Facts About Anthrax

Creating the Anthrax Crisis His Career Needed by Floy Lilley

The crisis was that there was no crisis.

The patents that Bruce Ivins held with co-inventors were never going to make him any real money or give him the star attention he deserved unless the Army became convinced that his new-generation anthrax vaccine had to be given to seventy-five million service men – without delay.

But, the Army wasn’t any longer paying any attention to anthrax.

Yes, a spike of fear in the early 1980s over the Soviet anthrax deaths at Sverdlovsk, and then the greater opportunity in 1990-91 that presented itself when it was thought that Saddam Hussein might use anthrax in the first Gulf War had worked well earlier in making Ivins a microbiologist star. Yes, his salary had risen from $27,000 in 1980 to $59,000 right after 1991. Those incomes, however, were pittances compared to the $150,000 each year that he could be allowed to receive from steady patent royalties, plus the glorious psychic rewards of being at the very epicenter of a critical military science project, if only the Army would demand his vaccine.

What were needed were fears. What were needed were massive waves of gut-chilling fears. Fears that near-invisible weapons of mass destruction were being unleashed and only one new anthrax vaccine could save lives. What was needed was a crisis. So, Ivins created it.

How can a man do what Ivins so deliberately did? This was not insider trading for profit, this was murder for power. In retrospect, a body of literature that includes The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek confirms that a shift in a man’s moral fiber occurs when a state becomes super nationalistic, an enemy such as terrorism is created, and a scientist is employed in a military project. That certainly describes the U.S. by 2001 and Bruce Ivins in Fort Detrick, Maryland, employed by USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases).

….where a few specific ends dominate the whole of society, it is inevitable that occasionally cruelty may become a duty; that acts which revolt all our feeling, such as the shooting of hostages or the killing of the old and sick, should be treated as mere matters of expediency…There is always in the eyes of the collectivist a greater goal which these acts serve and which to him justifies them because the pursuit of the common end of society can know no limits in any rights or values of any individual.

Facts about anthrax

Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York

Transactions of the Epidemiological Society of London ...

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