Saved Wikipedia (June 7, 2024): "Fuad El-Hibri"

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Fuad El-Hibri, the executive chairman of the biotech company Emergent BioSolutions, at company hadquarters in Rockville, Md., in 2010.

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Evy Mages for The Washington Post, via Getty Images

By Clay Risen

Published April 30, 2022Updated May 2, 2022

Fuad El-Hibri, whose biotech company won billions of dollars in government contracts to manufacture a vaccine against anthrax but stumbled in 2021 when, having been hired to produce Covid vaccines, it had to throw out the equivalent of 75 million contaminated doses, died on April 23 at his home in Potomac, Md. He was 64.

His death was announced in a statement by his family. A representative for the family said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

Mr. El-Hibri’s Maryland-based company, Emergent BioSolutions, was an obscure player in the world of government contracting, but an influential one: It deployed extensive lobbying efforts and campaign contributions to secure a near-monopoly on the production of an anthrax vaccine in the early 2000s. The contract accounted for nearly half the budget for the Strategic National Stockpile, a medical reserve held in case of crises like a bioweapons attack or a pandemic.

Though the relationship occasionally drew scrutiny — including an extensive investigation by The New York Times in March 2021 — it also made Mr. El-Hibri’s company a seemingly obvious choice to produce the Covid vaccines developed by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca. Emergent received a $628 million contract from the federal government in 2020.

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Mr. El-Hibri testified via videoconference before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus in May 2021, two months after his company announced that the equivalent of some 15 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine had been contaminated and had to be discarded. 

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Pool photo by Stefani Reynolds

But in fact, Emergent was not at all ready for that imposing task. Though it was already part of a government program to scale up vaccine production rapidly in an emergency, it had yet to demonstrate such a capacity when it began to churn out Covid vaccines in early 2021.

In March of that year, the company announced that because of worker error, the equivalent of some 15 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine had been contaminated and had to be discarded. Production nationwide shut down temporarily, creating a political headache for the Biden administration, which had been hoping for a smooth rollout to tamp down vaccine hesitancy.

Congress launched an investigation, and in May Mr. El-Hibri, who was Emergent’s executive chairman, and Robert G. Kramer, the company’s chief executive, testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus.

While both men defended the company and cited the unprecedented challenge their task presented, Mr. El-Hibri was contrite about its failures.

“The cross-contamination incident is unacceptable,” he said, “period.”

About 60 million additional doses were found to be contaminated in June.

Fuad El-Hibri was born on March 2, 1958, in Hildesheim, Germany, the son of Elizabeth (Trunk) El-Hibri, a homemaker, and Ibrahim El-Hibri, an engineer and entrepreneur. He grew up in Lebanon and Germany and graduated from Stanford University in 1980 with a degree in economics. He received a master’s degree in public and private management from the Yale School of Management in 1982.

Mr. El-Hibri began his career with Citicorp in Saudi Arabia and later worked for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in Indonesia. After returning to the United States, he started a business that helped national telecom companies upgrade their networks in Russia, Venezuela and El Salvador.

In the 1990s, he advised the Saudi Arabian government on its efforts to buy millions of doses of an anthrax vaccine. That experience seeded the idea for what became Emergent BioSolutions.

He co-founded the company, originally called BioPort, in 1998. He and his partners, including William J. Crowe, a former admiral, soon won a bid to buy a disused government laboratory in Lansing, Mich., and upgrade it to produce anthrax vaccines for the U.S. military.

The company changed its name to Emergent BioSolutions in 2004. It went public in 2006.

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Mr. El-Hibri co-founded Emergent BioSolutions, originally called BioPort, in 1998. It went public in 2006.

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Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

Though it mostly focused on just one product and one customer (it also produced Narcan, used to treat opioid overdoses), Emergent grew rich under Mr. El-Hibri’s leadership, reporting $1.5 billion in revenue in 2020.

As The Times’s investigation found, the company’s financial success was in part attributable to its aggressive efforts to win a large part of the strategic stockpile’s budget. Many experts consider it an outsize chunk, given the relatively low risk of a widespread anthrax attack and the option to use cheap antibiotics for many cases.

“Purchases are supposed to be based on careful assessments by government officials of how best to save lives,” the investigation found, “but many have also been influenced by Emergent’s bottom line.”

