William Patrick, the father of the original US germ warfare program, has died. As this country’s chief biowar scientist during the Cold War, Patrick perfected the applied misuse of rabbit fever and weaponized anthrax.
He was 84, as noted by an obituary today in the Washington Post here.
In the Nineties, Patrick was a central character in lurid books and articles on biological warfare by Richard Preston and Judith Miller. Miller along with co-authors at the New York Times, produced Germs, a history of worldwide biowar programs, including that of the United States during the Cold War.
After 9/11 and the anthrax mailings, it was generally thought Patrick would have a lot to contribute to the discovery and netting of the anthrax mailer.
This did not pan out.
Patrick was, however, noted in the Post for having written a report for the US government, years before the anthrax attack, on the lethal potential of its spores in the mail.
“[Patrick] had been commissioned to write a report on the effectiveness of an anthrax attack spread through the mail system,” writes the Post today. “In the report, Mr. Patrick described how an envelope laced with 2.5 grams of anthrax could do significant harm by direct and indirect contact.”
The paper notes this was about the same amount used by Bruce Ivins.
The newspaper lists a number of Patrick’s career milestones.
However, many microbiologists would fairly consider them dubious.
Patrick held five secret patents on the weaponization of anthrax. And according to the Post:
Under Mr. Patrick’s direction, scientists at Fort Detrick developed a tularemia agent that, if disseminated by airplane, could cause casualties and sickness over thousands of square miles, according to tests carried out by the U.S. government.
Patrick and his US biowar teams “conducted mock attacks in places bustling with people, including the New York subway system and Washington National Airport, in the latter case releasing anthrax simulants hidden in suitcases.”
One example was famous for its inclusion in college level microbiology texts.
From a common college textbook, “Fundamentals of Microbiology” by I. Edward Alcamo:
“Perhaps the most famous and controversial use of [Serratia marcescens] was the US Army’s ‘Operation Sea-spray,’ conducted in 1951 and 1952. To study wind currents that might carry biological weapons, scientists filled balloons with cultures of [the organism] and burst them over the ocean near San Francisco . . . Shortly thereafter, doctors at close by Stanford Hospital noted an unusual outbreak outbreak of pneumonia and urinary tract infections among hospital patients. They isolated Serratia in some of these cases, but could not establish the source . . . Serratia pneumonia is accompanied by patches of bronchopneumonia, and in some cases, substantial tissue destruction in the lungs . . . In addition, it is a widespread agent of urinary tract disease.”
US biowar scientists did not think Serratia marcescens could cause illness. It did. However, the microbe was of interest because it is easy to identify.
“In this next situation, we are going to attack the World Trade Center with crude tularemia; francisella tularensis,” continues Patrick.
“I want to use 1,000 blood auger plates that you can buy practically anywhere: hospital supply houses, for instance. I can scrape 1,000 of these plates in 2 hours without a problem. I am going to scrape with a cotton swap so that I get confluent growth. In about 36 hours I am going to wash off the material that has grown there. I am going to wash it off with saline. If the terrorist is wise he is going to add a little sugar to maintain isotensity of the cell wall, cell membrane. I am going to Waring-blend this mixture and then I am going to filter it through cheese cloth.
“I am going to use a garden sprayer to disseminate the material. The critical point here, in addition to the agent, is that the garden sprayer has got to develop 90 psi; if it is less than that, you can forget it.
“One thousand plates with this little scheme will yield 5 liters of product or 1.32 gallons of material. Trust me on this. The agent concentration is not like a sophisticated production facility, but we have five times 108 of these cells per milliliter. The dose for man is a very conservative 50 cells; I could as easily have used 10 cells if it is fresh material. The garden sprayer has a 2-gallon capacity, 90 psi, one split orifice. I am going to disseminate at the rate of 1 gallon per 10 minutes, and I am going to use a very low disseminating efficiency because garden sprayers are not very efficient. I am going to get 0.001 percent of the material that I have. Attacking the World Trade Center with your good friend tularemia!”
“. . . Finally, I believe that a dedicated terrorist group can produce crude BW agents with simple procedures, with readily available equipment. I think they can jerry rig disseminating devices from equipment that can be purchased from a local hardware store. They can infect and kill large numbers of people in confined areas like buildings. The Pennsylvania Turnpike tunnel was a very interesting study, classified, of course. The subway systems in New York, Chicago, and Washington. They will certainly produce panic and hysteria.”
If you read Patrick’s entire presentation in the original, along with the rest of those from the old bioterror-is-coming lobby, the audience doesn’t quite get Bill Patrick. A couple venture to say, logically, that if everything is possible just as he says it is, there’s nothing anyone can do. The terrorists will strike, lots of people will get sick and die, and emergency services will be crushed.
This has not turned out to be the case.
The Post ended on this note:
Despite the macabre nature of his work at Fort Detrick, Mr. Patrick spoke about how vital his profession was to national security.
“We did not sit around talking about the moral implications of what we were doing,” he told the Baltimore Sun in 2004. “We were problem-solving.”
The Dickensian characters of Eat Shit Farms appeared in this short news video from the Associated Press:
Everyone is familiar with the image of the American businessman who now invokes his 5th Amendment right to protection against self-incrimination.
Then there was the Austin “Jack Decoster/Peter DeCoster team from Eat Shit Farms Wright County Egg, the business at the center of the biggest spread of foodborne salmonellosis in US history.
Their written testimony, here, is predictably self-serving.
Their business grew too fast. And it’s always been aggressively fighting Salmonella. Et cetera.
Pictures from the FDA are worth a bit, showing sides of Eat Shit Farms’ hen house broken and bulged out from piles of crap, liquid excrement seeping from various holes and cracks, and dead flies everywhere.
Bart Stupak, the outgoing Michigan congressman and chairman of the House Energy & Commerce committee, was the face attached to the investigation.
Stupak, an anile character known only for trying to screw up healthcare reform and living in the shady place now known as the C Street house, released as pro formaa statement of concern and rectitude as possible.
Congressman Bart Stupak was alarmed. He was on the case. There were flies and manure everywhere. It probably took a staffer all of an hour and a half to write and put into .pdf form.
That Bart Stupak was head of this congressional investigation reveals a lot about how much change is coming.
