Dr. Meryl Nass talks anthrax How a doctor from Maine helped prevent US soldiers from getting unnecessary (and potentially dangerous) vaccinations BY ALEX IRVINE

On October 27, District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan ordered the Department of Defense to stop forcing military personnel and selected civilian government workers to be vaccinated against anthrax. Since the mandatory vaccinations began in 1998, under then-Secretary of Defense William Cohen, a growing number of patients have complained of complex and ongoing health problems resulting from the shots, and a number of citizen groups have sprouted up to fight the program. That same year, the Food and Drug Administration shut down the BioPort plant that manufactured the vaccine, after finding gross safety and procedural violations.

Administration of the remaining stocks of vaccine continued, however, as the government and military researched new vaccines, and in 2001, the FDA changed its own rules and allowed BioPort (which bills itself as "America’s line of defense against the deadly anthrax bacteria") to reopen and resume production.

Dr. Meryl Nass, who practices at Mount Desert Island Hospital, has been a key figure in the resistance to mandatory anthrax vaccinations. She talked with the Phoenix last week.

Phoenix: Why don’t you recap for our readers how you got involved in this issue in the first place?

Dr. Meryl Nass: I’ve worked on anthrax issues since 1989. I happen to be the person who demonstrated that the anthrax epidemic that occurred in Rhodesia between 1978 and 1980 was due to biological warfare. As a result of that interest, I’ve been tapped by different groups to work with them on biological arms control. So I’ve worked with the Federation of American Scientists; I worked with a group called Citizen Soldier in New York City that was concerned about the use of unlicensed vaccines on soldiers.

If you’re a soldier, you cannot refuse any vaccines or medications. I was aware back in 1995 or earlier that the military planned to institute a large program of multiple vaccines for bioterrorism. Also because of my involvement in this subject, I knew that giving people vaccines for bioterrorism was a strategy doomed to failure.

Q: Why is that?

A: You can create theoretically limitless numbers of microorganisms relatively easily; it takes a short time to make a bug, and a long time to make a vaccine against it. With genetic engineering, of course, the whole thing becomes much more difficult. In 1996, the military announced that they were going to start an anthrax vaccine program. In those days, you could read the world’s literature on anthrax in a few months, so I knew the anthrax vaccine literature, and I knew the vaccine that existed for anthrax had never been proved to be either safe or effective. That’s okay if only a few people are going to be using it, but at least 150,000 people used it in the Gulf War, and the military was talking about giving it to 2.5 million people, and I didn’t think that was smart. So I wrote a small piece for an Internet mailing list of medical professionals, many of whom worked on bioterrorism issues. What happened was that because it was on the Internet, it was searchable, and a whole lot of people found this little piece of mine. The Lancet [a prestigious British medical journal] hotkeyed to my post, and I was asked to write several other articles as a result.

Lots of people contacted me about this, and pretty soon after March 15 [1998, when large-scale mandatory vaccinations began], I started getting a lot of phone calls saying, "These are the symptoms I got after taking the anthrax vaccine; am I going to get Gulf War Syndrome?" I kept telling people "no," but things sort of bubbled up. The military started this program with a lot of publicity and started vaccinating 75,000 people a month.

Several mothers had contacted me for information about the vaccine and decided they wanted to do more. One developed a Web site and mailing list, and another started making up packets of information, and suddenly we had this very loose organizational structure.

By the summer, I had been contacted by some military officers [in the Connecticut Air National Guard] who had been tasked by their colonel to study the vaccine. They had a fellow in their unit who was quite ill with ALS after the Gulf War, so everyone in that unit had a sense that Gulf War exposure might lead to life-threatening disease. They wrote a report, they went back to their commanding officer, he was very concerned, he went to Washington, brought the report with him . . . and when he came back he had a different perspective.

