In 1999, they bulldozed the factory and rebuilt it at taxpayer expense. The state of Michigan sweetened the deal. But the FDA would not give its stamp of approval to the new manufacturing facility. BioPort, with a hefty lobbying team and designer furniture in its executive offices, kept crying poor and coming back to the US government for additional handouts24 before finally falling into a death spiral around the bankruptcy drain in mid-2001.25 The October 2001 anthrax incidents proved the El-Hibris’ salvation. The Pentagon leveraged the strange attacks, turning them into the long-awaited
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