Make vaccine voluntary

[HARDCORE]

Issue Date: January 26, 2004

Editorial
Make vaccine voluntary
http://www.airforcetimes.com/story.p...ER-2558960.php


Five years after the Defense Department began forcing service members to roll up their sleeves for the anthrax vaccine, the battle over whether the shots are safe, effective or even legal still rages.
But there?s another question that gets far less attention: Has anyone reassessed the potential threat that prompted the vaccine program in the first place?

More than eight months after major combat operations ended in Iraq, U.S. officials have failed to find a single drop of the anthrax supposedly stockpiled by Saddam Hussein. In fact, the teams charged with searching for anthrax and other weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were pulled out and sent home Jan. 7.

The Army said then that anything worth finding had been found and, if necessary, destroyed.

Surely, if the legions of enemy combatants still fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan had such weapons, they would have used them against U.S. troops by now.

So why does DoD continue to force this vaccine on troops and to destroy their careers if they refuse? Is it fear that admitting there is little or no threat now might invite embarrassing questions about whether the threat ever existed?

Three years ago, when anthrax vaccine shortages forced defense officials to stop inoculating troops going to South Korea, they conveniently dropped that region from the Pentagon?s list of ?high-threat? areas. After that, it stopped publicly identifying any regions as being on its ?high-threat? list.

The Pentagon doesn?t say what the threat is. Rather, officials say, in effect, ?Take our word for it.? If only the Defense Department had a better track record on such matters of troop health and safety.

If defense officials won?t make a clearer case for why mandatory anthrax shots are necessary, then a fundamental revision of the program ? starting with making it voluntary ? is in order.


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(More info exposing the illegalities of the anthrax vaccine program is available at: http://www.milvacs.org/tiger.cfm. The DoD's anthrax vaccine website is available at: http://www.anthrax.mil. The key to understanding the anthrax vaccine program is education, as well as a thorough understanding of the timeline of events, and the historic modus operandi of the military medicine.)