He said, "You guys are bad apples, we’re getting the vaccine, that’s it." Nine of the 36 people in that group quit. These guys were fighter pilots. They’ve been treated decently; when they go up, they do criticism of each other afterwards. They were accustomed to being able to criticize other members of their units irrespective of rank, they were encouraged to think for themselves, and they were commercial pilots making lots of money. The military thing was something they loved, but if they got sick from this vaccine, they would lose their good jobs. They started a revolt within the ranks over this vaccine.

The military started sending experts to bases, and producing lots of literature, this kind of thing. These officers who had become friendly with me started encouraging me to come to bases and give talks about the vaccine. Every time that happened, somewhere between 25 and 60 percent of the pilots would quit.

We never actually formed a formal organization. Everybody did their thing, and one thing led to another. I became the medical expert.

Q: In 2001, anthrax boomed onto the public consciousness. How did that change your movement?

A: Before that, the military had had to stop the program; as a result of our efforts, there had been a number of congressional hearings and we’d been able to explore the FDA inspections of the plant that made the vaccine. It had all kinds of violations, was shut down and not allowed to reopen. As of 2001, the government was able to use [9/11 and the anthrax mail attacks] as an excuse to get FDA to allow this plant to reopen and start the vaccine program up again. In terms of me personally, what it did was give me a lot more of a national presence. Suddenly we had these anthrax attacks, and I knew what needed to be done to deal with them. CDC experts were all involved in their little research contracts, and they hadn’t ever really reviewed the world literature. There were probably military people who knew what to do, but they were keeping their mouths shut.

Q: What’s the consensus within the medical community on the relationship between this vaccine and Gulf War illness or any of the other illnesses you’re talking about?

A: The medical community doesn’t have a consensus because the majority of these people are seen by military physicians. They eventually get seen by outside physicians, but usually each physician only has one patient with odd illnesses, so they don’t make a connection. The people who know the most about the illnesses and who have acknowledged that the vaccine can cause Gulf War Syndrome are a special clinic set up at Walter Reed Army Medical Center to deal with people who got sick from the vaccine.

Q: So there’s a unit within the military that acknowledges the connection.

A: Yeah. This is called the Vaccine Healthcare Center, which was established in 2000 or 2001 as a result of these congressional hearings, because all of these people who were getting sick would have military doctors say, "There’s nothing wrong with you," or "You’re faking," or "We can’t diagnose you," because they’d get odd illnesses that were very difficult to diagnose, understand, and treat.

Q: How many total cases of injury or disability from this vaccine would you say there are?

A: 1.2 million people have gotten this vaccine since March of ’98. My guess is that around 10 percent of them have developed some time of chronic medical illness as a result. Somebody did a survey at Dover Air Force Base, and in their survey about 29 percent were complaining of a problem that developed shortly after vaccination. There’s a few other small surveys. The GAO [General Accounting Office] did a survey of people who said they had symptoms lasting more than a week, or maybe more than a month, and it was seven to 10 percent.

Q: How exactly does the vaccine cause all these illnesses?

A: I can’t do any research because I don’t have access to these military people. I have examined a number of people and been able to order standard lab tests, so I know something about maybe 30 people that I’ve been able to work up. The Vaccine Healthcare Center has reviewed the records and worked up hundreds of these people, and they’ve even published some papers. We think it overstimulates the immune system, and then you wind up getting either typical autoimmune illnesses like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, hypothyroidism — or you get weird combinations of diseases that we think are autoimmune. But because none of these people that I’ve really gotten to work up live nearby, I can’t see them regularly, and I would need to get them to a top university to do specialized tests. Walter Reed is in fact doing some of those tests, but they haven’t published the results.

Q: Do they plan to?

A: Probably depends what the results are.

Q: What is the military’s interest in fighting so hard for this strategy of inoculating everyone? What’s their argument?

A: One is that the anthrax vaccine was the first, and the smallpox vaccine was the second, that would usher in a huge program of 50 vaccines that [the military and biotech contractors] would develop. The cost to develop a new vaccine is $500 million to $1 billion, and the cost to manufacture and administer is another large sum of money.