Mr. El-Hibri and his wife were prolific campaign donors; they gave nearly $1 million between 2018 and 2021, mostly to Republican candidates. An employee political action committee at Emergent gave $1.4 million more over the same period.

Those connections proved crucial in the fall of 2020, when Emergent was one of two facilities contracted to produce Covid vaccines. Shortly afterward, Mr. El-Hibri cashed out $42 million in shares and stock options.

After the production debacle at Emergent became public, the company faced an uprising by shareholders, including a lawsuit accusing it of committing securities fraud by falsely claiming it was ready to produce the vaccine in order to boost the value of its stock.

Mr. El-Hibri stepped down as chairman of Emergent BioSolutions on April 1.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy (Grunenwald) El-Hibri; his mother; his brother, Samir; his sister, Yasmin El-Hibri Gibellini; his daughters, Faiza and Yusra El-Hibri; his son, Karim; and three grandchildren.

With each new confirmed anthrax infection raising fears of a wider bioterror attack in the U.S., pressure is mounting on the Defense Department and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to give the green light to Michigan-based [BioPort Corporation], the nation's lone anthrax-vaccine manufacturer, to ship new lots of the vaccine to the Pentagon.

Anthrax vaccine shipments from BioPort have been suspended by the FDA since 1998 because of questions about the facility's quality control, forcing the Pentagon to dramatically reduce its program to vaccinate all 2.4 million U.S. soldiers and reservists against anthrax. Now the lack of the vaccine threatens to become a scandal, as the U.S. is sending thousands of soldiers overseas and calling up reserves, and as the public is clamoring for access to protection from the deadly bacterium.

After three years of getting bailed out by the Defense Department, BioPort could be poised to make a fortune -- as its CEO [Yahia Fuad El-Hibri (born 1958)] did working with the British seller of anthrax vaccine, Porton International, during the Gulf War a decade ago. But only if the FDA approves the company's renovated plant, as expected, sometime in the next week. The decision could open the door for BioPort to market the drug to a worried public, as new anthrax scares are reported daily.

The story of the troubled U.S. anthrax-vaccine program is a tangled saga of science, politics, private-sector deal-making and national security. There have been persistent questions about the vaccine's safety and effectiveness. Critics say Defense Department studies have never proven the vaccine works against the more dangerous inhaled form of anthrax, only against cutaneous, or skin anthrax. Some military personnel have complained of mysterious illnesses after taking the vaccine, and at least 400 have been disciplined for refusing the mandatory inoculation. But the Pentagon insists the vaccine is both effective and safe. Even now, some researchers say the vaccine is seriously outdated, as BioPort gears up to ship more.

Then there are questions about BioPort's role as the nation's only anthrax-vaccine maker. How did Fuad El-Hibri, 43, a German-born entrepreneur and former director of British vaccine-maker Porton Products, come to have so much control over the West's supply of anthrax vaccine? Why didn't the Pentagon turn to a larger, more established drug maker for the crucial anti-biowarfare weapon? And how could it let BioPort remain the sole maker of the vaccine after it failed repeatedly to gain FDA approval for its renovated facility?

"It speaks to DoD culture more than anything else," says a congressional staff aide who asked not to be named. "The Pentagon just does not have a corporate culture. Once they decided to go with this program (BioPort), they stuck with it, even though oversight indicated they had built their biodefense program on a foundation of sand, and they had an unreliable producer. The DoD is simply incapable of admitting a mistake. They genetically just can't back out."

The Pentagon and BioPort deny they made a mistake, of course, and they believe their problems will be solved, perhaps next week. Government sources close to the process say as early as Monday, the FDA will approve BioPort's renovated facility, and enable it to resume shipments of the vaccine it has been stockpiling since 1999.

A government official who asked not to be named says while BioPort is "70 percent on the way there" in terms of improvements in quality control demanded by the FDA, political pressure due to the terrorism scare is playing more of a role than quality control in expediting FDA approval. But BioPort officials say FDA approval for their renovated facility is long overdue.

"We have heard the process will be speeded up, and it has taken an incredibly long time," said Jay Coupe, a longtime aide to Adm. William Crowe, who with Fuad El-Hibri serves as one of BioPort's owners, and who served as chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff during the Reagan administration. (Fuad's father, Ibrahim El-Hibri, also well-connected to the defense establishment, is a third partner in the venture.) "While BioPort certainly supports the FDA, and doesn't want any special consideration and wants a safe and effective vaccine, the approval process has gone on for a very long time for most vaccine manufacturers. This is one of the reasons people are getting out of the vaccine business."

