Thanks for the flu story; it is fascinating. How Baxter got H5N1 into this material is quite a mystery. From the articles I've been able to find, it appears that Baxter was attempting to send out inocula for mass production of one component of flu vaccine. According to the CDC web site, standard flu vaccine is tripartite, with an H3N2, an H1N1 (both type A's) and a type B. The actual virus strains used change year to year based on what is expected to be circulating. Baxter meant to send out H3N2 for the subcontractors to mass produce.

I found one panic-stricken web site (Drudge Retort--some sort of alternate to the "real" Drudge) where they postulated that this was an attempt to create a pandemic. That would not be possible through just the vaccine produced, because the standard flu vaccine is a killed virus. The only way this could have produced a pandemic would have been a loss of containment in the production facilities mass producing the live virus, especially if the inoculum consisted of a mix of H3N2 and H5N1. Baxter is not involved with FluMist, the live, attenuated flu vaccine, made by MedImmune, which is owned by Astra Zeneca, so this material with H5N1 was not in any identifiable pathway that would have led to mass distribution of live material.

This site did suggest that Baxter has changed their story to now claim that pure H5N1 was shipped out, rather than a mixture.(I haven't seen confirmation of this from any other sources.) Although still a huge error that is worthy of loss of all facility certifications, it would come off as much less sinister than a mixture of the two virus types. Mixing the two live viruses and then allowing them to grow together in a single host is the recipe for making the killer virus. Those dead ferrets in the Czech Republic need very careful analysis of the viruses present. DNA sequencing, as Pedinska suggests, is the only way to know what happened here.

It will be worth following this story to see what further information comes out.

I've now gotten a link to the YouTube of Senator Whitehouse's very intriguing question yesterday in the hearing. An Oxdown Diary is linked at my name. I'm now convinced more than ever that Whitehouse, with an assist from Pickering, was sending a direct message to Obama and Holder that using the State's Secret doctrine to hide evidence of war crimes is wrong both legally and morally.

Unrelated, piling on with Jebbie: we don't use A4.

In a post (linked at my name) late last night discussing the October 23, 2001 Yoo memo, Marcy Wheeler points out another action by Tom Daschle that I think would have made him a target of the anthrax attack if one assumes he was targeted because of his opposition to the Patriot Act. She quotes an Op-Ed from Daschle, published in the Washington Post in December, 2005:

Just before the Senate acted on this compromise resolution, the White House sought one last change. Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words "in the United States and" after "appropriate force" in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act -- but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.

As Arte Johnson would say, "Verrrry interesting.!"

Pedinska wrote:

bamage

Is anyone other than me having difficulty reconciling the release od the OLC memos by [someone within POTUS!* Admin.] w/ the DOJ position on ongoing State's Secrets related litigation?

I am. That's why I linked to Holder's entire speech, which Froomkin claimed in his article put the release of the documents in context. It didn't for me, and harpie agreed (in yesterday's first thread). Link to speech at sig.

Rhetorically, he's saying all the right things in this speech and it would all be copacetic if it weren't for the State's Secrets boondoggle.

I've been really intrigued by Whitehouse in all of this. I noted earlier the real anger in his speech on the Senate floor in support of the idea of a commission and how I felt that he was operating with additional knowledge of truly horrible acts that we have not yet learned about.

In the hearing today, Whitehouse directed his first question to Pickering. He prefaced his question by saying we don't yet know everything that happened but then asked if there is anything that could come out of this process in terms of revealing actions by the United States that would actually harm our status in the world because it is so horrible rather than improving our status through admitting our errors and finding a mechanism to prevent their being repeated. He got Pickering to agree with Schwarz's earlier view that "We should not flinch" in this process.

I believe that this question was very carefully calculated to send Obama and Holder the message that if their current actions in supporting states secrets are aimed at preventing further harm to the country because of the atrociousness of what could be revealed, then they are taking a bad approach. Only by getting the evidence out into the open (and prosecuting those responsible) can we rejoin the civilized world.

That says it all. Hooray for Rush Holt. It will be very interesting to see who lines up against the idea of an investigation.