Uncle Sam the Bioterrorist

Ivins was a senior member of the US Army’s Bacteriology Division at USAMRIID and had been instrumental in anthrax vaccine development and production. Until recently, the army had viewed his vaccine work as critical. In December 1997, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen went so far as to mandate that all US soldiers, sailors, and airmen receive the inoculation. However, claims of the vaccine being connected to Gulf War Syndrome . . . made Cohen’s directive controversial. . . . Also in year 2000, Ivins had coauthored a patent application for a new generation of vaccine developed through genetic engineering, which Ivins clearly hoped would replace the decades-old, controversial BioPort product.[ii]

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According to Decker, Ivins feared that his life’s work was imperiled, and therefore decided to show the US government and media just how much the country needed his anthrax vaccine by attacking both establishments with anthrax spores. Even though the FBI quickly concluded the attacks were not the action of a hostile foreign agent, Ivins’s gambit initially worked as he intended. In June 2002, the DoD reinstated the anthrax vaccine mandate for US service personnel and Congress passed the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act with additional funds allocated for vaccine development.[iii]

However, due to ongoing safety concerns, the anthrax vaccine mandate for US soldiers was again challenged in court, and protracted litigation ensued that lasted until 2008, when a federal judge upheld an earlier ruling that it was “a violation of federal law for military personnel to be subjected to involuntary AVA inoculation because the vaccine was neither the subject of a presidential waiver nor licensed for use against inhalation anthrax.”[iv]

Ivins was a person of interest for six years, but the investigation of him intensified only after the DoD lost the legal battle in March 2008. On July 29, 2008, he purportedly committed suicide by overdosing on acetaminophen after he learned that he was probably going to be arrested. On August 6, 2008, federal prosecutors declared Ivins the sole perpetrator.[v] In other words, according to the FBI, the anthrax bioterrorism attack of 2001 that seemingly justified the DoD’s controversial anthrax vaccine mandate for US service personnel was committed by a senior DoD scientist.

Some of his Ivins’s colleagues and others in the field who knew him are not convinced he was the culprit. Suspicions have also arisen that the true culprit was someone who wanted to pin the attacks on Iraq to justify US military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The FBI never found evidence that Iraqi agents or Islamic terrorists mailed the anthrax contaminated letters. If it wasn’t Bruce Ivins, it was likely someone else within the US or Israeli national security state. Reviewing the record of US biodefense blunders over the last twenty-five years, one may reasonably conclude that the biggest threat to the American people is not hostile foreign actors or emerging infectious diseases, but the US bio-pharmaceutical complex and its laboratories stocked with dangerous infectious agents and its obsession with creating experimental vaccines against them.

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