The commanding officer of Fort Detrick, Colonel Richard Barquist, asked Major C. J. Peters to courier vaccine to NAMRU-3 in Cairo, test it on the U.S. troops there, and trace the epidemiology of this strange new virus. The seasoned virus hunter couldn't resist the challenge; a decade later, this same gutsy, aviator sunglasses-wearing scientist swaggered into a Reston, Virginia, monkey house and swiftly put down an outbreak of the feared Ebola virus. Peters brought with him "Rift Valley Fever Vaccine, Formalin-Inactivated, Tissue Culture Origin, NBDR-103, Lot 6," an experimental vaccine designed by the Army during the early days of Fort Detrick. Listed in "Final Development" stage in the now-declassified 1977 congressional report, U.S. Army Activity in the U.S. Biological Warfare Programs, it hadn't gone through extensive testing and it wasn't licensed safe for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The only testing of this experimental vaccine occurred between 1958 and 1974 in the Army's top-secret human guinea pig operation, code-named Operation whitecoat. whitecoat was a milestone on two counts. It was the first time the Army reached out to a religious organization to form a singular military unit, and the first time it drafted humans for biological warfare experiments. At the urging of Theodore R. Flaiz, the physician who oversaw the worldwide health outreach of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, 2,300 Adventists — nonsmokers and teetotalers all— signed consent forms and volunteered to be deliberately infected, injected, and exposed to concentrated virus and bacterial mists, genetically altered germs, and investigational therapeutic treatment. Conscientious objectors to the draft by virtue of their faith, their church endorsed this "service to the nation" on the grounds that it saved lives in conventional battle.
In this case, Whitecoats (named for their standard issue white lab coats) were injected and then challenged — like a mouse or sheep might be — with live Rift Valley fever virus. In strict isolation, they were closely monitored, poked, and prodded by scientists in white-hooded biospacesuits.[27] Conducted in 1958, Operation whitecoat Project No. 58-2 tested three men with Rift Valley fever virus who spent seventeen days in the hospital deliberately infected with the disease. Another three were tested in 1969 as part of Project No. 69-9. In Project No. 69–10, twenty "volunteers" gave their arms to needles and suffered through a nine-day hospital stay. Eight of the men became so ill they had to be put on convalescent leave to recover. Further details of these human vaccine tests remain classified.
The Army knew full-scale human trials could not be conducted at home without causing public uproar, but they could make use of a disease outbreak in Egypt and obtain useful data through "peaceful" medical intervention. "Rule One of biological warfare development," said Peters in his book Virus Hunter, "was that you don't weaponize an agent until you have a vaccine or other treatment for it. Otherwise, if the wind blows the wrong way or something else goes wrong, you're in a whole bunch of trouble." Egypt's misfortune gave the United States the Rift Valley fever vaccine trial it wanted.
Peters went to Egypt and tested the experimental vaccine at NAMRU-3 on young naval men and women who weren't quite volunteers. Major Peters simply said to the troops, "We think you ought to have it." Naturally, they all responded exactly as they were trained to: "Yes, sir! Thank you, sir." Some three hundred Egyptians working for NAMRU, happy with their steady paychecks, joined in the chorus. It may have worked, since none contracted the fever.
Endemic in sub-Saharan Africa, Rift Valley fever somehow migrated to the Nile delta on the Mediterranean Sea, and somehow morphed into a hemorrhagic killer. While there were plenty of potential natural vectors, including mosquitoes along Lake Nasser, most disturbing were reports the germ was introduced intentionally. "There were a lot of scary possibilities which couldn't be definitively proved or disproved," Dr. Peters said. "[U]nless you caught some guy up on a hill with a blower and gas mask generating aerosols from a can, you couldn't be sure it came from man or nature." During this period, the Soviet Union and Egypt enjoyed a robust economic and military relationship that included furnishing Egypt with all kinds of weaponry. Further raising the specter of a man-made biological event, be it accident or otherwise, it is now generally understood — due in part to ex-biological warfare scientists who defected to the West — that the Soviets conducted a immense germ warfare program at this time, which included creating genetically engineered organisms (such as a strain of antibiotic-resistant anthrax) designed for their ability to kill.
The new, deadly version of the Rift Valley fever virus is again on the move. In September 2000, rampant outbreaks occurred on the Arabian Peninsula in Saudi Arabia and Yemen — with the virus poised to extend into Europe. The results of the initial Egyptian outbreak were devastating: 82 million in livestock infected, 200,000 humans infected, 18,000 of those human cases clinically confirmed, along with over 700 deaths. A survey of blood serum taken prior to 1977 proved the virus was not present in Egypt before the epidemic.
Today, Egypt and two other Arab nations — Syria and Libya — refuse to join the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which 165 other nations have agreed to. Presumably another nonmember, the newly constituted Iraq, will join. In a 1994 Congressional Research Service report on biological warfare programs, Egypt was listed in the "suspected program" column. Egypt's reputed biological warfare germs include plague and anthrax bacteria, an ailment called "West Nile" fever virus, and a germ that infected 200,000 of its own people in 1977—the Rift Valley fever virus.
Like most other nations in the region, both friendly and unfriendly to the United States, there has never been an independent inspection of Egypt's biological warfare capabilities.
IN OUR BACKYARD
While Egypt was the scene of the deadly outbreak, the American research on Rift Valley fever took place on Plum Island. Dr. Gerry Eddy, a veterinarian and head of virology at Fort Detrick, obtained USDA permission to work on the virus in 1977. Though even the milder Entebbe strain from the 1950s was labeled number six on the list of most dangerous viruses by the secretary of agriculture, the Army's Fort Detrick and the USDA's Plum Island did cooperative research on the killer strain, Zagazig 501, named after one of the hardest hit villages in Egypt.
Until now, Plum Island had worked on five animal diseases fatal to people. This would be their sixth zoonotic — a germ capable of both animal and human infection. However, unlike previous studies, Rift Valley fever came on the heels of a confirmed human epidemic, so Colonel Eddy sent along the experimental whitecoat vaccine that would ostensibly protect the staff from exposure. The collaboration proved to the Army's germ warriors they didn't need to run Plum Island themselves, not when the USDA gladly aided when necessary. The vets were there for the Army during World War II and they were there with them in the cold war. The key would be to see that minimal public interest over a "famine disease" in Egypt faded from memory.
But somebody talked. Somebody read the internal memo explaining the proposed research, and Peters's account of people in desert streets suffering from massive hemorrhaging, blindness, and encephalitic brain seizures, with herds of cattle and droves of sheep carcasses strewn across the countryside. Safety Officer Dr. Walker told over one hundred workers in contact with Lab 257—lab techs, janitors, electricians, boiler operators, clothes launderers, engineers — they had to sign health waivers and be injected with a vaccine that wasn't FDA approved. Though it was "voluntary," there was really no turning it down, not if the workers wanted to keep their current jobs. "You either took that shot or you had to go — or push a lawn mower around the island for the rest of your days," says a former worker. A few brave souls wrote the words "under protest" beneath their signatures before being pricked with the syringe. Talk spread along the island paths, in the cafeteria, and on the ferry. People began to worry.
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Interestingly, one of the scientists prodding the WHITECOAT men was a young Dr. Robert Shope, who had joined Fort Detrick's Project WHITECOAT team in 1955 after finishing his schooling at Yale.