"We have been manufacturing vaccine," BioPort spokeswoman Kim Brennan Root said. "As we submit final documentation for approval from the FDA, we have been manufacturing vaccine and contributing it to the stockpile so when approval comes we can be in a position to release the vaccine."

But critics of BioPort say that repeated FDA inspections have shown the company has failed to prove it can produce the same dose of vaccine twice.

"The most fundamental problem has to do with the quality of the process of vaccine manufacture," a congressional aide, who asked not to be named, told Salon. "They cannot show they can produce the same vaccine of the same potency and consistency twice in a row. The quality of the process is not validated. That means they don't have the data to show that, within this process, within this heat range, this process produces this vaccine. They are trying to retrofit a modern inspection and validation process on an old system."

"BioPort has tried to say it didn't know how much it would cost to bring the company to 2001 FDA standards," another congressional staffer told Salon. "But that is kind of a hard pill to swallow. They consistently showed deviations from good manufacturing practices. Some of the FDA complaints are substantive. There were contaminants in the lot. There were some deficiencies in packaging. There were problems with paperwork and record keeping. There was an inability to show consistency from one lot to the next."

"They have come a long way," he added, "at significant taxpayer support."

Even if BioPort gets FDA approval to resume vaccine sales, anthrax vaccine will be available only to the military, not to the general public. That is, unless BioPort can step up production, and get the Defense Department to agree to sales to federal health agencies. If the current anthrax scare in New York and Florida grows, some members of the public are certain to pressure their political leaders for access to the vaccine.

"I will tell you right now, I wish I had access to the vaccine myself, I can tell you," says [Dr. Zsolt Paul Harsanyi (born 1944)],, a former business partner of Fuad and Ibrahim El-Hibri who is president of the Washington office of Porton International.

BioPort's Kim Brennan Root would not disclose how much vaccine the company had stockpiled while awaiting FDA approval for their renovated facility since renovation was completed in 1999. But a congressional aide who has researched the matter estimates that approximately 5 million doses are stockpiled. Vaccination requires six doses over 18 months, and a yearly booster shot.

In testimony to congressional committees, BioPort CEO Fuad El-Hibri has indicated BioPort's viability depends on being able to sell anthrax vaccine to a much larger market than to just the Defense Department, which he said is getting "rock-bottom prices."

"It has become clear to us that the prices paid by the Department of Defense for anthrax vaccine are significantly below BioPort's costs for producing anthrax vaccine," El-Hibri told the House Government Reform Committee in June 1999, a year after he purchased the Defense Department's former anthrax vaccine supplier. "Traditionally vaccine manufacturers have been able to offer lower prices to the government by recovering a substantial portion of their costs through commercial sales. Because of the current unavailability of product, the commercial sales market has not materialized as anticipated. Without a second market, the government cannot expect the rock-bottom pricing it enjoys with some of the other vaccines it purchases."

"As a commercial entity," el-Hibri added, "BioPort cannot continue to subsidize the DoD."

Critics of BioPort are outraged at El-Hibri's contention that BioPort has subsidized the Defense Department. Chief among them is U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., who sits on the House Armed Services Committee. Jones estimates that the Pentagon has paid BioPort almost $150 million since BioPort purchased the state-owned Michigan Biologics Products Institute (MBPI) in 1998, giving it the exclusive U.S. license to make anthrax vaccine -- with no new shipped vaccine to show for the money.

"My whole concern has been that this company cannot meet FDA requirements to produce the product," Jones told Salon Thursday. "So how long does the government continue to put taxpayers' money into a company that cannot produce the product?"

"Since former Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen raised the concern about the possibility of anthrax being used on the military or civilians," Jones added, "the Clinton administration made the decision to go with BioPort."

As his comment suggests, partisan politics may at least initially have played a part in Jones' troubles with BioPort, and its co-founder, Adm. Crowe. Alone among top military brass, particularly those who served Republican administrations, Adm. Crowe endorsed the election of "draft-dodger" Bill Clinton, who was widely despised by the Republican-leaning military establishment. Clinton rewarded Crowe for his endorsement, Jones suggests, with a plumb ambassadorship to England from 1994 to 1997.