Stupak mentions other hearings he’s conducted on foodborne illness, as if he can take credit. Too bad for Bart Stupak, the same types of things continued to happen. Indicating Stupak does things for show and publicity.
These are meant as indictments of the firms named on the certificates. As well as what it takes to get some rubber stamp for good healthy business.
They also serve as indictments of the US government and congress which, two years after Peanut Corporation of American set off a salmonellosis outbreak that killed nine, still wasn’t regulating or overseeing anything until it was too late again.
Today’s Associated Press piece on the salmonella and the massive egg recall has everything you need to know about more US failure on the way.
The complaining politician, who is shocked — just shocked, is Bart Stupak, the outgoing Democratic Party caveman from Michigan who held up healthcare reform for vanity’s sake.
From AP’s lede grafs:
The chairman of a House subcommittee says a recent outbreak of salmonella in eggs paints, in his words, “a very disturbing picture of egg production in America.”
During a hearing Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan showed photos of dead chickens, bugs and holes in hen houses at Iowa egg farms linked to the outbreak.
Consider that for a moment, the inconsequential fellow known only because he was a famous nuisance, Bart Stupak, heading a House inquiry into mass salmonellosis.
It’s a joke.
Austin “Jack” DeCoster, the Dickensian owner of Eat Shit Farms Wright County Egg also makes an appearance. He claims to be upset that he’s implicated in so much illness. At least until he’s out of this jam.
It is reported:
The owner of an Iowa egg company says in testimony prepared for a House hearing that he was “horrified” to learn that his eggs may have sickened as many as 1,600 people in an outbreak of salmonella poisoning this summer.
Austin “Jack” DeCoster and his son, Peter DeCoster, are scheduled to testify before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee Wednesday. The panel has asked them to come prepared to explain what steps they have taken to address salmonella contamination found at their farms.
In testimony released by the company, Wright County Egg, the two men say they believe an ingredient sold to them by an outside supplier may be to blame for the outbreak.
Someone else’s fault. The eight-foot-high piles of manure in the egg-laying operation.
I’ve said it before. Currently, the US system is broken.
The Dickensian character afoot in US agribusiness is a greater menace to the general welfare than any ginned up scenario dreamt of re bioterrorism.
The US government cannot now, and even will not, get these people off the street. That the DeCosters can show up to be questioned by the likes of a Bart Stupak in a Congressional inquiry is all the evidence one needs.
The next sentence is particularly laughable:
Peter DeCoster, CEO of Wright, said the company has made “sweeping biosecurity and food safety changes” following the recall …
At the beginning of the summer, the people who ran Wright County Egg in Iowa probably didn’t know and/or care what the word biosecurity meant.
Not that it matters. Biosecurity — in real world practice — is just a word coined and used to justify transfer of taxpayer money to the American bioterror defense private sector.
Federal investigators found piles of manure up to eight feet tall, live mice, pigeons and other birds inside the hen houses at two egg farms suspected of causing a nationwide outbreak of salmonella illness, officials said Monday.
How do you biosecuritize a mass egg farm where it was business to have piles of manure taller than the boss inside the hen house?
The Associated Press also mentions some eyewash about chickens now being vaccinated against Salmonella at Eat Shit Farms, a practice DD noted in news from the Los Angeles Times, that has been avoided nationwide. Because it added a few pennies to the cost.
“I pray several times each day for all [those made ill]and for their improved health,” wrote Austin Decoster in prepared testimony, reported AP.
Around 1,600 have now been diagnosed in the outbreak.
“For every case reported, there may be 30 that are unreported,” concludes the AP.
Some additional notes from today’s hardcopy Los Angeles Times, including a frank admission that the food regulatory system is broken.
Completely, DD might add.
It’s more proof that nobody in power is really interested in doing anything about the Dickensian characters from US agribusiness who emerge as threats to the general welfare.
But they are always ready to throw immoral amounts of money at bioterrorism research and defense into protecting against an outside threat.
“[While] most policy-makers and food safety experts agree the regulatory system is broken, they also agree that chances of a significant overhaul anytime soon are dwindling,” reported the newspaper here.
Unintentionally telling lines, an excuse, actually:
“In what FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg recently termed an ‘unfortunate irony,’ new FDA rules governing egg safety went into effect July 9, too late to prevent the current salmonella outbreak.”
In a sidebar piece, Eat Shit Farms Wright County Egg in Iowa was announced as the target of a civil suit including sickened people from six states.
“Self-policing doesn’t work,” said the lawyer representing them, during a press conference announcing the suit. “The farms failed to follow US regulations to prevent contamination,” reads the newspaper.
The Wright County Egg salmonella distribution “is the largest instance of salmonella poisoning since the Centers for Disease Control began tracking cases more than thirty years ago.”
In the last installment of Eat Shit Farms, I contrasted Austin “Jack” DeCoster’s Iowa tainted egg farms with the case of the Rajneeshee cult in Oregon in which the group instigated deliberate salmonella contamination.
In 1984, the Rajneeshee sickened 751 people with Salmonella typhimurium.
DeCoster’s firm is responsible for 1,519 diagnosed cases of salmonellosis.
The lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the suit estimated the number much higher.
Ricin is a poison. Since 9/11, the now turned parasitic US bioterror defense industry, which runs on taxpayer dollars, has worked hard to convince that it’s a horrible threat in the hands of terrorists.
Ricin, while very toxic, simply isn’t quite poisonous enough. And it isn’t a cake walk to purify it from castor seeds, although making castor mash is a fairly common activity.
DD has written about this at length previously. Just see the “Ricin Kooks” tab at right.
Historically, the only people in the US who fiddle with castor seeds are nuts from the extreme right fringe — neo-Nazis and those endeavoring to turn their living rooms into bunkers lest the tyrannical government come for them — to those harboring the impulse to destroy their spouses.
Two recent cases in the news, the first from Everett, WA, where a man named Jeffrey Marble had it in for his wife. He beat her with a barbell and was convicted and sent over on that charge.
A jury on Wednesday quickly convicted an Everett man in the barbell beating of his wife last year.
A Sept. 8 sentencing date was set for Jeffery C. Marble, 49. He faces a standard sentencing range of 11 to nearly 14 years in prison, prosecutors said.
