Health Official: Israel Stockpiling Smallpox Vaccine

July 8, 2002

Klalit HMO Chairman Dan Michaeli, a former director-general of the Health Ministry, said Monday that Israel has begun stockpiling smallpox vaccine for possible future use in a biological weapons attack by a foreign power or terrorist organization.

"I know that decisions have been taken that have led to provisions for all the residents of the country," Michaeli told Army Radio in an interview. "If and when it is decided to vaccinate, I hope they will do so quickly."

A senior IDF officer said in remarks broadcast Monday on Army Radio that intelligence gathered by security forces points to the possibility that Palestinian terrorists will resort to the use of non-conventional weapons in the future.

Smallpox, once a scourge that killed nearly a third of its victims and scarred the rest, was eradicated in 1979. But some countries, including Iraq and the former Soviet Union, experimented with the virus as a potential germ warfare agent.

Fearful of a smallpox attack, the U.S. government last year ordered millions of doses of smallpox vaccine - enough, in the words of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, to vaccinate "every man, women and child" in the country.

The New York Times on Sunday quoted federal officials as saying that the U.S. government will soon vaccinate around 500,000 health care and emergency personnel against smallpox. Until now, there had been plans to vaccinate just a few thousand workers, the paper said.

The paper also said that the government was "laying the groundwork to carry out mass vaccinations of the public" on the event of a mass-scale outbreak of the disease.

But a U.S. Health and Human Services Department spokesman, Bill Pierce, told Reuters the exact number of those to be vaccinated had not yet been decided.

Since vaccination was scrapped in the United States in 1972, experts assume almost no one has any real immunity any more. This means smallpox, which is highly infectious, could spread like wildfire through the population.

But the current vaccine is based on old technology and is not considered very safe. It has a high rate of side-effects, some of them deadly.

In addition, more people have suppressed immune systems now than in the 1970s, and they could be at special risk not only from the vaccine, but from people recently immunized with it.

The large numbers of unvaccinated people born in the interim have raised fears that terrorists or regimes which have experimented with biological weaponry, will try to use smallpox as a weapon of mass destruction.

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