Anthrax vaccine

Secretary of Defense William Cohen may well be right that the threat of the biological weapon anthrax is real and in the hands of nations that might use it against U.S. soldiers. But even Pentagon officials recently admitted that its plan to protect those soldiers with a vaccine is not working and that dwindling stocks of the vaccine would cause the number of vaccinations it administered to drop sharply. As one member of the Bangor-based 101st Air National Guard Refueling Wing said this week, “A lot of people are breathing a sigh of relief.”

The lack of confidence in the program is not based on numbers – a senior biological weapons expert from the Food and Drug Administration testified before Congress last week that of the 2 million doses of the vaccine given in the last decade, 1,404 caused any reported adverse reaction and only 73 of those were serious. And no case, according to the official, could be confidently linked to the vaccine. The doubt among soldiers – nearly 300 have so far refused to be vaccinated, countless others have been injected and simply hoped for the best – may be traced more to the vaccine’s sole source, Bioport Corp. of Lansing, Mich., which was forced to halt production of the vaccine after the FDA found numerous safety and procedural violations.

The financially troubled Bioport and the particular kind of vaccine it makes, which some doubt would be effective against airborne or multiple-strain germ warfare, are losers for the Pentagon. To continue with Bioport after so many difficulties is to invite further morale problems without adequately addressing the efficacy of its product.

Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, suggested recently that the Pentagon uy out the vaccine maker. It is an idea that probably already has occurred to Pentagon officials, but worth pursuing anyway. A major shift in the vaccination process is one way to regain the confidence of members of the armed services and their families. Short of buying out the company, the Pentagon might try to make the vaccination program attractive enough to another company to take it on. Certainly, finding a second supplier would be a lot faster than the Pentagon trying to get a program of its own going.

Whichever course Secretary Cohen eventually chooses, he will have a hard time regaining the confidence of service members unless he severs ties to the company the Pentagon currently supports.