Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

[HARDCORE]

FYI to all:
The editorials being sent (this and prior) are all that I have had forwarded to me.
If links are provided, I will always include them. If there are no links with the story, then no links were provided.
Sorry.
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Subject: Plain Dealer (Cleveland) - 12/27/03

Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio)

December 27, 2003 Saturday, FINAL / ALL

SECTION: OPINION; Pg. B10

LENGTH: 463 words

HEADLINE: The antidote? U.S. was wrong to force anthrax vaccinations on troops, and damage to resistors' military records must be undone

BYLINE: THE PLAIN DEALER

BODY:
The Pentagon can order American forces into the maw of battlefield death, but it cannot order them to roll up their sleeves for inoculation with an untested vaccine.

American soldiers need not serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said this week in issuing a preliminary injunction against the Pentagon.

Finally, a court has listened to the concerns of those who doubted both the wisdom and legality of the vaccination campaign. Now the question becomes, what can it or any other body do to restore the careers of those who refused to take the shots?

Sullivan, a jurist who has been elevated by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, understood the logic of those who opposed receiving the inoculations: The vaccine in question has been tested for use against topical, not internal, anthrax exposure.

Since the Pentagon's reason for demanding the shots was to ward off the deadly effects of inhaled anthrax, the vaccine amounted to an experimental drug being used for an unapproved purpose, Sullivan found in blocking its mandatory use until a full trial is conducted.

This dubious vaccination program dates to 1998, when the Clinton administration set out to inoculate all 2.4 million military personnel. But it faltered almost immediately when the troubled Michigan company that makes the vaccine couldn't get a Food and Drug Administration license to produce it.

The program was revived by the Bush administration as the Iraq war loomed, as a protection against all those thousands of rounds of anthrax-loaded Iraqi artillery shells that have yet to be found.

But along the way, reports circulated of illnesses, even deaths, involving the vaccine. Hearing these, service members reported to number in the hundreds have refused to take the six-shot series. Each has been disciplined, with punishments ranging all the way to bad-conduct discharges and jail time.

Among them currently is Kurt Hickman, 20, an Ohio National Guardsman from Granville who faces 40 days in jail and a dishonorable discharge for refusing the needle. Hickman appealed to Gov. Bob Taft for leniency, but last week, hours before Sullivan's ruling, Taft turned him down.

Hickman, a junior at Ohio University, is one of more than a half-dozen Ohioans who chose to say no to what they considered an unlawful order, and for so doing now will carry around their necks the lifelong millstone of a dishonorable discharge.

But now a federal judge has heard and agreed with the arguments they and their fellows have been trying to make. Should they prevail in the proceedings to come, their records must be made clean. No one should forever bear such black marks for having opposed an abuse of governmental authority.