EXCLUSIVE: How firm, skirting regulations, spun fear of anthrax into gold

[rawstory]

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By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor

Quietly lurking in the shadows of all three presidential debates has been the specter of terrorism. And as the fear of terrorism followed one debate to the next, so too did BioPort, the U.S. military’s sole provider of the anthrax vaccine.

Marred by the reports from hundreds of servicemembers who say they’ve been made ill by the vaccine since it was mandated 1998, three federal lawsuits about the vaccine’s safety and financial woes related to the government’s refusal to add the vaccine to its civilian defense stockpile, the has company launched an aggressive grass-roots marketing push.

To ensure that it nets the lucrative civilian contract, BioPort has systematically sought to elevate concern about the risk of anthrax exposure, successfully playing on local fears and paying “experts” thousands of dollars to produce reports that assert the threat of anthrax is immediate and grave.

It has also retained a medical professor to run a lobbying group while masking its own affiliation. The group has disseminated misleading information about adverse reactions to the vaccine, putting BioPort in apparent violation of federal regulations, RAW STORY has learned.

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The (lobby') site, which mentions the BioPort vaccine by name, provides misleading information about adverse effects of the vaccine, putting the company in likely violation of federal regulations.

The BioPort lobby fails to document any of the serious adverse reactions to the vaccine as mandated by federal regulations. According to the manufacturer’s own product package insert (view pdf file), the most common side effects reported to the government’s vaccine adverse effects reporting system were an allergic reaction in the skin, headaches, systemic joint pain and fatigue.

Not a single one of these effects are listed on the site.

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