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
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