Anthrax Suspect’s Colleagues Doubt Government's Case

By ERIC LIPTON / NY Times

Military personnel, under the threat of court-martial, were refusing inoculations of an anthrax vaccine. The vaccine’s sole manufacturing plant was ordered to shut down. Researchers were turning up evidence possibly linking the vaccine to illnesses of soldiers during the Persian Gulf war of 1991.

It was hardly the thank you that Dr. Bruce E. Ivins expected for his years of labor to produce a vaccine that would protect military personnel from an anthrax attack by the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein or some other adversary.

The criticism, which reached its peak in 2000 and early 2001, was clearly starting to get on Dr. Ivins’s nerves. “I think the **** is about to hit the fan ... big time,” he wrote in a July 2000 e-mail message about the inoculation program, according to a government affidavit. “It’s just a fine mess.”

This turmoil has now been cited by federal investigators as a key part of the reason they believe that Dr. Ivins sent out anthrax-laced letters in the fall of 2001 — as such an attack would, in a single stroke, have eliminated the skepticism and second guessing about the need for an anthrax vaccine.

The investigators suggest that Dr. Ivins had been struggling with psychological problems, and was on medication and undergoing counseling after being overcome by what he described as paranoid, delusional thoughts. The trouble with the vaccine, they argue, may have been enough to set him off.

But Dr. Ivins’s former colleagues reject that two-part theory, saying it is just one of many flaws in the evidence presented by the government in an unconvincing case.

There was a real threat, the former colleagues acknowledged, that the anthrax vaccine Dr. Ivins had worked on during that period, known as Anthrax Vaccine Absorbed or AVA, might be pulled from the market

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