. When Pentagon officials held a press conference about the mandatory immunizations last summer, they insisted that there had been only seven reported adverse reactions to the nearly 140,000 anthrax vaccinations that the military had given in the preceding six months. But according to the FDA's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, there were at least 64 reports of reactions to the vaccine between September 2, 1998, and March 9, 1999. Activist Lori Greenleaf, a day-care provider in Morrison, Colorado, says that, based on her E-mail, there are a lot more military personnel reporting problems. Greenleaf began a grassroots campaign against mandatory anthrax immunizations because of her 23-year-old son, Erik Julius, who she says fell ill after taking the second of three anthrax shots in March 1998. She is swamped with messages from fearful enlisted men and women. Some of them have already received their anthrax shots. "They've got rashes, chronic fatigue, hair loss, memory loss, muscle and joint pain, numbness in their extremities." Greenleaf says she does not know what an adjuvant is, and she has no idea what is ailing her son. "All I know is, my son and many other people are getting sick after getting the anthrax shots, and it sounds an awful lot like Gulf War syndrome." Two servicemen who received their anthrax shots last year have tested positive for antibodies to squalene. One received vaccine from Lot No. FAVOZO, the same lot sold to Canada and Australia. The other serviceman received vaccine from Lot No. FAV030. Doses from this lot were also sold to Canada, according to that country's Department of National Defence. There is no evidence that every dose in FAVOZO and FAV030 is contaminated with squalene, but the antibodies in these two veterans suggest that anyone immunized from these lots may be playing "vaccine roulette." The U.S. has shipped anthrax vaccine from other lots to Germany, Israel, and Taiwan. If the first casualty of war is truth, then the rule of law is a close second. As Cicero wrote, “Laws are silent in time of war." In the fall of 1990, the Pentagon began petitioning the FDA to waive informed-consent requirements on so-called investigational new drugs for the Persian Gulf. This was an ethical powder keg. In 1947, under the authority of the U.S. military in Nuremberg, Nazi scientists and physicians stood accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity for performing experiments on prisoners. Seven were hanged. Following the trials, US. judges drafted the 10-point Nuremberg Code, which was intended to gover all future experiments involving human subjects. The code's first and. best-known principle was voluntary, informed consent. Until the Gulf War, the US. military had never argued that there should be any exceptions. In the end, the ED_A. decided to grant waivers for PB. pills and for the rarely used and as yet unlicensed vaccine botulinum toxoid. In 1994, the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee called this a violation of Nuremberg, the moral equivalent of the army's World War II-era mustard-gas tests on troops and its LSD experiments in the 50s and 60s. "We'd like to think these kinds of abuses are a thing of the past, but the legacy continues,” said the committee chairman at the time, Senator Rockefeller. "During the Persian Gulf War, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were given experimental vaccines and drugs ... these medical products could be causing many of the mysterious illnesses those veterans are now experiencing.” Rockefeller could barely contain himself: "The D.O.D.'s failure to provide medical treatment or information to soldiers was unjustifiable, unethical, sometimes illegal, and caused unnecessary suffering." He was referring to the experimental PB. pills and botulinum-toxoid vaccine. Rockefeller and his staff made no mention of unapproved anthrax vaccine, Project Badger, or the Persian Gulf "Manhattan Project." http://www. idir.net/~krogers/vanty fair. html 11/8/2005