Federal agents weren’t far behind after ricin was found in the home and tests later showed the woman had been exposed to the toxin.
That information didn’t reach jurors. Any testimony about the ricin would have been too prejudicial to the defendant, who was on trial for an assault, Superior Court Judge Gerald Knight ruled earlier in the trial.
It’s against federal law to possess or manufacture ricin. FBI agents and federal prosecutors continue to investigate.
“It’s still pending with the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Shapiro said.
Marble allegedly told police he’d looked up recipes to turn castor seeds into ricin. He used a mortar and pestle to grind up the seeds in the family home but denied using it on his wife, according to court papers.
Marble told investigators he used the seeds to poison mountain beavers and moles, but it didn’t seem to be working.
Another case involves the typical perpetrator, this time from a suburb of Chicago. Edward Bachner will eventually be sent over for buying up purified tetrodotoxin, a nerve poison extracted from puffer fish.
This, also in a case seemingly aimed at poisoning his wife, coupled with the white kook’s fetish for accumulating weapons — including castor powder.
The FBI arrested Bachner June 30, 2008, after he arrived at a UPS Store to pick up vials of TTX he had ordered from a company in New Jersey. Authorities said a search of his home on the 5700 block of McKenzie Drive later uncovered 45 full or partially full vials of the poison along with evidence he had obtained at least 19 more vials that were missing. Agents also found a handgun, more than 50 knives, five garrotes, a phony CIA badge, a precursor to the poison Ricin and books on how to poison people, make gun silencers and hand-to-hand combat, a federal prosecutor said. Bachner also faces charges he tried over the Internet to hire someone to kill his wife in 2005. Authorities questioned Bachner about that incident in 2006, but did not press charges at the time.
Ricin will never be used as a WMD. While there may be wishful thinking in this matter, it just isn’t going to happen. Science, history and precedent don’t support the conclusion. The castor plant has co-existed with man for a long time, not only as a renewable crop but also as a decorative ornament.
People who have castor plants don’t have WMDs in the garden. And castor oil pressing plants aren’t biochemical weapons depots.
Nevertheless, the US government sends taxpayer money to a small portion of the bioterror defense industry every year — for the purpose of defense against ricin.
Most of it goes to a virtually valueless company known as Soligenix, part of the infamous Alliance for Biosecurity.
Soligenix, which used to known as DOR Biopharma — the name change presumably made to camouflage it from potential investors — has been working on a ricin vaccine ever since 9/11.
And it regularly tries to pump its worth by issuing press releases on its products, which have never quite made it to market.
Indeed, the only people who actually may need a ricin vaccine are those who do research on ricin. And — perhaps — the US kooks who try to make it, along with anyone in their households.
There are currently no effective means to prevent the effects of ricin intoxication. The successful development of an effective vaccine against ricin toxin may act as a deterrent against the actual use of ricin as a biological weapon and could be used in rapid deployment scenarios in the event of a biological attack. RiVax™ would potentially be added to the Strategic National Stockpile and dispensed in the event of a terrorist attack.
Think of it as a type of scientific corporate welfare work for the few and privileged. Perhaps the company will go out of business some day. But don’t bet on it.
The daily newspaper is now always loaded with Dickensian characters.
The country has a class of people, a club that hated the last two thirds of A Christmas Carol.
Often they have truly negative security implications for the general welfare.
Take Austin “Jack” DeCoster, the man behind the biggest egg recall in US history, profiled in the Los Angeles Times last week.
As the head of Wright County Egg Farms in Iowa, the paper couldn’t have painted him more poorly. If there was something evil Decoster hadn’t done in food production in the last few years, one can’t imagine what it might have been.
Decoster caused child labor laws to be rewritten in Maine, was sued by neighbors for “beetle infestation,” had eggs his company produced banned in New York, and was declared a “habitual violator” of environmental regulations in Iowa for “mishandling of hog waste.”
And in 1997 he was fined by the feds for “numerous egregious safety and health violations” in Maine.
But the US system just can’t get a guy like this off the street, even after he’s directly responsible for sickening 1,500 with Salmonella enteritidis.
In the predator state, the bad company led by bad men will literally poison the public. And they won’t stop until people are killed. In the predator state system, still that’s not even enough to get them [dragged off].
A year ago Baxter International and another US company it did business with killed people by selling tainted heparin. Heparin is a necessary drug in US medicine and it used to be made here. But in the rush for profits, like many other US businesses, both companies subcontracted their formerly in-house work to China, where there were people willing and malicious enough to deliver a cheaper counterfeit substance, a derivative of chondroitin sulfate, used to mimic heparin. The counterfeit material sickened hundreds and killed a number of people outright. There were news stories and vows of reform. And then nothing happened; it was back to business as usual in the predator state. It was no time to get in the way of commerce!
Today readers have the spectacle of the house hearings in which Peanut Corporation of America’s CEO, Stewart Parnell, is seen as willfully urging his employees to get his salmonella-laced peanuts out the door.
“[Parnell] gave instructions to nonetheless ‘turn them loose’ … ” reports the Atlanta Journal & Constitution. At the time, Parnell was engaged in finding a laboratory that wouldn’t return a positive salmonella test, kind of like fishing through a high school bundle of failed exams, looking for the lone good one, the coincidental exception, that could be waved around to show what a diligent student you were.
However, despite making hundreds ill and killing a handful, Parnell’s still on the street and the bulldozers haven’t been called. Literally, months go by — sometimes years — and the US government just will not remove such people.
In the predator state, this is the way things work, or — don’t work.
In the predator state, it is important to look the other way, to pretend to be concerned, but to actually remain indifferent to such things as long as humanly possible. Because to take action would be to interfere with the business of predators, the making of profit at everyone else’s expense.
Two years later, and despite lots of noise from the Obama administration about making regulation stronger and revamping the FDA with someone named Margaret Hamburg — someone at the time of appointment alleged to be great — it’s the same old story.
Not enough regulations, or regulations put in place too late, or ignored, or any other miscellaneous excuse from a bottomless grab-bag to explain why we have the trouble we do.
The Los Angeles Times profile of DeCoster had someone attesting he was at least good for local tax revenues. This because in desperate times people will accept anything really bad as long as there’s a bit of money that comes with it.
