Effects of Anthrax vaccine downplayed
Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2005
http://www.vermontguardian.com/dailies/122005/1220.shtml
NEWPORT NEWS, VA — The Pentagon never told Congress about more than 20,000
hospitalizations involving troops who took the anthrax vaccine from 1998 through
2000, despite repeated promises that such cases would be publicly disclosed.
Instead, generals and Defense Department officials claimed that fewer than 100
people were hospitalized or became seriously ill after receiving the shot,
according to an investigation by the Daily Press of Newport News.
Written policies required that public reports be filed for hospitalizations,
serious illnesses and cases where someone missed 24 hours or more of duty. But
only a few of the cases were actually reported; the rest were withheld from
Congress and the public, according to records obtained by the Daily Press.
Critics of the vaccine, veterans' advocates and congressional staffers say the
Pentagon's deliberate low-balling of hospitalizations helped persuade Congress
and the public that the vaccine was safe.
Withholding the full record contributed to a shorter list of
government-recognized side effects for the drug, which gave patients and
physicians a false idea of what might constitute a vaccine-related illness or
problem. Repeated evidence of the same adverse side effect after a vaccination
is one of the most telling signs of a systematic problem, vaccine safety experts
say.
The newspaper found three cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), known as
Lou Gehrig's disease, that the military hadn't reported. The disease destroys
muscles and nerves, is always fatal, and rarely hits people younger than 45. One
of the three cases involves Navy Capt. Denis Army of Virginia Beach, who died in
2000 after developing symptoms less than a week after his first anthrax
vaccination.
His widow filed the first public acknowledgement of his death and its connection
to the vaccine after talking to a Daily Press reporter and learning that she
could file a report with the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
Col. John Grabenstein, director of the military's vaccine agency, said no one
from the military intentionally misled Congress or the public. The 20,765
hospitalizations merely followed vaccinations in time, without documented proof
of a cause-and-effect relationship, he claimed. However, the data that the Daily
Press used to document the underreporting came from an unpublished report that
Grabenstein supplied in response to its request.
Quarterly analysis of the vaccine's effects ended just as the nation's only
manufacturer, BioPort, Inc. regained its license in 2002, after a 1998 shutdown
by federal inspectors who found safety and other problems. The decision to
discontinue the quarterly monitoring end systematic long-term studies of the
health of those who have taken the drug, the newspaper notes. Most studies that
the Pentagon cites as support for the vaccine's safety involve monitoring that
lasted no longer than a few months.
After the quarterly reviews stopped, more than a million troops were forced to
take the vaccine — until a federal judge ruled last year that the drug had never
been adequately licensed for protection against anthrax use in warfare. He
ordered the military to make vaccination voluntary. The Pentagon is appealing
that ruling. A decision is expected by February.