And England in the years during and after the Gulf War is key to understanding the close links between the half dozen people who have come to dominate the sale of vaccines against deadly bioweapons in the U.S. and the U.K. Only two countries, the U.S. and Britain, make anthrax vaccine, and El-Hibri has been involved in both, first at Porton International in Britain during the Gulf War, and now with BioPort in the U.S., as the world faces a new terrorism scare. Sources say El-Hibri remained involved with Porton International up until the firm partnered with defense contractor DynCorps in 1997 to get a new Defense Department contract to make a second generation of vaccines against bioweapons. The new company is named [DynPort Vaccine Company, LLC], and its license to make second generation vaccines to protect against small pox, anthrax and other bioweapons was publicly announced Thursday, although the contract appears to date from 1997.

It was in Britain that Ambassador Crowe resumed his acquaintance with an old family friend, Ibrahim El-Hibri, a wealthy Venezuelan citizen of Sunni Lebanese descent, and his son Fuad. Ibrahim El Hibri had made a fortune in the telecom business with Phillips Company, working in the Gulf states.

Crowe and Ibrahim el-Hibri were first introduced decades ago by a U.S. Naval Academy classmate of the admiral who, like Ibrahim El-Hibri, lived in Venezuela. They had stayed in close contact during the 1970s when Adm. Crowe was posted to head the U.S. Central Command in Qatar, in the Middle East, where Ibrahim El-Hibri was active in his businesses. And in England during his ambassadorship, they met again.

The mania for privatization in Margaret Thatcher's England made it a great place for entrepreneurs like El-Hibri. In the 1980s, an El-Hibri acquaintance named [Dr. Zsolt Paul Harsanyi (born 1944)],, an American Ph.D. in genetics who had spearheaded an early report on biotechnology for the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, became involved in what would become in its time the largest private biotechnology firm in the world, Porton International. Porton got the rights to sell vaccines and other products developed by the U.K.-government run laboratory, the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research (CAMR), on commercial markets. CAMR had done the early research into products like botulinum toxin, or botox, a bacterium that can be injected to stop spasms (as well as prevent wrinkles, its most popular use in the U.S., at least until now) and anthrax vaccine.

The marketing relationship between Porton and CAMR ended in the 1990s, Dr. Harsyani said, and CAMR now markets its own products.

"At the time of Mrs. Thatcher, there was a philosophy in the U.K. supporting taking public works to the private sector," Harsyani told Salon. The spirit of public-private partnership that existed in Thatcher's England in the 1980s then moved to the States, Harsyani explained. "A lot of U.S. government and military research was not commercialized because there was no mechanism for it. One of the things that has changed in the United States in the last 20 years is that intellectual property that came out could in fact be owned by the institution where the researchers worked. The U.S. has now taken steps towards that kind of privatization."

In 1989-1990, with Persian Gulf tensions heating up and the U.S. and Britain preparing to lead a war against Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, El-Hibri became a principal silent investor in Porton, while his Yale and Stanford-educated son Fuad was installed as director of a Porton subsidiary, Porton Products. Their Middle East connections were put to use, as Porton sold tens of millions of dollars worth of anthrax vaccine to Saudi Arabia and other countries -- deals all approved by the British Ministry of Defense.

(A U.S. government investigator says Porton sold vaccine to Saudi Arabia at the insanely high price of $300-$500 per dose -- some 30 to 50 times what the U.S. Defense Department agreed to pay BioPort per dose.)

The Gulf War was a boon to businesses like Porton, as well as its officers, the el Hibris and Dr. Harsyani. Increasingly, they started to look for similar business opportunities in the U.S., particularly in areas that revolved around biodefense. They gravitated to opportunities where the government-run defense industry meets the private sector.

After the Gulf War, with concerns mounting in the U.S. about reports of Iraq's production of anthrax, Adm. Crowe was posted as ambassador to England. There, he resumed his friendship with the El-Hibris. About the same time, the El-Hibri family was hearing that the U.S.'s lone anthrax vaccine manufacturer, the state-owned Michigan Biologics Products Institute (MBPI), was financially troubled and looking for a buyer.

In 1970, the Michigan lab had received the only U.S. license to make anthrax vaccine, but its facility was antiquated. By the late 1980s, according to Judith Miller's "Germs," Michigan's Biologic Products Institute was making small batches of the vaccine -- 15,000 to 17,000 doses -- every four years, and selling them mostly commercially, to people in the animal hides business who came into contact with anthrax. But in 1988, the U.S. Army went to the lab and signed a contract to buy 300,000 doses in five years. The order was ambitious. By the time Gulf War troops assembled in early 1991, there was only enough vaccine to protect 150,000 of the half million troops assembled there, and none for civilians or allies, though the Saudis were able to buy some from the U.K.'s Porton International.

