Canada orders anthrax vaccine, ‘lethal’ threat remains
Recalling a largely forgotten terrorist threat, the Public Health Agency of Canada has ordered up to 28,000 doses of anthrax vaccine, saying the bacteria remains “one of the most dangerous and lethal” possible biological weapons.
The agency issued a sole-source tender recently for 15,000 to 28,000 shots of BioThrax from the Michigan company Emergent BioSolutions, to be delivered over five years.
But the federal department refuses to say how the vaccine would be used or who would receive it in the event of an attack.
Meanwhile, the stockpile is a small fraction per capita of what the American government has ordered recently, suggesting relatively few Canadians would have access to it.
A former federal cabinet minister who dealt with what turned out to be anthrax false alarms while Toronto’s police chief says buying the vaccine makes sense, regardless of how likely Canada is to be targeted.
“The one thing I’ve always been concerned about in all my years in public safety, be it as police chief or (Ontario) commissioner of emergency management, is that the things you don’t know are the things you fear the most,” said Julian Fantino, now a board member of the Mackenzie Institute security think-tank.
“The only responsible thing is to prepare.”
Anthrax came to the fore shortly af- ter the 9-11 attacks when letters containing spores of the bug — a highly virulent animal disease first turned into a modern weapon last century — were delivered to various media and political offices in the United States.
Five Americans were killed, with the culprit later named as a mentally unstable government scientist.
But in the face of more conventional terrorist dangers, the pathogen has received little public attention over the past decade.
Its potential use as a weapon, however, means it’s still a public-health threat, said Rebecca Gilman, a Public Health Agency spokeswoman.
“It is among the most dangerous and lethal agents available for a bioterror attack, with extraordinarily high mortality rates if people exposed to anthrax are not treated quickly,” she said in an emailed statement.
The tender indicates the vaccine could be used both as a preventive measure and “prophylactically” after someone had been exposed to anthrax, which kills 80 per cent of those who breath in the spores.
However, Gilman said she was unable to comment on who would potentially receive it or under what circumstances, as those details are kept under wraps for “national security reasons.”
“This information could end up in the hands of those who could use it to inform their plans to harm Canadians through an act of terrorism,” she said.
One outside expert said the relatively small number of doses likely means the government is stockpiling the vaccine to administer to first responders or health-care workers, but not the general public.
“It’s a strange number,” said Leonard Cole, an expert on bioterrorism with Rutgers University, who wrote a book about the American anthrax letters. “If you’re talking about a mass inoculation effort, you would need hundreds of thousands or millions of doses.”
By contrast, an Emergent news release last month indicated the U.S. Centers for Disease Control had decided to take delivery of the full 44.75 million doses set out in a 2011 contract.
Even factoring in the 10-fold difference in population between the two countries, that is 160 to 300 times the number Canada is procuring.
It appears the States wants enough vaccine to prophylactically treat large populations exposed to anthrax, said Michael Kuhlman, chief scientist for contract research at Battelle, a nonprofit research organization that works with the U.S. government on bioterror defence.
It could also be given to people not actually exposed after an initial attack, based on the assumption that more assaults could come, he said.
As evidence that the threat remains real, Kuhlman pointed to a report last year that ISIL had executed a scientist at Iraq’s University of Mosul because he refused to help develop a biological-weapons program, while al-Qaida was developing an anthrax factory in Afghanistan at the time the Taliban were toppled.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Forces also have a stockpile of anthrax vaccine, said Jennifer Eckersley, a National Defence Department spokeswoman.