Posted on 07/31/2002 5:01:37 PM PDT by knak
THE scientist who has accused the British government of ordering the wrong strain of smallpox vaccine was responsible for the US government buying the rival treatment, it has emerged.
The Scotsman has learned that Dr Stephen Prior, who has attacked Britain’s choosing the Lister smallpox vaccine as "indefensible", brokered a $330 million deal to sell its rival to the Pentagon.
The disclosure suggests that Dr Prior’s attack on the UK could be fuelled by his complicity in providing 300,000 doses of the rival "New York" vaccine for US troops.
Labour was yesterday facing fresh sleaze allegations after Dr Prior said the Lister strain had not been proven to work against endemic smallpox - and that he was "very surprised" to see it chosen by the Department of Health.
He now works for the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a US-based think-tank which has published a report suggesting Lister had not been proven to work on a smallpox outbreak in India.
Ministers again faced claims that Lister was chosen because the company which is procuring it, Powderject, is run by a Labour donor who gave £100,000 to the party shortly before winning the £29 million deal.
The Conservatives said the choice of Lister has been attacked by an independent expert and demanded "a full independent inquiry into the whole sordid affair of the smallpox scandal".
But it has emerged that Dr Prior, before joining the think-tank, spent three years as president of DynPort Vaccine Company, which provided immunisations for the US government.
In November 1997, DynPort - an Anglo-American venture - won a ten-year deal to provide the New York strain of the smallpox vaccine. Dr Prior resigned in October 2000 to pursue "other interests".
The New York strain, also known as EM63, is understood to have been chosen as it was the only one fully approved by the US authorities.
Britain chose a separate strain on the advice of government intelligence reports, understood to have centred around the experience of the former Soviet Union.
The Kremlin used the New York vaccine in the 1960s - but switched to Lister in 1971 after what MI6 believes was a deliberate release of smallpox virus in the Aral Sea, now in Kazakhstan.
The USSR then mass-produced the Lister strain and exported it to India as part of the World Health Organisation’s programme to control a smallpox outbreak between 1968 and 1973.
Dr Prior’s paper argues that, in India, Lister was proven to be less effective than the New York strain - and was chosen in European vaccinations programmes, not because it was the most effective, but because it has fewer side effects. He also suggests that this virus, known as "India-1967", was used by the USSR to make weapons. British intelligence reports, however, argue that there is no evidence that this actually happened and little grounds for believing Saddam Hussein may now own this strain.
John Oxford, professor of virology at Queen Mary’s School of Medicine in London, said yesterday the choice of smallpox vaccine should be made on effectiveness, rather than gambles on their origin.
"It makes perfect sense to choose a strain we are all comfortable with, have experience with, and in actual fact choose a company that could manufacture the vaccine here in the United Kingdom," he said.
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.