After the war, as worry increased over Iraq's biowarfare capacity, some in the Pentagon proposed that the military build its own vaccine factory, but officials thought it best left to the private sector. By 1996, however, concerns were mounting that the Michigan facility, already inadequate to the challenge of producing enough vaccine for the entire military, was having new problems. After several years of troubling inspections, the FDA threatened to close the lab in 1997, citing problems with sterility and equipment maintenance as well as scientific procedure. The only other facility producing a vaccine, Britain's CAMR, which at one time had a marketing relationship with Porton, now terminated, was using a different anthrax strain, and wasn't licensed for U.S. use anyway.

The el-Hibris and Crowe came up with the idea for BioPort, which they thought could do in the U.S. what Porton had done in Britain: bring private-sector methods (and profits) to a public research lab. As Fuad el-Hibri testified to Congress in 1999, "When BioPort was originally conceived, we believed that Admiral Crowe's background would be important in ensuring that we did everything correctly in establishing a company that would best serve DoD's needs."

El-Hibri and Crowe also partnered with two former managers of the state-owned facility, Robert Myers, who serves as BioPort's COO, and Rob van Ravenswaay -- a deal former Michigan state Sen. Linng Brewer, a Lansing Democrat, has long charged was ethically suspect, because Myers and Ravenswaay as employees of MBPI "knew the identities of at least two bidders (El-Hibri and Crowe) and the substance of their bids, information not made available to the general public. It appears they used information not available to others to enhance their financial position relative to the other bidders, a clear violation." The BioPort partners have long denied the charges.

In June 1998, BioPort's $24 million bid for MBPI -- $17 million upfront and the rest in loans to be paid over five years -- beat out competitors, including a $16.6 million bid endorsed by the Defense Department by Gruppo Marcucci, that involved no debt. Some expressed concern about selling the sensitive national security facility to a foreign company. (Brewer says the Marcucci bid lost out because it had failed to partner with managers of the Institute, but he has been unable to bring his ethical violations against Myers and Ravenswaay to court.)

A former Porton employee who asked not to be named says the company was looking to make a fortune on the Pentagon contract. "When El-Hibri bought the Michigan plant, he thought they would make a killing. The lab was already knocking out this product. The vaccine was already FDA approved. It's an essential business but no one wanted to talk about bioweapons back then, even though they knew Iraq and other countries had anthrax."

But it didn't turn out to be so easy.

Despite El-Hibri's experience marketing anthrax vaccine at Porton, Crowe's strong ties with the defense establishment, and growing interest from the Pentagon in protecting troops from anthrax, BioPort's problems quickly mounted after it acquired the MBPI facility.

Troubles seemed unlikely, because in May 1998, shortly before BioPort's bid for MBPI was finalized, Defense Secretary William Cohen announced plans to require all 2.4 million U.S. soldiers and reservists to be inoculated against anthrax, which looked like a windfall for the new venture.

In testimony to Congress, Adm. Crowe has adamantly denied that he had any insider knowledge that led to his purchase of the anthrax vaccine facility. "It has on occasion been rumored that the decision to inoculate all service personnel was made to benefit BioPort Corporation and indirectly me, presumably because of my past associations with the military and the administration," Crowe told the House Committee on Government Reform in October 1999. "If this charge were not so ridiculous, it would be offensive. It outrageously exaggerates my influence. Let me be completely clear. I never, repeat never, solicited any official of this administration to install or promote a mandatory inoculation program."

Despite the Pentagon's decision to require anthrax vaccination for all troops, which clearly could have been lucrative for the new firm, BioPort was struggling. Only three months after their acquisition of MBPI, El-Hibri and Crowe were prevented from shipping any new vaccine, by a scathing FDA inspection that found over 40 items wrong with the plant, the vaccine, its consistency, the firm's accounting, and other problems. Indeed, by September 1999, BioPort was already appealing to the DoD for relief from a contract requesting BioPort's delivery of some 8 million doses of anthrax vaccine. It simply could not deliver, and certainly not at that price.