And one of his old attorney’s added: “I know Jack pushes the envelope because he’s growth oriented.”
Growth-oriented and envelope-pushing to the extent that today newspapers read:
Federal investigators found piles of manure up to eight feet tall, live mice, pigeons and other birds inside the hen houses at two egg farms suspected of causing a nationwide outbreak of salmonella illness, officials said Monday.
Investigators made public their observations of Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms, two massive egg producers who have recalled nearly 500 million eggs since Aug. 13.
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FDA officials said Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms appeared to violate federal regulations for egg safety that took effect July 9, as well as voluntary industry standards for sanitation. Company officials have said they were in compliance. — the WaPost
On its blog, the LA Times explained salmonella had been virtually eliminated from state egg production by institution of a rigorous program of sanitation.
The program, which includes vaccinating hens and testing barns regularly for bacteria, has essentially wiped out salmonella on California farms, industry officials say. Yet only nine other states have enacted similar government-sponsored efforts.
In other words, protecting the public has impacted business and that we cannot abide:
One reason, the Armstrongs and other California farmers contend, is cost. Injecting chickens and swabbing cages takes money — not a fortune, but enough to send egg distributors searching for lower-cost sources.
“We have lost contracts over pennies a dozen,” Ryan Armstrong said. “They want cheap eggs.”
One obvious answer to this is for the US government to regularly destroy a business and ban its bosses for causing mass illness through negligence and cost-cutting. And to do it swiftly.
Sadly, I doubt this will ever happen in what’s left of our lifetimes. You’re going to regularly see more and more of this type of thing.
Hand in hand with it — almost unnoticed, however — will go regular increases in expenditure to increasing food security against attack from terrorists.
The article from old DD blog continued:
In the predator state, it is critical that attention be diverted from real liabilities to the external menace, potential threats which can even be trumped up in the absence of proof that such things exist in a practical sense. In the case of tainted food and drugs, it has been the radical Islamists under Osama bin Laden who have been passed around as those who would easily poison and contaminate American food and drugs.
Terrorists might put botulism in milk, killing hundreds of thousands.
Terrorists might put anthrax in beef, rice or orange juice. (It was an American, an insider, working from a biodefense lab, who put anthrax in the mail, killing five. But only recently has research on dangerous agents been suspended at the lab where the insider, Bruce Ivins, worked so that the military-run disease house can be internally put in order.)
Osama bin Laden might even poison meals at school!
In fact, one famous example always used to squeal about what terrorists can do to food was also an American example, the work of the Rajneeshee cult in The Dalles, Oregon. And while it was intentional, it still was not as effective at creating illness, monetary loss and disruption as the recent egg recall.
Bioterrorist attacks could be covert or announced and could be caused by virtually any pathogenic microorganism. The case of the Rajneeshee religious cult in The Dalles, Oregon, is an example (1). The cult planned to infect residents with Salmonella on election day to influence the results of county elections. To practice for the attack, they contaminated salad bars at 10 restaurants with S. Typhimurium on several occasions before the election. A communitywide outbreak of salmonellosis resulted; at least 751 cases were documented in a county that typically reports fewer than five cases per year. Although bioterrorism was considered a possibility when the outbreak was being investigated by public health officials, it was considered unlikely. The source of the outbreak became known only when FBI investigated the cult for other criminal violations. A vial of S. Typhimurium identical to the outbreak strain was found in a clinical laboratory on the cult’s compound, and members of the cult subsequently admitted to contaminating the salad bars and putting Salmonella into a city water supply tank. This incident, among other recent events, underscores the importance of improving preparedness at all levels.
There’s a way of logically looking at these problems. But the US government doesn’t do it and corporate interests work to discourage it.
History shows that bioterrorism as a mechanism for causing illness and disruption is not nearly as frequent, effective, or motivating as the combination of greed, lack of regulation, and an utter disregard for the public welfare.
What makes individuals like Newt Gingrich and other GOP cronies so repellent is their use of fear to enrich themselves. According to them, the future is always filled with many all-powerful external threats. The collapse of the US economy, mass unemployment and the destruction of the Middle Class is of no concern.
In John Dean’s Broken Government book from a few years back (yes, John Dean, of all people), he names one of the central aims of GOP power: “Line your own pockets.”
Gingrich and others are featured prominently.
And today’s post, on a discussion of Gingrich’s new book, To Save America, you get the official DD laundry list of GOP predictions about external threats. And all of the industries involved in protecting from such potential threats are those discussed on this blog.
In Newt Gingrich’s latest book, To Save America, he reflects on the five potentially catastrophic threats to the United States. Gingrich lists the threats as “Terrorists with nuclear weapons, Electromagnetic pulse attack, Cyber warfare, Biological warfare, and the potential gap between Chinese and American capabilities.”
Or any noting of the unpleasant fact that the corporate interests in America seem not to have yet realized when you beggar your US shoppers by firing as many as possible, relentlessly compressing wages and removing all benefits, there is not even enough leftover anymore for anything but essentials. Chinese crap notwithstanding.
Nevertheless, it’s time to drop everything and worry about China’s military, or electromagnetic pulse doom, or the usual ant-like countries allegedly developing magical ways with biological weapons:
Frances Townsend, former Bush and Fox News flunky Homeland Security Advisor, felt that electromagnetic pulse weapons are “a big deal and we are solely unprepared for it. I think Gingrich is right.”
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Currently we can try to prevent this threat, but there is no way to defend against it because society is so interconnected, particularly in the delivery of food, water, and medicine. It appears that this is a threat that falls under the radar, with little time or energy spent on solutions. The death toll would climb in unexpected ways. Clare Lopez, a former CIA official who is currently a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, told of a scary scenario where people would “no longer be able to buy groceries or gasoline.
There is also concern — not that al-Qaeda terrorists will become biologists, but that the biologists of Iran, Syria, and Pakistan will become terrorists. These countries, as well as North Korea, are working on synthetic biological weapons.
Naturally, the only way to counter these threats is the standard mantra: A cooperative alliance between the national security industry and big government is always needed.
