After 2001, Rumsfeld’s Pentagon agreed to hike BioPort’s compensation by 30 percent—from $3.35 in its 1998 contract to $4.70 per dose—and to purchase anthrax shots for 2.4 million members of the armed forces, each of whom the military would require to receive six doses over an eighteen-month period.94 That was $60 million worth of poorly performing and unapproved vaccines for a threat that never again surfaced. The anthrax threat was always phantasmagoric; since anthrax does not spread through human-to-human transmission, terrorists plotting an anthrax epidemic would need to somehow simultaneously release spores over dozens of US cities.
The anthrax deal was exceptionally ridiculous, since antibiotics are a far safer, more elegant, and more useful defense against anthrax. The prescribed remedy, ciprofloxacin, is a cheap, commonly used antibiotic that Tony Fauci himself recommended after the 2001 postal incidents. “The best approach toward anthrax is antimicrobial therapy,” Dr. Fauci admitted to Congress in 2007.95 Indeed, the night of the 9/11 attacks, the White House Medical Office thoughtfully and presciently dispensed ciprofloxacin to select White House staff who were accompanying Dick Cheney to the safety of Camp David.96
Furthermore, the El-Hibris’ anthrax jab was by far the worst of a bad lot. According to the Times, “Emergent’s anthrax vaccine was not the government’s first choice. It was more than 30 years old and plagued by manufacturing challenges and complaints about side effects. Officials instead backed a company named VaxGen, which was developing a vaccine using newer technology licensed from the military.”97
In 2004, the El-Hibris cofounded, with their partner and former Joint Chiefs Chair Admiral William Crowe, a lobbying group called the Alliance for Biosecurity, as part of their strategy to secure lucrative BARDA-funded BioShield contracts and beat back upstart competitors like VaxGen. That lobbying group recruited two of the Johns Hopkins Center for Biosecurity spooks with whom Kadlec had written the Dark Winter simulation, Tara O’Toole and Col. Randall Larsen, and enlisted more than fifty lobbyists to successfully block VaxGen from muscling in on its locked-up anthrax government monopoly. With these sorts of friends in high places, Emergent made the National Strategic Stockpile an exclusive captive market. By 2006, VaxGen had lost its $800 million contract and was bankrupt, and Emergent remained the government’s sole source monopoly. Emergent then purchased VaxGen’s anthrax vaccine for $2 million, at pennies on the dollar.
A 2021 New York Times exposé titled “How One Firm Put an ‘Extraordinary Burden’ on the US’s Troubled Stockpile” documented Emergent’s airtight domination of stockpile purchases: “As Emergent prospered, other companies working on pandemic remedies for the stockpile were squeezed out of government spending decisions.” Several federal health officials anonymously told the Times that “preparations for an outbreak like Covid-19 almost always took a backseat to Emergent’s anthrax vaccines.”98
By 2011, the El-Hibris’ connections had put Emergent in the driver’s seat. Despite its vaccine’s glaring and dangerous deficiencies, Emergent received $107 million in 2010 from Kadlec’s baby, BARDA,99 and up to $29 million from Fauci’s NIAID to develop NuThrax (its old anthrax vaccine with a new adjuvant) for large-scale manufacture in 2014.100 By 2010, Emergent’s anthrax vaccine price had risen to about $28 (now closer to $30 per dose), with 75 percent gross profit margin for the El-Hibris.101 As with BioThrax, the El-Hibris never performed functional safety testing for NuThrax, and the FDA has never approved the vaccine, but BARDA recently contracted for $261 million of this experimental and notoriously dangerous unlicensed anthrax vaccine. By then, the company had grown from a single corporate office in Rockville, Maryland, to headquarters in Seattle, Munich, and Singapore. Its projects include developing vaccines for pandemic flu and tuberculosis, in partnership with Oxford University and with funding from the Gates Foundation.
Despite NuThrax’s failure to win FDA approval, almost half of the Strategic National Stockpile’s half-billion-dollar annual budget prior to 2020 went to Emergent’s two anthrax vaccines—a cost that, according to the New York Times, “left the government with less money to buy supplies needed in a pandemic.”102
Some guardian angels with invisible hands seemed to catch the El-Hibris every time they stumbled. In March 2021, two federal officials anonymously told the New York Times that “One year, the government increased its order of Emergent’s main anthrax vaccine by $100 million after the company insisted it needed the additional sales to stay in business. . . . At the time that order was announced in 2016, the [federal vaccine stockpile] reserve already had enough to vaccinate more than 10 million people. The stockpile has long been the company’s biggest and most reliable customer for its anthrax vaccines, which expire and need to be replaced every few years.”103 After that, the cards really started breaking for the El-Hibris.
When Kadlec left the federal government, the El-Hibris did not forget the man who rescued them from bankruptcy and possibly from arrest. In the summer of 2012, Fuad El-Hibri made Robert Kadlec managing director and part owner of his own biodefense company, East West Protection.104 The company received Pentagon backing that year to build a US biodefense site in Utah, in partnership with the HHS. CEO Bob Kramer told Forbes, “It was designed” to prevent a future pandemic.105 With El-Hibri financing, Kadlec founded a company, RPK Consulting, which provided consulting services to Emergent until 2015. The firm paid Kadlec $451,000 in 2014 alone.
In 2015, the El-Hibris bought out Kadlec’s shares of East West, allowing him to take the post of deputy staff director for the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Two years later, President Donald Trump nominated Kadlec to become assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), an office within Health and Human Services. During his confirmation process, Kadlec neglected to disclose his financial entanglements with the El-Hibris on the Senate nomination forms.
The El-Hibris apparently anticipated a windfall for Emergent from Kadlec’s new posting. In July 2017, four days after Kadlec’s nomination, Emergent announced that it was acquiring the rights to the smallpox vaccine from Sanofi Pasteur, the government’s previous supplier.106