A Defense Department audit from July 12, 2000, shows that shortly after BioPort bought MBPI, the DoD awarded it a $29.4 million contract to supply 8.7 million doses of anthrax vaccine at the price of $4.36 a dose. But a year later, unable to ship product, BioPort requested and the DoD granted $24.1 million in relief to BioPort, reduced the number of doses demanded from 7.9 million to 4.6 million, and agreed to raise the price per dose from $4.36 to $10.36.

Even after a full-scale yearlong renovation of its manufacturing facilities, and significant efforts to meet FDA requirements to get its new facility reapproved, BioPort continues to wait for FDA approval to ship doses of the vaccine it has been manufacturing all this time. Problems have been found not simply with BioPort's process, but with the doses of the anthrax vaccine already produced. FDA tests found a lack of consistency in dosage and other problems with the finished product.

The delay has prevented the Pentagon from vaccinating all but the troops it is currently sending abroad, and has forced some soldiers to actually suspend vaccination mid-process.

"Now we're in a situation with the terrorist attack that we still have this company that has still not met FDA approval," Rep. Walter Jones says, "and we're spending almost $3 million per month on this company that is still months away from having FDA approval."

So why did the DoD stick with BioPort all these years of their failing to get final FDA approval -- until now, when the U.S. faces a real anthrax crisis?

"I blame everybody," says a congressional staffer well versed in the BioPort controversy. "The buyer -- the Pentagon -- kept BioPort alive. The DoD should have pulled the plug on this outfit a long time ago."

To be fair to the Pentagon and BioPort, however, it's not as if major pharmaceutical companies have been clamoring for the contract. A reliable anthrax vaccine has proven hard to make, and questions about its safety have likely scared off other manufacturers (although the Defense Department agreed to protect BioPort against lawsuits by military personnel.)

Even now, just as BioPort seems set to perhaps overcome its long regulatory and financial difficulties, many in the industry and government are coming to consensus that the anthrax vaccine BioPort produces is outdated.

Increasingly, the government is also supporting research into a second generation of vaccines that can protect against multiple bacteria -- perhaps all in one shot. The government has also turned to the well-connected defense contractor, DynCorps, known for its involvement in the drug war in Colombia, and sending retired U.S. cops to Bosnia and Kosovo to serve as U.N. police, to subcontract vaccine research. (DynCorps was implicated in the accidental killing of an American Baptist missionary and her infant daughter by the Peruvian military earlier this year.) In 1997, DynCorps partnered with the El-Hibris' old company Porton International, to form [DynPort Vaccine Company, LLC] (DVC), just in time to beat out four other bids for a $322 million, 10-year contract.

Under the award, "DVC acts as a prime system contractor for the management of the existing stockpile of biological defense vaccines (except anthrax vaccine) and the advanced development, testing, production, FDA licensure, and storage of up to 18 new biological defense vaccines, including new vaccines against anthrax, small pox, plague, botulism and tularemia," according to Pentagon spokesman Jim Turner.

Why did the Pentagon turn to the unknown DynPort over more established companies? Some in the industry say not a whole lot of pharmaceutical companies want to get into bioweapons vaccine research, because the capital costs to build a dedicated lab safe from airborne toxins are so high, and the market -- at least until now -- has been so small, primarily just the Pentagon.

"No one else wants these contracts," insists Ron Rader, who leads an industry research firm called BioPharm.com. "Spore-forming microorganisms, because of FDA regulations, require totally separate facilities. Botulinim toxin, anthrax -- the facilities have to be dedicated. No one wants to have a dedicated, one-product facility. The trend now is to have multiple suites, and/or large manufacturing facilities. That way, you can switch from product to product every few months. No one wants to deal with spore-forming organisms.

"Also back then, anthrax vaccine was just not an attractive product. It's associated with biological warfare -- and that's not a positive thing. It's not the kind of thing you want to put in your brochure. Mainstream pharmaceutical companies had no interest. And you're also talking about being absolutely dependent on one customer. Very few companies are willing to take that risk. Any day, the Defense Department could just walk away." But P.W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has studied private military companies such as DynCorps and Military Professional Resources Inc., says the Pentagon seems to be treating bioweapons vaccines as just another weapons system they want to outsource to a trusted private-sector insider.

"The Pentagon is in search of two things: efficiency, and expediency," Singer said. "They either think they can get a better product in terms of quality or price or rapidity, or for expedient reasons. DynCorps provides a disconnection, when they would rather not have the government involved in some activity."

