Lab Almost Destroyed Smallpox Vaccine

PHILADELPHIA -- For three decades, 120 liters of smallpox vaccine sat in a walk-in freezer at a remote mountainside lab in the Poconos, stored at precisely minus-20 degrees Celsius, even though company officials thought the drugs were worthless.

"We had actually been developing protocols with the (Centers for Disease Control) to destroy it," said Aventis Pasteur spokeswoman Beth Waters.

Then a series of anthrax-tainted letters killed five people in the weeks following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, reviving fears that smallpox, eradicated worldwide by 1980, might return as a biological weapon.

In October, the French-owned company's nearly forgotten stockpile -- believed to be enough to vaccinate about 85 million people -- was transferred from its campus in Swiftwater, Pa., to a secret location.

"All I can say is that it is not in Swiftwater, Pennsylvania, anymore," Waters said. "There was substantial security at our site, but not like where it is now."

Aventis on Friday announced it would donate the supply to the federal government after preliminary tests revealed the vaccines are probably still effective, even after 30 years in cold storage.

The drugs, worth about $150 million, will vastly expand the nation's stockpile of the vaccine, which had been estimated at about 15.4 million doses but could be diluted to make more than 150 million inoculations.

The removal of the drug from the Swiftwater campus, about 80 miles north of Philadelphia, marks the first time in its 105-year history that it hasn't had a reserve of smallpox vaccine.

New York bacteriologist Dr. Richard Slee founded the Pocono Biological Laboratories in 1897 to research smallpox inoculations. He had fallen in love with the region while recuperating from cholera at the Swiftwater Inn, still located across the street. He also fell for the innkeeper's daughter and had married her.

The lab's first smallpox vaccine -- the first in the U.S. to mix the disinfectant glycerin with an inactive strain of the smallpox virus -- was sold in ads as "Dr. Slee's Glycerinated Vaccine Virus," with a promise that it was "always effective."

Slee's drug was a vast improvement over previous smallpox inoculations and set the groundwork for his lab's establishment as one of the nation's largest producers of the vaccine.

The lab today is a combination of modern buildings and old stone dormitories with a winding trout brook. It stopped making smallpox in 1972, but never depleted its supply.

The last bottles were rendered to relic status in 1980, when smallpox was believed to survive only in a few biological weapons caches in the United States and Soviet Union.

A series of international owners of the laboratory, including Connaught Laboratories Ltd., of Toronto, Institut Merieux S.A., Rhone-Poulenc S.A. and finally Aventis Pasteur, made other vaccines at the lab, now the largest employer in Monroe County.

The remaining stash of smallpox vaccine is about 31 gallons in a concentrated form, Waters said. It is stored in commercial freezers at minus-4 degrees Fahrenheit with emergency generators and alarms that would trip if the temperature began to drop.

Believing the need for a smallpox vaccine to be obsolete, lab workers began talks with the CDC in 1999 on precisely how to destroy the drugs, a long process for any sort of vaccine.

They were still working out the protocols last fall when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Suddenly, the secret discussions on the drugs changed to whether the vaccines could still be used as a defense against a biological terrorism.

"It's quite amazing, and quite appropriate, really, that this facility should turn out to be a source of smallpox vaccine now, when it played so vital a role in its development early on," said author Jeff Widmer, who chronicled the lab's history in his 1997 book, "The Spirit of Swiftwater."

U.S. to Buy 155M Smallpox Vaccines WASHINGTON, Nov 28, 2001 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The Bush administration signed a contract Wednesday to buy 155 million doses of smallpox vaccine from a British firm in case terrorists try to spread the deadly virus.

The contract with Acambis Inc. will bring the nation's stockpile to 286 million doses of the vaccine by the end of next year, promising protection for every American should bioterrorists ever attack with the all-but-extinct virus.

The vaccine can be administered four days after exposure to smallpox and still offer protection. For that reason - and because the vaccine can cause some rare but deadly side effects - officials have no plans to resume the routine vaccinations of Americans that ended in 1972.

The government has 15.4 million doses of smallpox vaccine on hand, and each of them will be diluted to create five doses, bringing the on-hand total to 77 million. Researchers are now studying whether each dose could be further diluted, to get 10 doses from each existing one.

An additional 54 million doses have already been ordered from Acambis and are expected to be delivered next year.

The new contract will cost the government $428 million, or $2.76 per dose. That's less than the $509 million that the Bush administration has asked from Congress to pay for the new vaccine.

The initial budget request assumed that the government would need to buy 250 million doses, but new research has found that the existing vaccine can safely be diluted, meaning much less new vaccine is needed.

"There's been considerable discussion since September 11 about the possibility of smallpox being used as a weapon against Americans," Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson told reporters.

"While the probability of an intentional release of the smallpox virus is low, the risk does exist and we must be prepared," he added. "We hope that increasing our smallpox vaccine stockpile would serve as a deterrent to any individual terrorist who would consider using smallpox as a weapon against us."

To make the newest batch of vaccine, Acambis has teamed with Baxter International, which will begin brewing doses immediately at an undisclosed European factory, said Acambis spokeswoman Lyndsay Wright. Acambis' own manufacturing will begin soon at a factory in Cambridge, Mass., she said.

Smallpox hasn't occurred in the United States since 1949 and was declared eradicated from the globe in 1980. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a Moscow laboratory hold stocks of the virus, and bioterrorism experts worry that samples could fall into terrorists' hands and be brewed into enough to be used as a weapon.

HHS officials have been negotiating for weeks with several drug makers for the new smallpox contract. Two other companies were in the final bidding, Merck & Co. and GlaxoSmithKline.

It was the Soviet Union who recommended to the UN Security Council that smallpox be glohally eradicated in 1954. As far as I am concerned, eradicating the pest, waiting for the vaccination program to become inoperative, waiting until all immunity has worn off, and then foisting a pandemic is a rational military plan. There are only two known sources of the virus: CDC and BioPreperat (IIRC) in the Soviet Union.

OK, so if it isn't us, who is it? If we are saying that such a bio-weapon is a real possibility, where would it originate? Why then aren't we calling it what it is?

Anybody who thinks that an enemy patient enough to plan such a crisis 45 years in advance isn't still an enemy is smoking something. As far as I am concerned, either the cold war was never over, or our government is planning something awful. Either one would rationally demand an underground private vaccination effort. There is cowpox still in England. What is the plan? Why are we waiting?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.