This almost sounds acceptable, until you’ve been around long enough to know what it really means. I’ll rely on another quote from Dean’s book, by way of a fellow named Alan Wolfe at the University of Pennsylvania:
[If] government cannot be made to disappear, at least it can be prevented from doing any good. [So one purpose] is to build a political machine in which business and the Republican Party can exchange mutual favors; business will lavish cash on politicians … while politicians will throw the cash back at business (called public policy).
The people who regularly tout this rubbish, and often noted here, are genuinely despicable. But in 2010, despicable is virtue.
At Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy blog, I point you to the publication of a transcript from the House Foreign Affairs committee in March. The hearing was on countering bioterrorism, complete with all the pro forma scripting on apocalyptic disaster.
The history of congressional discussion of the threat of bioterrorism has always been a bad business. When it’s time to discuss threats and risk management, the only people who get called are generally lobbyists for the bioterror defense business, people who can be counted on to immediately call for more bioterrorism funding, recite various frightful scenarios, and talk about how — under no circumstances — should the United States allow on-site verifications in the Biological Weapons Convention.
This transcript and its bag of bad-faith witnesses, with the sole exception of the Monterey Institute’s Jonathan Tucker, was no different. As usual, the process is almost entirely rigged, allowing for staged recitations and no critical questioning, only more raids on the taxpayer for the benefit of a security industry.
Rather than take it apart piece-by-piece, it’s more illuminating to contrast statements from the various witnesses and politicians with events happening right now in the real world.
“As I said, biological science has led to great advances in addressing our food shortages and [in the development of] famine resistant crops. However, the agriculture sector in our nation’s food supply can be a very enticing targets for acts of bioterrorism.
As our agriculture sector, as I mentioned, is known as the bread basket of the world, it is important to note that any attack on the food supply could have devastating effects for the rest of the world.” — David Scott, D. Georgia
A sudden outbreak of salmonella has prompted a third recall by some of the biggest egg producers in the country in only two weeks. The Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.) has warned that hundreds of millions of eggs may be affected. Ironically, this latest food safety breakdown is happening only a few weeks after new guidelines for egg production were issued by the agency. Now federal health officials say that contamination with salmonella in eggs may be a more serious problem than they had anticipated at the time when the new rules were established …
Consumer advocates and animal rights activists have long pointed to industrialized farming facilities as potential breeding grounds for bacterial contamination of egg-laying hens … — a Seattle newspaper
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Democratic leaders on the House Energy and Commerce Committee want more information surrounding the recall of more than half a billion eggs potentially contaminated with salmonella.
In letters to Iowa’s Hillandale Farms and Wright County Egg, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the committee, and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), who heads the committee’s oversight subpanel, requested a long list of details about the companies’ operations and a response to the contamination.
Among the requested data, the lawmakers want to see “a description of the identity and source of that contamination;” documents “sufficient to show all … internal protocols and standards for monitoring and analysis;” and “all documents relating to any allegation of violation of any health, safety, environmental, or animal cruelty laws.”
Waxman and Stupak have requested the information by Sept. 7.
Earlier this month, both companies launched voluntary recalls of eggs they discovered could be tainted with salmonella. The episode “is the largest egg recall that we’ve had in recent history,” Margaret Hamburg, head of the Food and Drug Administration, said Monday on NBC’s “Today Show.”
No one has died from the contamination, federal health officials have emphasized, but hundreds have fallen ill. — The Hill
”
Envision 10 terrorists spreading highly weaponized anthrax in ten cities around the world: Nairobi, Warsaw, Tokyo, Mexico City, etc. Assume not a single American is touched by any of these attacks, none of which happen on American soil. Would anyone suggest that we are unharmed?
“If instead, a smallpox pandemic is ignited , killing perhaps millions worldwide, if Americans are effectively immunized, does that mean that we are ok? …
“Finally, allow me to ask you all, what would Congress do in the wake of biocatastrophes that relegate every other policy priority to insignificance?” … — fearmonger Barry Kellman, International Security and Biopolicy Institute, a small lobbying group of lawyers with virtually no science background
After the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which displaced 1 million people and came as the U.S. economy continued to crumble, the American Red Cross joined with U.S. cell phone carriers to give Americans the ability to donate a few dollars by sending a simple text message. The campaign raised $31 million within days, generating as much as $200,000 per hour, a relatively small piece of the $2.5 billion that relief groups would raise for Haiti by late March. Some aid groups warned that they were so awash in cash they were incapable of distributing it all.
In August 2010, a similar text message campaign was launched in response to the flooding in Pakistan, which has so far displaced 5 million people and put 13 million, particularly children, at risk of water-borne diseases such as cholera because they lack access to clean drinking water. The United Nations has declared the flooding, which is expected to worsen, already worse than the Haiti earthquake, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and the 2005 Kashmir earthquake combined. But the Red Cross’s recent text message effort yielded only $10,000, about 0.03 percent of what it earned for Haiti.
The disappointing campaign has been another in a series of alarming reports from aid groups and even the United Nations that they do not have enough money …
As many in the U.S. have pointed out, the flooding in Pakistan has received light and undramatic TV news coverage relative to Haiti and other humanitarian disasters. The New York Times’ Neil MacFarquhar described the floods as not being as sufficiently “dramatic, emotional, [or] telegenic” as the earthquakes and tsunamis that so opened American wallets. Others have described the floods as a “slow motion” disaster that cannot be effectively conveyed in a single photograph or piece of video — The Atlantic
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The worst floods in Pakistan’s history washed out independence day celebrations Saturday, as the U.N. confirmed the waterborne disease cholera has been found in the disaster zone.
U.N. officials confirmed the first case of cholera in Mingora, in the northwestern district of Swat. Other cases of the deadly disease are suspected and aid workers are treating thousands of cases of acute watery diarrhea. — Voice of America
“There was also great concern about [inspections resulting in false positives]; that unlike the nuclear area, unlike the chemical area, the things that biological weapons inspectors would be looking for — you know, an anthrax spore…
These things occur in nature. Highly enriched uranium does not occur in nature. If an inspector goes to a lab and finds highly enriched uranium, there is not a legitimate reason for that … In the biological area, when we are dealing with germs of one type or another, they could be man made or naturally occurring. So the fact that inspectors detect something really does not tell you much.” — Stephen Rademaker, a lawyer/lobbyist for the bioterrorism defense industry, in an argument for prohibiting any inspection regimes for biological weaponry
In December 2001, Fort Detrick was busily engaged in analyzing contaminated mail. And it was during this period that a number of anthrax contaminations occurred at the facility, surprisingly reported by Bruce Ivins. At the time, the contaminations were attributed to minor negligence and complacency.