"My concern," he added, "is that the company in Michigan [BioPort] is actually a government lab that was privatized. It strikes me that for something so important for societal security, that you don't want to leave it in private hands. There are just some things that are too important."

And indeed, for BioPort CEO Fuad El-Hibri, BioPort is not an exclusive priority. El-Hibri, who became a U.S. citizen around the time of the BioPort purchase of MBPI, does not work out of the Michigan company, but out of the Rockville, Md., offices of his company East West Resources Management. His secretary there, Sheila Glick, says BioPort is one of 15 different companies El-Hibri runs, including some mobile phone operators in El Salvador, Venezuela and Jamaica. El-Hibri did not respond to numerous requests by Salon for an interview, and his secretary later referred questions to back to BioPort.

[Dr. Zsolt Paul Harsanyi (born 1944)], president of Porton International, which has now been bought by the French pharmaceutical company Ipsen, and who is now involved in the DynPort vaccine contract with the Defense Department, said there is nothing sinister about the way the El-Hibris have approached the business of anthrax vaccine -- as a business opportunity.

"Mr. Ibrahim El-Hibri is a wonderful gentleman," Harsyani said Friday. "He started a charity for orphans." A scan of the Internet shows Mr. El-Hibri on the board of a Beirut-based Sunni charity, Dar Al Aytam Al Islamyah, that provides relief to orphans and widows, and espouses "commitment to the humanitarian principles of Islam such as justice, tolerance, and abhorrence of confessionalism or sectarianism."

[Dr. Zsolt Paul Harsanyi (born 1944)] said he had not spoken with Ibrahim El-Hibri in over a year, but that the two parted on good terms. The El-Hibris divested from Porton International about three years ago, about the time when DynPort got the Pentagon contract to begin work on a second generation of bioweapon vaccines.

The former Porton employee, who asked not to be named, says the El-Hibris should be viewed as defense contractors, and their relationship with the Pentagon is not unique. "You have to realize: BioPort and now DynPort, these are arms dealers. They are part absolutely of the military industrial complex. This is their business. They are selling to a captive audience: the Defense Department. That's all-American. All these defense contracts -- they are boondoggles -- and that's the American way, to make as much money as possible. There's not that much unique about BioPort."

