The Hampton Roads, VA, Daily Press is beginning a four-part series on a deliberate misinformation campaign by the Department of Defense regarding adverse health incidents among troops who were given controversial anthrax vaccinations.

The Pentagon never told Congress about more than 20,000 hospitalizations involving troops who’d taken the anthrax vaccine, despite repeated promises that such cases would be publicly disclosed.

Instead, a parade of generals and Defense Department officials told Congress and the public that fewer than 100 people were hospitalized or became seriously ill after receiving the shot from 1998 through 2000.

They also showed Congress written policies that required public reports to be filed for hospitalizations, serious illnesses and cases where someone missed 24 hours or more of duty.

But only a sliver of those cases were reported, while the rest were withheld from Congress and the public, records obtained by the Daily Press show.

Critics of the vaccine, veterans’ advocates and congressional staffers say the Pentagon’s deliberate low-balling of hospitalizations helped persuade Congress and the public that the vaccine was safe.

Keeping the actual number of illnesses secret contributed to a shorter list of government-recognized side effects for the drug, giving patients and physicians a false idea of what might constitute a vaccine-related illness or problem. Doctors are expected to know the full list of side effects and alert federal drug safety officials whenever they see a repeat of those symptoms.

Repeated evidence of the same adverse side effect after a vaccination is one of the most telling signs of a systematic problem with a drug or vaccine, as opposed to a coincidental relationship, vaccine safety experts say.

(It should be noted that these are all hospitalizations among people who had taken the vaccine. There is no reason to believe these are all due to effects of the vaccine. But that’s not the point.)

The comments that can and should be made about this are all too obvious. What’s depressing is that making them will have absolutely no effect – on this case, on future behavior by the Pentagon and the Bush administration, or on the right of citizens, including the military, to control their own healthcare and to exercise their liberty free of governmental control.

Hat tip: HealthLawProf Blog.