However, only in hindsight do they apparently point to something greater and one can speculate that this is what contributed to the FBI suspecting Ivins.
An Army report on the contaminations said that Ivins had indeed discovered anthrax contaminations but had not reported them. And he had started doing the unauthorized samplings in December 2001 …
Ivins undertook the disinfection of contaminated surfaces with bleach. And he set about another round of unauthorized samplings, including his office, as late as April 15, 2002.
Col. David L. Hoover, the Army scientist who had prepared the report on contamination at Fort Detrick, could not determine where the anthrax came from …. The Army apparently asked Ivins to explain further unauthorized samplings in April of 2002 …
Of course, perhaps this is all circumstantial … Or maybe it pointed to someone attempting to feverishly cover their tracks. — me, at the Register
Bob Graham and Jim Talent, a bioterror defense lobbying duo, are the very definition of nuisance astro-turfers.
For the last two years, they have regularly bashed the Obama administration with the same story:
Bioterror catastrophe of biblical proportion is coming. So heed our advice and fund the building of a new biodefense vaccine and nostrum facility at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
[Two billion dollars has] been sitting in the treasury for several years, without any active industry partner against which to obligate the funds. As former senators, Graham and Talent know that the money ought to be used against current priorities if it’s not being obligated, but their desire to front for Big Pharma overwhelms their common sense.
The Graham-Talent bioterror defense industry lobby is upset because the Obama administration wants to spend money on the middle class. It wants to use two billion dollars from Project Bioshield to save middle class jobs in this very bad economy.
Project Bioshield has been around since the beginning of the war on terror. It has had a good long run and not produced much of benefit. But it has been considered a private inviolable fund by a very small and ineffective segment of the bioterror defense industry. A segment which Graham-Talent represents.
And for two years the Graham-Talent lobby has been allowed to masquerade as a bipartisan advisory group on opinion pages of newspapers. When it is nothing of the sort. It is just a sock-puppet for a very specialized industry.
This is not an rash accusation. It’s backed up by the record of the Graham-Talent lobby.
Their dirty laundry list is here. It is an accounting of all the opinion pieces and newspaper stories in which they proclaim catastrophe is coming if money isn’t spent the way they they think it ought to be spent. The two work under the directive that the truth of a thing is determined by how many times you plant a frightening scenario pertaining to it in newspapers.
And they continually distort and exaggerate what is known about bioterror capabilities for the purpose of advancing their recommendations. It’s manipulative and deceptive.
So, in today’s Washington Post, they pull the same odious trick they’ve been doing for … well, for way longer than the country deserves.
“Our nation failed to heed the warning signals that preceded the financial collapse in 2008 and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill,” they write.
And they tell readers, “Information has since come to light [since Dec 08] about the possibility that one or more nation-states may choose to provide sophisticated biological weapons to terrorist groups.”
No such information has come to light.
And it is the very height of deceit and fear-mongering to conflate theoretical catastrophic bioterrorism with two very understandable and now well understood man-made disasters of OUR own making.
Using Graham-Talent’s lousy logic, one can justify spending for any pet project just as long as one has the stones to write or say “it would be as bad as” something we’ve already gone through. Just plug in your favorite special interest and add water.
Bob Graham and Jim Talent have no shame. They continually try to rig the game by massaging opinion pages of newspapers nationwide.
“So who are these guys trying to fool?” asks Sigger at AG. “You, the general public, and Congress … ”
It’s accurate and fair to say they’ve had more than a good opportunity to voice their opinions. If their advice has been judged unsound or no longer appropriate to current needs, that is also fair.
They are nothing more than fixers for the bioterror defense business. And they continually work to get their favorite thing — more money — for this small private industry.
When the Obama administration tries to ignore them or do something good, they refuse to get out of the way. Even though there is no public support for anything they want to do.
But Graham and Talent always want to turn up the volume and generate more opinion pieces and one-sided news stories, anyway.
Or lash together a group of toady congressmen, easy to do in 2010, to make the case that spending on the insular bioterror defense industry they work for is very good.
As opposed to spending that money on the nation’s general welfare, on immediate tangibles — like saving teaching job. Because everyone knows that would eat up some of their precious special pie.
They never stop dancing, never stop trying to call in favors, for their industry.
Graham-Talent’s contrived lobbying is bad in every sense of the word.
Americans are used to helplessness when a corporation goes rogue. But what if you were actually helpless — inert flesh tied to a table in a business plan run amok? Toay’s post takes us to a small firm, one from the heart of the bioterror defense research industry.
Its name: List Biological Laboratories in Campbell, CA.
To set the stage it is necessary to take readers back to a small newspaper article from November 2004.
From the Palm Beach Post:
Two weeks after four Floridians were paralyzed with knockoff Botox, the laboratory that manufactured the botulinum toxin unhesitatingly sold its poisonous product to a federal undercover agent over the phone.
Campbell, Calif.-based List Biological Laboratories didn’t verify the buyer’s identity or his made-up statements that the botulinum would be resold to research institutions, according to a federal search warrant affidavit obtained Thursday.
The FBI raided List, effectively halting the company’s sale of botulinum toxin, apparently to anyone with a good story.
“Agents … seized ‘growing procedures,’ computer records, customer lists and all List documents relating to Toxin Research International,” reported the Post. Toxin Research International — or TRI — would turn out to be two scammers with a plan to resell botulinum toxin produced by List Biological Laboratories. Reused illegally as the popular Botox, it would poach into Allergan’s effective monopoly on the drug in the United States and net a hefty profit.
The plan exploded when another Florida man named Bach McComb bought botulinum toxin from List. He then put himself and three patients in the hospital with botulism, a condition which would have killed all four had they not been sustained on ventilators.
Botulinum toxin, nature’s deadliest poison, eats part of a key protein in human nerve endings. When this happens in very small doses, it removes frown lines.
