“I myself wonder how he could have gotten hired if he was this crazy...but his crazyness doesn’t seem to make sense here...it would take a bit of time to pull this stunt, which came too soon after 911, and of course there was the anthrax to the National Enquirer and maybe skin anthrax on one of the friends of some terrorists in Florida.”
The most dangerous crazies are the ones that are not obvious. The other thing that is often not realized is that when people leave microbiology labs, their cultures and samples are left behind. Its possible that Ivins didnt need to make the spores, that they were left behind by someone who retired long ago and found their way to his possession. Its unlikely with dangerous material like this but sloppy bookkeeping or lax administration is certainly possible.
Ivins handled anthrax spores: which are usually fairly large and made from a bunch of anthrax stuck together. Think of a bunch of balls stuck together...They are heavy, so tend to be in the soil, not in the air. Even those catching anthrax from hides usually only get skin or stomach anthrax (you inhale them, but they are so heavy they stop at the tongue and you swallow them).
To “weaponize” anthrax, you have to do something to keep the individual spores from clumping...in this case, silicon was used, or maybe not (the FBI screwed up the analysis)....
There are ways to do this, but it requires some skills that a doc used to working with spores to make vaccines wouldn’t have.
(grinding, added correct silica).
Yes, Ivins lab was contaminated with anthrax, but that was ordinary anthrax, not the weaponized one.
And the strain was a common strain found in many labs...heck, my Oklahoma patients joked they probably had some in their barnyards.
The original suspect, Hatfield, had worked with anthrax vaccine in Rhodesia at a time when a lot of elephants and cattle were dying of it. The FBI had a scenerio that he ground and mixed it working underwater so he wouldn’t catch it, but they never could find evidence on this, so they decided Ivins did it,