How BioPort (with Ivin's help) Grabbed a a Billion Dollar Monopoly on Anthrax Vaccine There's an important backstory in the death of Bruce Ivins, the biotoxins scientist who is now blaimed for the anthrax attacks that followed 9/11.
Can’t go into all the details here, but Ivins was involved in anthrax vaccine development for three companies, Bioport/Emergent, Coley, and VaxGen. There seems to have been a recent struggle between two of them, BioPort/Emergent and VexGen, for a lion's share of $5.6 billion in federal biodefense contracts. The third company, Coley, licensed its vaccine additive to the losing company, VaxGen, in March 2007.
Vaxgen lost its federal contract later in 2007, and in May 2008 was bought out by Emergent.
That leaves BioPort/Emergent the sole approved provider of anthrax vaccine. There are some vexing historical details about BioPort that I won’t go into here that you should be aware of. If you're not, see,
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/binladenprofits.html?q=binladenprofits.html; http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2002/31. Ivins worked on the BioPort vaccine after it manifested serious, widespread side-effects in the first Iraq War. That older vaccine was first developed in the 1950s, and was used on coalition troops in 1991 and is blaimed for Gulf War Syndrome. Its production was suspended in the 1990s, but resumed in 2002-03; most recently 6 million doses were produced in 2006.
Ivins also had a role in upgrading a “vaccine additive” for a second company, Coley Pharmaceutical Group. Ivins was listed as one of two inventors of a biodefense-related product made by Coley that has won federal sponsorship. According to their still-pending application for a U.S. patent, the inventors hoped the additive would bolster certain vaccines’ capacity to prevent infections “from bioterrorism agents.”
From December 2002 to December 2003, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)committed $12 million for additional testing of the experimental additive. That research money was designated for Coley Pharmaceutical Group, which was developing the additive. The company was acquired last fall by Pfizer Corp.
A newer vaccine was developed with Ivin’s help by VaxGen. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded VaxGen an $877 million contract in 2004 to produce 75 million doses of its second-generation anthrax vaccine for the Strategic National Stockpile. But HHS canceled the contract in December 2006, after problems with the vaccine’s stability caused the company to miss a deadline for starting a clinical trial.
VaxGen’s contract was the first awarded under Project BioShield, the Bush Administration's $5.6 billion program to procure medical defenses against the effects of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons.
In March 2008, after the company’ stock crashed and burned, VaxGen -- after putting $175 million into the program, on top of a whole pile of DARPA and HHS money -- sold its anthrax vaccine process to Emergent for a bargain price of $12 million. A year earlier, Emergent had bought out Coley’s additive, VaxImmune vaccine adjuvant compound, making Emergent's newly acquired vaccine line the sole potential competitor for BioPort, that still produces the only available anthrax vaccine.
So, after all this time and all that money, we're still stuck with BioPort's dicey vaccine, while Emergent has scooped up all that expensive technology.
Only one thing, Emergent is BioPort. See,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_BioSolutionsAnd, yes, did I tell you that BioPort's investors included the Carlyle Group and the bin Laden family? Should we be at all surprised that they ended up with an effective monopoly on anthrax vaccine?
There’s an important backstory here for anyone who wants to flesh it out.
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