When it happens in full blown botulism, the victim loses the ability to move, to smile, to even speak. Eyelids droop, become flaccid. Speech is slurred as the toxin eats at the synapses.
The body, turned to unresponsive meat, must be sustained by artificial means until the damaged nerve endings are slowly healed.
The four suffering from botulism were slabbed, kept alive in hospital by machines. The made-in-America product took them right to the edge of the abyss and gave them a good look down.
McComb, a doctor in Florida whose medical license had been suspended for overprescription of painkillers, had bought a 100 microgram vial of highly purified botulinum toxin — a dangerous amount if incompetently used — from List Biological Laboratories.
He injected himself and three others with aliquots taken from it in treatment for wrinkles. Three to four days later, he and his patients were on hospital ventilators for survival. McComb’s girlfriend took the worst of it, needing six months on life support, saying in a videotaped statement for a criminal trial that her body wasted away until it was unrecognizable.
A scholarly paper subsequently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association described the poisonings as equivalent to “21 to 43 times the estimated human lethal dose by injection.” The vial from which McComb took his injections was thought to contain enough material for 14,286 fatal doses.
But how did this get started?
The simplest of all motivations. Greed.
In 2003, two con-artists in Arizona in pursuit of profit in the anti-aging industry began ordering the most poisonous substance known fresh from List Biological, then a dedicated purifier of biochemicals and toxins used in counter-terror research.
Chad Livdahl and Zahra Karim had set up a series of shell companies in Tucson with the aim of acquiring botulinum toxin cheaply and repackaging it as “Mimic Botox.”
The “Mimic Botox” would be shilled to cosmetic surgeons, fraudulently misrepresented as Botox, competing with Allergan’s property, the only company that could sell Botox in the US as a trademarked and licensed drug. With more profit in the equation than purchase of Allergan’s product allowed.
The scam worked.
Using the front company Toxin Research International, Livdahl and Karim ordered thousands of 5 nanogram vials of botulinum toxin from List Biological Laboratories sight unseen and promptly diverted it for resale to a collection of websites, as well as through anti-aging seminars.
Through this effective bit salesmanship, TRI established demand in the US’s first botulinum toxin black market.
According to the US government’s indictment (full text here), Livdahl and Karim paid List about $30,000 for the botulinum toxin shipment, subsequently making about one and a half million dollars in profit through the operation.
The plan came apart when McComb and his patients landed in the hospital. The FBI raided List. Livdahl and Kahrim were arrested, tried and convicted, getting nine and six years respectively, for fraud and misbranding a drug.
McComb pled guilty in 2005 to charges of administering unapproved drugs. He entered a Florida court using a walker, seemingly crippled from the side effects of botulism, according to a newspaper report. He was given three years in prison.
But although the government was looking to file charges against List Biological Laboratories, the company escaped the formal grasp of justice.
“Toxin Research International obtained the botulinum toxin from Campbell-based List Biological Laboratories, but investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could not establish that List had done anything illegal,” reads a San Jose Mercury News article from 2006.
“List sells products designed to be used in scientific and medical research, and no charges were filed against the company.”
The article outlined the US government’s continued roll-up of clients and associates in the Toxin Research International network, revealing the hot demand for American black market Botox.
“In June, a New Mexico doctor was indicted on federal charges of fraud after giving the fake Botox to 120 patients,” informed the newspaper. “Earlier this month, an Oregon doctor was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for using two kinds of fake Botox, from Toxin Research International and a Chinese company, on more than 800 patients. An Idaho doctor also was sentenced to six months in prison in mid-December for using botulinum toxin from Toxin Research International.”
Technically, List Biological Laboratories was part of the US government’s select agent control regime. It is a program designed to prevent select agents — like botulinum toxin or anthrax — from getting into the hands of bad people.
However, there are no obvious laws preventing professional malfeasance
and escape from oversight with regards to the select agent program.
In all the news on the black market Botox incident, no employees from List Biological Laboratories appeared in the press. The person (or persons) at List who sold botulinum toxin to Livdahl, Karim and McComb were never identified. The corporate culture when the company turned rogue and its product escaped from prudence, propriety, good sense and oversight have never been elucidated or described. No firings were announced.
What happened to the people who made the botox that put four people in hospital, severe enough poisonings to have killed the victims without intervention? Where did these parties go, if anywhere? Are they still scientists and lab assistants in good standing?
Mum’s always been the word. List ran for cover.
If the four poisoned by List Biological’s botulinum toxin had died, that would have made one less fatality than the number killed in the anthrax mailings.
Both incidents had to do with select agent misuse. The anthrax mailings led to a spectacular explosion in US bioterror defense spending.
List Biological Laboratories, like many other small firms in the bioterror defense industry, benefited and grew during this go-go period, a time when the US government was spending money like there was no tomorrow on bioterror defense research.
It was apparently a giddy time for List Biological Laboratories, a history to be discussed in a moment.
For two of those poisoned by List’s misused research botulinum toxin, there was only the civil court.
In June of 2007, the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reported:
A South Florida couple that suffered debilitating injuries from deadly anti-wrinkle shots has settled a civil lawsuit against the supplier of the lethal toxin.
Eric and Bonnie Kaplan, of Palm Beach Gardens, were among four people who almost died of botulism poisoning in 2004 after they were injected with a toxin more than 2,850 times the lethal dose at an Oakland Park clinic …
The terms of the settlement, finalized on the eve of a trial that was scheduled to begin Monday in Broward Circuit Court, include a confidentiality clause, said attorneys for both sides. The settlement is between the Kaplans and List Biological Laboratories of California, which supplied the raw botulinum toxin …
While neither side would discuss the amount of the settlement, the Kaplans revealed last year that they had previously rejected a $1 million settlement offer from List.
It’s the by now typical corporate remedy.You can have the blood money under the condition you never speak of this again.
List had been badly damaged by the FBI raid and botox case publicity. The extent of the damage would not become visible until the company filed for bankruptcy late last year.
“Campbell, Calif.-based List Biological, a biotechnology company which produces and researches bacterial toxins, files for Chapter 11 with $1 million to $10 million in both total assets and liabilities,” read a small item on December 11, published in the Daily Deal.
Throughout the year, List’s bankruptcy case has been proceeding through a San Jose court.
