Support Pvt. Kamila Iwanowska!

Support Pvt. Kamila Iwanowska!

23 Apr 2003--Private Kamila Iwanowska is a 26-year old member of the United States Army Reserve, currently assigned to Ft. Drum. When she enlisted in the Army Reserve, she asked her recruiter, “Will I be required to participate in the Anthrax Vaccination Program?” Her recruiters answer was a definited “No.”

Like many other young people, she was soon to find out that her recruiter was not telling the truth. She was called to active duty this year and ordered to take the Anthrax Vaccine. On January 26, she refused to receive the vaccine. She said she feared the vaccination caould have adverse effects on her reproductive system and her ability to have a baby.

She has already received punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including loss of rank, fines, and confinement. She now faces a Court Martial on May 24, 2003. The military court has the authority to sentence her to up to a year in Federal Prison, just for trying to preserve her health.

Kamila needs our support. The military court system prefers to act in secrecy, but we can bring this case out in the open and expose the military’s use of untested, unsafe vaccines on soldiers.

Please call Private Iwanowska’s commanding officer. Let him know that we oppose the use of unsafe vaccines and that the charges against Pvt. Iwanowska should be dropped immediately.

Her commanding officer is: Maj. General Franklin L. Hagenbeck 315-772-5565

1. The vaccine's manufacturer, Bioport of Lansing, Michigan, has never passed an FDA inspection. Numerous problems include lack of sterility, contamination problems, quality control problems, lack of consistency in manufacturing, falsification of the expiration dates on some lots of the vaccine (labels were switched), and the presence of squalene, an adjuvant which is illegal in the United States.

2. Adverse reactions to this vaccine range from 40% in men to 70% in women, according to an Army study. Yet when the program began the FDA-approved product label admitted to only a 0.2% adverse reaction rate; now it says 5-35%. Adverse reactions range from severe bone and joint pain, to loss of vision, severe skin problems, blackouts and loss of consciousness (crashing from a standing position leads to other injuries, of course), grand mal seizures, internal organ problems, ALS, multiple sclerosis -- and death. If this was a civilian vaccine, it would long ago have been taken off the market.

3. The current vaccine, licensed in 1970, failed to meet federal requirements to prove efficacy in humans prior to licensure; the required trials to prove safety were conducted, but were of limited scientific validity. The only trial of an anthrax vaccine in humans, in the late 1950's, was for a different vaccine and showed efficacy only for cutaneous, or skin contact. The Dept. of Defense wanted a vaccine against aerosolized anthrax - that which would be "weaponized" - and for mass inoculation, and in 1996 submitted to the FDA an Investigational New Drug (IND) application requesting permission to use it for this purpose. By law (10 USC 1107), an IND requires informed consent, or a Presidential waiver of that consent, neither of which currently exist. Absent either, a military order to take the vaccine is illegal. Yet, if troops refuse the vaccine, they are most often fined, court-martialed, jailed, and separated from the service under less than honorable conditions.

SNAFU 212-802-4459