• While the national and international media has been busy exploring Battelle’s possible connection to the anthrax scare, the local media has been eerily quiet when it comes to Battelle’s ties to intelligence agencies and companies linked to an alleged bin Laden family business associate. Here’s what they’re not telling you:
•  The spooky Dr. Strangelove Institute headquartered in Columbus may be ground zero in the domestic military-industrial anthrax scare. With five people dead and 18 ill, Battelle’s role in directing the U.S. Defense Department’s “joint vaccine acquisition program” is now coming under heavy scrutiny—just not in Columbus.
•  Battelle, in partnership with BioPort of Lansing, Michigan, has a virtual monopoly on military anthrax vaccine production in the United States. [BioPort Corporation] is partly owned by a top-secret British bio-warfare consortium, Porton International. The New York Times reported in July 1998 that BioPort’s owners included Admiral William Crowe Jr., a former chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and ambassador to Britain during the Clinton years. One of Crowe’s partners is the mysterious [Yahia Fuad El-Hibri (born 1958)], a German citizen of Lebanese descent and a reported business associate of the bin Laden family.
• Laura Rozen pointed out in an October 13, 2001, Salon.com article [PDF Saved as : [HM00EW][GDrive]  /  To view, see page for BioPort Corporation ] that El-Habri, BioPort’s CEO, “made a fortune” working for “Porton International” during the Gulf War a decade ago. Porton had a virtual monopoly on the anthrax vaccine in Britain in partnership with Battelle. Porton International’s for-profit arm, the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research (CAMR), announced last March it was putting together a joint proposal with Battelle to supply the U.K. with an anthrax vaccine.
• What’s Porton International, you might ask? Well, they’re the Battelle, so to speak, of the U.K. In the weeks immediately preceding the September 11 attacks, the consortium’s laboratories located at Porton Down made national news in Britain when the BBC reported that Porton Down scientists had conducted biological and chemical experiments on “about 20,000 so-called human guinea pigs… between 1939 and the 1960s.”
• On August 27, Britain’s Independent newspaper reported that Porton’s chemical and biological defense branch “tested LSD on soldiers to investigate its ‘tactical battlefield usefulness’” in the ’60s. Two days later, the Sunday Telegraph reported that the experiments included dripping liquid sarin, the deadly nerve gas, onto a patch taped to a soldier’s arm. The British police were investigating between 45 and 70 deaths linked to the experiments 
• As I reported in Columbus Alive immediately after the anthrax scare began, Battelle is involved in developing a new and stronger strain of anthrax at its West Jefferson labs. Don’t be deceived by the fake farmland facades of the West Jefferson complex: It’s the center of an unclassified defense project going under the name “[Project Jefferson]” according to the New York Times.
• The Times also confirmed that the CIA is involved with its own top-secret anthrax project, code-named “Clear Vision.” The presence of the CIA and specter of “national security” is thwarting the current FBI investigation into the mailed anthrax, sources say.
• More than any other organization, Battelle controlled access to the Ames strain of anthrax used in various secret projects—and the strain found in last fall’s deadly letters. The Baltimore Sun reported that the Ames strain was also being produced at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, but this is a red herring. Battelle’s involved in that program as well.
• A Battelle press release dated December 18, 2001, reads: “Battelle is expanding… with the opening of a suite of offices in West Valley City, Utah. The office will house existing business operation from Battelle’s Dugway, Hill Air Force Base, and Toole, Utah, locations.” Battelle co-manages many labs and projects including the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, well known for its role in the nuclear weapons industry. 
• As I previously noted in Alive, the number-two man in the former Soviet biochemical warfare operation, Kanatjan Alibekov, now going by the alias Ken Alibek, is a classified consultant with both the CIA and Battelle. A 1998 New Yorker article pointed to work on the anthrax project Alibek conducted with William C. Patrick III. Patrick, now president of Biothreat Assessments, has 48 years of biological warfare experience with the U.S. military, including a stint as the chief of the Army’s Product Development Division (which weaponizes biological agents).
• The current FBI investigation has led toward the Patrick/Alibek/Battelle/CIA connection. But whether the feds have the will, or the authority, to investigate spook central in Columbus is another question. The New York Times, on November 9, reported that the FBI already made an error in the “anthrax probe” by allowing the “destruction of university” samples that “may have caused clues to be lost.”
• On December 17, London’s Telegraph ran the headline: “CIA links Porton Down to anthrax attacks.” The newspaper reported, “Sources in the FBI said the CIA was under investigation because of the bureau’s ‘interest’ in a contractor which used to work for the agency in its anthrax program.” Sources at Battelle and in law enforcement say the contractor in question was Alibek, not the unnamed former Battelle scientist in Milwaukee the Columbus Dispatch has referred to.
• Alibek, who arrived in the U.S. in 1992, needs to be looked at very closely; news reports suggest he had possible financial stakes in a biochemical scare. On October 29, the Washington Post reported that Alibek “has hooked up with an Alexandria, Virginia, company, and, supported by federal grants, opened a laboratory of 35 people.” The article notes the former Soviet bio-warfare scientist is “learning to be a capitalist.” 
• “Hadron Advanced Biosystems Inc., Alibek’s company, sports an unusual provenance for a biotechnical venture. No other company, doing any kind of work, can claim to be headed by a former number-two man in a vast program aimed at turning anthrax, plague, smallpox, tularemia and many other germs into weapons of war,” noted the Post. “Alibek’s venture is a subsidiary of Hadron Inc…. a publicly traded 37-year-old government contractor specializing in defense and espionage work.”
• The FBI’s investigation initially focused on who stood to gain financially from the deadly anthrax letters (as in, who has a stake in increased sales of the anthrax vaccine, for instance). Sources close to the investigation say that El-Habri’s possible ties to the bin Laden family also caused the FBI some concern—not to mention his role as CEO of the only laboratory in the U.S. licensed to sell the anthrax vaccine. But the convergence of the Strangelovian Battelle with [BioPort Corporation], the British Porton Down consortium and the role of prominent individuals like Alibek, Crowe and [Yahia Fuad El-Hibri (born 1958)] suggests that much of this is likely to be covered up.
• Ironically, this summer, George W. Bush renounced long-standing calls by the Russians for mutual inspections of biochemical weapons sites like Battelle. Bush claimed that mutual inspection of U.S. biochemical technology sites by foreign scientists could risk revealing commercial trade secrets—secrets that would be worth a fortune if a few people controlled the commercial rights to them.