Paradoxically, List’s bankruptcy filing put an end to another civil suit brought against it, one by one of its infamous clients, Bach McComb. That legal stay — in pdf form — is here.
The List bankruptcy case is an argument by the company that it should be allowed to continue business as it reorganizes.
Part of it, for example, is a stay to keep its utilities — gas, electric, garbage and Internet — plugged in. That request is here.
List Biological’s creditors list, which has been furnished to the court a couple times, includes not only the many businesses it is in debt to but also the names of those convicted in the botox case.
These include Toxin Research International and Bach McComb, as well as Gayle Rothenberg and Saul Gower.
List lays out an initial argument for its survival in a request for a cash collateral loan so that it may continue operation during the bankruptcy proceedings.
Part of the justification for it is stated in a part entitled “History and Events Leading to the Debtor’s Bankruptcy Case.”
“In 1988, botulinum toxin became of great interest to List Bio Labs and the Company developed the technology to produce commercial sale botulinum toxin for the research reagent business,” it explains.
“As a result of its acknowledged expertise in this area, List Bio Labs was engaged by Allergan, Inc., in the early 1990’s to provide assistance … and to produce clinical grade botulinum toxin. The relationship ensued that led, ultimately to the licensure of the manufacturing facility as well as to the active ingredient in Botox being produced at the facility.”
By 2004, greatly increased government spending on bioterror defense research had led to ballooning demand for select agents.
List moved to a new location and expanded its laboratory production facility.
“With this new expanded facility, List Bio Labs is prepared to exploit its biological product expertise and expand the contract manufacturing part of the business,” attests the company.
“List Bio Labs is known for providing resources to biological and medical scientists and to the biodefense community. The Company success has been based on the List Bio Labs name recognition and our focus on quality products.”
If the reader grimaces while noticing weasel-wording, it only means that you’re still sane.
List’s arguments get much better. They imply the company’s value lies in things like its production of Botox and its strict adherence to safety and the select control regime.
Without mentioning that the reason List is in bankruptcy is because it turned bad with regards to these matters.
The above snapshot has List arguing there was an upgrade in the protocols of the select agent program in 2003. And the company’s infrastructure for agent handling was or is in national compliance. This at the time when List was either selling or about to sell botulinum toxin, a select agent, to Toxin Research International. By 2004, it had sold to Bach McComb and the resulting botulism cases brought the FBI down upon it.
While some bankruptcy court readers may be impressed by List’s various claims about its employees being approved by the select agent program there’s nary a mention the company is in this mess precisely because it sold select agent to bad people.
Who is behind List Biological Laboratories? Their names and faces have never been shown in newspaper stories.
For the purposes of this article, the company president is Karen R. Crawford, one of the five equity holders in List. One of the other holders is List scientist Linda Eaton. Along with List’s director of research and development, Nancy Shine, the three appear to be the principals in the company’s sales push for its botulinum toxin research preparations and related products over the past few years and during the period when the company’s troubles started.
Their accumulated poster sessions on select agent materials, on-line here at List, go from 2003 to 2009 — just before the company filed for bankruptcy.
The value of this to the company becomes clear when one realizes the counter-bioterror research boom is partly aimed at finding quick detection for materials which the US thinks could be used by terrorists.
In this paper, published in November 2004, the author posited 100,000 poisoned individuals through the purposeful contamination of milk with botox — a near Biblical catastrophe, of sorts. It was an overcooked thought experiment in terror theatre and received great publicity.
Nevertheless, the timing of the paper’s reception at PNAS — in one of those very strange twists of fate — dovetailed with List’s sale of botox to Bach McComb and the four near fatal botulism cases the same month.
In financial statements about List delivered regularly to the court, Crawford, Shine and Eaton are List’s highest earners.
For example, during the weekly pay period beginning March 22 and ending April 2, they earned $4348.08, $3957.12, 3840.71 — respectively. List has a little under thirty employees with salaries ranging from Crawford’s high down to somewhat less than a quarter of that for an office assistant.
With address listed in court documents, Crawford lives in a relatively posh abode worth about $2.2 million, according to Zillow. It would seem to feature a nice-looking swimming pool and attached Jacuzzi.
These things, as limited as they are, limn aspects of List and its brain trust.
And while legitimized botox production is a proven money maker, in the final analysis, there is no compelling argument to be made for List’s survival. If it were broken up and its physical and intellectual assets sold off in a firesale with the remains going to creditors, it would be no big loss to science or the biodefense research effort in the US.
There will always be others to take such a company’s place, to develop purified or custom biochemical preparations for research purposes. List is only unique with regards to the trouble it has been embroiled in.
On the other hand, there would be a symbolic balancing if the firm was brought to an end.
Perhaps they apologized in private.
Perhaps it has been sworn, cross the hearts and hope to die, that this will never happen again. Never! Our bad. But now the company is good again. Really!
But just because there wasn’t something with which to charge people isn’t much of a reason for List not going down with the rest of those in this illness-inducing and disgraceful case, anyway.
Post note: The US government — specifically the Defense Threat Reduction Agency — paid to find out the level of threat that might be posed by overseas black market botox production being suborned by terrorists. And it was all over the news recently.
It’s worth noting the inspiration for analyzing such a problem — the diversion of botox to bad people — was minted here in the US, courtesy of the biodefense research industry. First.
In fact, mundane reality may reproduce the American model — the incidental poisoning of a few people here or there, lining up for black market de-wrinklings, overdosed by the careless and incompetent greedy wanting their piece of the beauty industry action.
List’s Vice President and another one of the firm’s five equity holders, Debra Dye, writes the bankruptcy court, in attempt to defend the company against the Wells Fargo move on its equipment here.
Much of the argument on the firm’s value and history is exactly the same as the information first logged in the company’s petition for a cash collateral operating loan. A cut-and-paste job.
A section once again implies the firm is an important part of the US bioterror defense effort:
Many of the List Bio Labs products support the national bio-defense effort and for that purpose the Company has provided reagents to an NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — ed] funded reagent repository as a subcontractor.
The arguments are to minimize the market value of List’s lab equipment, bought on a business loan from Wells Fargo. So as to apparently lessen the debt load upon reorganization.
