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.

Most troubling were problems at the Michigan manufacturing plant, which had been shut down in 1998 after the Food and Drug Administration uncovered serious flaws.

Dr. Ivins and other researchers, however, had been working on a more advanced alternative vaccine — considered safer and more effective — so there was no reason for such a rash act, his former colleagues say.

"There was a lot of consternation, a lot of pressure to rescue this thing," said Jeffrey Adamovicz, one of Dr. Ivins’s fellow researchers at the time. "But if AVA failed, he had his next vaccine candidate. It was well on its way to what looked to be a very bright future."

It doesn't sound like Ivins himself was half as stressed out as the company who was about to get their product pulled from the market, Bioport. So who was really worrying about an end to the anthrax program?

Bioport (now Emergent BioSolutions) began in 1998 when a company led by the late Admiral William Crowe bought the vaccine-manufacturing facilities of the Michigan Department of Public Health, located in Lansing. Along with the bargain came the exclusive right to license and manufacture the anthrax vaccine for the Department of Defense.

Admiral William Crowe is the man who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military under Ronald Reagan, back in the days when our military and CIA were selling anthrax to Saddam Hussein at the same time they were secretly arming Iran, in one of the largest CIA covert operations in history.

Speaking of the CIA, on December 16, 2001, the CIA admitted that they, themselves, had anthrax they were using in their "bio-warfare program":
 

The article says:

But, just as Army officials denied any connection to the anthrax letters, a CIA official said the anthrax detected in letters sent earlier this fall "absolutely did not" come from CIA labs.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that the FBI is focusing its anthrax investigation on a contractor who worked with the CIA.
 

The media believed the unnamed CIA official's assurance that the anthrax in the letters "absolutely did not" come from the CIA labs, and two days after this revelation the FBI announced that the anthrax was a "genetic match" to the kind used by the Army at Ft. Detrick since 1980. The story about the CIA anthrax and the CIA contractor went away as the FBI started on a six-year wild goosechase that focused on one suspect after another.

The fact that the CIA was using anthrax should not have been news. On September 4, 2001, Judith Miller and others reported in the New York Times that:

... the United States has embarked on a program of secret research on biological weapons that, some officials say, tests the limits of the global treaty banning such weapons. ...

...The projects, which have not been previously disclosed, were begun under President Clinton and have been embraced by the Bush administration, which intends to expand them.

Earlier this year, administration officials said, the Pentagon drew up plans to engineer genetically a potentially more potent variant of the bacterium that causes anthrax, a deadly disease ideal for germ warfare.

According to this article, President Bush did not want to strengthen the treaty because it would subject the government's secret research sites to international inspection.

Among the facilities likely to be open to inspection under the draft agreement would be the West Jefferson, Ohio, laboratory of the Battelle Memorial Institute, a military contractor that has been selected to create the genetically altered anthrax.

It should be noted at this time that the CIA contractor mentioned above that was working to create genetically altered anthrax, Battelle Memorial Institute, controls "Battelle Ventures," a venture capital fund headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, of all places.

Dr. Bruce Ivins had a unique relationship with the CIA-funded Battelle Memorial Institute. The Dallas Morning News reports:

Since 1980, Dr. Ivins specialized in developing vaccines against anthrax and other biological weapons. He experimented with animals, including monkeys, rabbits and guinea pigs.

Dr. Ivins mixed the spores shipped to Fort Detrick from the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, a facility operated by the Battelle Memorial Institute in Ohio, a private contractor performing top-secret work for the CIA and other agencies.

So the anthrax in the so-called "smoking flask" actually got its start in a laboratory that was genetically altering anthrax for the CIA, master of top-secret, covert operations.

After the anthrax attacks, the company Bioport quickly got its FDA approval back and resumed its work of being the only manufacturer of the anthrax vaccine, even though it had been unable to deliver even a single dose during the company's then three-year history. Business got back on track, bolstered by legislation like Project Bioshield, which committed "$5.6 billion over 10 years for the government to purchase and stockpile vaccines and drugs to fight anthrax, smallpox and other potential agents of bioterror." Just last year the company, now Emergent Biosolutions, secured at $448 million dollar, 3-year contract to protect the country from bio-terrorism.

Before the anthrax attacks the White House, too, worried about the anthrax vaccine program. For years the government was denying the existence of Gulf War Syndrome, at the same time US soldiers were reporting being sickened by the anthrax vaccine. The president's political adviser Karl Rove, sent a memo to Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz on April 25, 2001 that stated:

Here is material which has been sent to me by Ross Perot regarding the Gulf War Syndrome, as well as some material on the anthrax vaccine problem.

He also offered me a packet of materials from the Lyndon LaRouche crowd about Richard Armitage, but I turned him down.

I do think we need to examine the issues of both Gulf War Syndrome and the anthrax vaccine and how they can be dealt with. They are political problems for us.

After the attacks, the "political problem" turned into a political advantage for the Bush Administration.  As Salon's Glen Greenwald points out:
 

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."

The Bush Administration would use the threat of Iraqi anthrax as one of the reasons to invade the country of Iraq.