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Soldiers were ordered to be vaccinated against Saddam Hussein''s non-existent smallpox supply. Some developed endocarditis. |
The Guardian reports that Gen. Colin Powell is mad at "Curveball", the aptly nick-named Iraqi fraudster who claimed - falsely he now admits - that he had personally witnessed Saddam Hussein's mobile biological warfare equipment. Powell went before the world at the U.N. and did "an Adlai Stevenson", as Christ Matthews calls it. Frankly I thought Powell was a willing shill. The then Secretary of State said from the podium at the United Nations that we have
"firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails … The source was an eyewitness who supervised one of these facilities"."An eyewitness" is awfully thin ground to launch a war: especially when Hans Blix's WMD hunters had found nothing and said they needed more time. But Powell was on board and there was no stopping the train George W. Bush had put in motion.
It is easy to forget that George W. Bush launched a program of massive smallpox vaccination without any evidence that any risk existed. Public health authorities were compliant with the Presidential command. Even though no risk had been identified. Fortunately few members of the public were sufficiently motivated by the non-existent threat to subject themselves to the low but unnecessary risks of the live virus vaccine.
Although almost no one dared to say aloud that the emperor had no clothes - that there was NO evidence of a smallpox threat - the program was the product of intense debate about risk and compensation and safety, as I detail in my interesting but utterly ignored study Reactions and Overreactions: Smallpox Vaccination, Complications and Compensation (2003).
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