September 28, 2000

Dear Dr. Katz,

Thank you for your message concerning the Edmonston B vaccine. Now
that I have had a chance to research the matter myself, I am in
complete agreement with you.

Let me explain something about the memo I and my colleague Leslie
Sponsel sent, as a confidential document, to the President and
President-elect of the American Anthropological Association, with
copy to the chair of the Committee for Human Rights. We were sent
advance copies of the galley proofs of Tierney's book, in which he
makes the alleegations we describe in our memo. The sole purpose of
the memo was to describe these allegations, in order to warn the
leaders of the association of the nature of the allegations that were
about to be published (the publication of Tierney's long article in
the New Yorker, now scheduled for this coming Monday, was supposedly
only two weeks away at the time) and the scandal they would probably
cause for the whole profession. The purpose was not to describe the
actual events to which the allegations referred--a distinction that
has been lost by many who have reacted to the memo since it was
circulated without our permission. Checking the veracity of the
allegations for ourselves was not germane to the immediate, and
limited purpose of the memo, which was to warn about what Tierney was
about to publish. However, having sent the memo (which was around the
world within days) we did set about doing our best to check on its
more shocking allegations, particularly those concerning Dr. Neel's
vaccination program and his use of the Edmonston vaccine. One of the
authorities we consulted was Dr. Peter Aaby, a well-known medical
anthropologist and member of the Scandinavian medical team team that
has been working on measles in West Africa for some twenty years. He
has gone over the claims about the vaccine made by Tierney and
refuted them point by point, in very much the same terms that you
have used.

We are in the process of preparing a memo that will state our own
understanding of this matter, to help correct the confusion that the
unauthorized circulation of our earlier memo. Thank you for your
message.

Yours sincerely,

Terry Turner