On Immunity: An Inoculation

by Eula Biss

the fact that US vaccines did not contain squalene, she said, had been disputed elsewhere: In 1997, a series of stories in Insight on the News magazine suggested that Gulf War syndrome might be linked to the presence of squalene, among other things, in the anthrax vaccine. There was no squalene added to the anthrax vaccine, according to the FDA and the Department of Defense, but some laboratory tests were able to detect minuscule traces of the substance. In a test conducted by the FDA, researchers suspected that the source of these traces was the people doing the testing. “Because of the difficulty of removing squalene-containing fingerprint oils from laboratory glassware,” they explained, “it is hard to know whether the squalene is truly present in some lots of the vaccine or is introduced by the testing process itself.”