In This Case, A Soldier Was Treated Beautifully at Walter

[Guest guest]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sheila-weller/in-this-case-a-_b_41706.html

So there's a website kerfuffle between National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg

and Salon' s Glenn Greenwald about Dana Priest's Washington Post investigative

reports which revealed conditions of dire neglect for injured and inform U.S.

soldiers at Walter Hospital. Goldberg said he doesn't particularly trust

Priest's reporting and thinks her paper (and the New York Times) has an " agenda "

-- presumably, making the Bush administration look bad.

NRO readers have written in to Goldberg, agreeing with him: saying Priest went

out of her way to find an army hospital with " the crappiest conditions, " etc.

But there was a case -- in 2000 -- in which Walter Hospital went out of

its way to give a catastrophically ill servicewoman -- a beautiful 27-year-old

Navy lieutenant with a radiant smile and blazing red hair -- expensive,

state-of-the-art care, including a round the clock private nurse. The young

woman had acquired (right after receiving her fourth -- mandatory -- anthrax

shot) a shockingly precipitous mystery disease, eventually diagnosed as a

bizarrely speeded-up form of ametropic lateral sclerosis -- she lost in three

months the amount of muscle function a middle aged ALS sufferer would lose in

four years. During one of the rare moments that the round-the-clock nurse wasn't

at her bedside, the patient whispered to a confidante the opinion she dared not

reveal more widely: " The anthrax vaccine did this to me. "

Flash back to the year 2000: There was a groundswell in the military, and among

military doctors, against the mandatory status of the anthrax vaccine, which had

been FDA-approved for experimental use only, but which every service man and

woman had to take, under threat of court martial. One military doctor, Air Force

captain Buck, chose a court martial (and a $21,000 fine) rather than submit

to the vaccine; he'd seen too many people get sick after taking the shot and

felt the mandatory status for an experimental vaccine was a violation of

servicepeople's rights. That documented number has since been shown to have

increased. I spent five months investigating the vaccine's hitherto unreported

disproportionate risk to women (a concern that was privately raised by the chief

of the allergy-immunology department at Walter at a private Pentagon

conference of military doctors, the transcripts of which were leaked to me).

There were a lot of stories of direly sick women

that I could tell, in the pages of the magazine I was writing for, but one

story I couldn't tell, because the sick young Navy lieutenant's mother was

fearful that her round-the-clock care might be taken away if it was revealed

that her daughter believed that the vaccine had made her sick. While I was

researching the story, I received many phone calls from people who visited the

sick young woman. These bedside visitors were: a former Army Top Gun (herself

made seriously ill, probably by the vaccine); a Gulf War fighter pilot and

Pentagon policy analyst; a Naval Reserve lieutenant colonel; and the ill young

woman's mother's best friend. All of these four sources told me that they

thought the family was gratefully accepting this level of care for

her...essentially in return for keeping quiet. A daily visitor to the young

woman's bedside was the wife of government official who had a lot to do with

military medical research. The official's wife became a close friend of the

young woman's mother -- she was at the patient's bedside almost every day. Now

of course, the friendship may have been completely sincere and coincidental --

no one knows otherwise.

When the young woman died, no one at her funeral (which I attended) talked of

her belief that the vaccine had made her sick. No one mentioned that people

close to her strongly believed that the level of extraordinary medical care and

the personal attention of official's wife at Walter might have been a

subtle quid pro quo for her keeping quiet about her fear about the source of her

terminal illness. In her private room at Walter , on her oscillating bed,

tracheotomy and ventilator, she was as vulnerable as a human being can be -- she

had to be suctioned every few minutes or else she could suffocate on her own

mucuous and spittle; how on earth could she afford to say anything bad about the

military? And how could her grieving mother? So they said nothing, and she

received wonderful care. And then she was dead.

So that's an excellent-care-at-Walter Hospital story that went untold.

Ironic, in terms of it, that the issue of care at Walter and politics and

saying good things or bad things about military health care for political

reasons should come up now --- the anthrax vaccine (after being not mandatory to

our fighting men and women for years) has, just last week, been made mandatory

again.

Randi J. Airola, © 517-819-5926

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