I WAS AIMING AT SCOOTER LIBBY!

Vice President Cheney accidentally sprayed a companion with birdshot while hunting quail on a private Texas ranch, injuring the man in the face, neck and chest, the vice president's office confirmed yesterday after a Texas newspaper reported the incident.
The shooting occurred late Saturday afternoon while Cheney was hunting with Harry Whittington, 78, a prominent Austin lawyer, on the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas. Hearing a covey of birds, Cheney shot at one, not realizing that Whittington had startled the quail and that he was in the line of fire.
Whittington was treated on the scene by Cheney's traveling medical detail before being taken by helicopter to a Corpus Christi hospital. He was in the intensive care unit at Christus Spohn Health System and listed in stable condition yesterday evening.
Katharine Armstrong, the ranch's owner, saw what happened Saturday and told reporters yesterday that Cheney was using a 28-gauge shotgun, which shoots fewer pellets and has a smaller shot pattern than a 12-gauge shotgun, making it harder to hit the target. Whittington was about 30 yards away when he was hit in the cheek, neck and chest, she said.
According to Armstrong's account, she was watching from a car while Cheney, Whittington and another hunter got out of the vehicle to shoot at a covey of quail. Whittington shot a bird and as he went to retrieve it, Cheney and the third hunter discovered a second covey.
Whittington "came up from behind the vice president and the other hunter and didn't signal them or indicate to them or announce himself," Armstrong said, according to the Associated Press.
It was Armstrong's decision to alert the news media. Cheney's office made no public announcement, deciding to defer to Armstrong because the incident had taken place on her property. Armstrong called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, and when a reporter from the paper called the White House, the vice president's office confirmed the account.
Cheney's office referred other reporters to Armstrong for a witness account, but after speaking to some members of the media yesterday afternoon, Armstrong stopped returning phone calls.
She told reporters that the small shotgun pellets "broke the skin" and that the blast "knocked him silly. But he was fine. He was talking. His eyes were open. It didn't get in his eyes or anything like that."
"Fortunately, the vice president has got a lot of medical people around him and so they were right there and probably more cautious than we would have been," she said. "The vice president has got an ambulance on call, so the ambulance came."
The International Hunter Education Association, which represents safety coordinators for fish and wildlife agencies and tracks incident reports by state, said on its Web site that hunting accidents in the United States have declined about 30 percent over the past decade. In 2002, the most recent year for which data were available, 89 fatal and 761 nonfatal incidents were reported. In 26 of the cases, including one fatality, the intended target was quail.
"The vice president visited Harry Whittington at the hospital and was pleased to see that he's doing fine and in good spirits," Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride said yesterday. Cheney returned to Washington last night.
"The vice president was concerned," said Mary Matalin, a Cheney adviser who spoke with him yesterday morning. "He felt badly, obviously. On the other hand, he was not careless or incautious or violate any of the [rules]. He didn't do anything he wasn't supposed to do."
White House aides said President Bush was notified about the incident, although he had not spoken to Cheney as of late yesterday afternoon. "The president was informed after the accident and received updates today," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday.
Whittington is well known around Austin, an old-school Texan whose friends include a retired Catholic bishop and who plays cards with a former Texas Supreme Court chief judge. Feisty and outspoken, he is a millionaire real estate investor who is known for a reformer's streak through his service on the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, which oversees the state prison system, and the Texas Funeral Service Commission.
"His dignified presence belies a fierce competitive spirit and antipathy toward government power," the Austin American-Statesman wrote in a profile of Whittington published last July.
Cheney, an avid hunter, usually visits the 50,000-acre Armstrong Ranch, settled in 1882, once a year. He also hunts regularly at sites in Georgia and South Dakota.
The Armstrong family has a long history in Texas Republican politics and has been close to the Bush family, as well as to the vice president.
Tobin Armstrong, Katharine Armstrong's father, was a Pioneer, an elite fundraiser for Bush. After Tobin Armstrong died last October, Cheney spoke at his funeral. Tobin Armstrong described previous outings with Cheney in an Associated Press interview in 2000: "We go out when the dew is still on the grass, and then hunt until we shoot our limit. Then we pick a fine spot and have a wild game picnic lunch."
His wife, Anne Armstrong, served as co-chairman of the Republican National Committee, White House counselor to President Richard M. Nixon, ambassador to Britain for President Gerald R. Ford, and co-chairman of Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign. Bush put her on the board of Texas A&M University when he was governor, and she was on the board of Halliburton when the company hired Cheney.
Katharine Armstrong also was a Bush Pioneer, along with her now ex-husband, Warren Idsal, according to Texans for Public Justice, which monitors political fundraising.
As governor, Bush appointed Katharine Armstrong to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, which regulates hunting, among other duties. People familiar with the Saturday outing said that Cheney had obtained the proper seasonal license.
Some Cheney critics pointed out that this is not the first Cheney hunting controversy. Two years ago, the vice president was criticized for going duck hunting with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia soon after the court had agreed to hear Cheney's appeal in an lawsuit related to his energy task force. A month earlier, he had bagged about 70 stocked pheasants at a private shooting club in Pennsylvania.
"Cheney needs to start setting a less violent example by switching to target practice and leaving animals and people in peace," PETA President Ingrid Newkirk said in a statement.
"We'd advise him to pursue a less violent form of relaxation and get on with the important business of leading the country," Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, said in a statement.

SAY IT AIN'T SO!

HARRISBURG, Pa., Feb. 11 -- Pennsylvania's Republican Party leaders endorsed former Pittsburgh Steelers star Uncle Tom...er...Lynn Swann, for governor Saturday, virtually guaranteeing that he will be the candidate to face Democratic incumbent Ed Rendell this fall.
"I haven't cried this much since I was inducted into the Hall of Fame," Swann told the applauding crowd as he wiped tears from his eyes.
Swann, 53, was unopposed for the endorsement, which came in a unanimous voice vote during a meeting of the 300-plus-member Republican State Committee at a downtown hotel.
Swann is seeking to become Pennsylvania's first black governor. Though he has revealed little about his political philosophy, he has said the Democratic Party has "taken the African American vote for granted."
The Republican State Committee also endorsed Jim Matthews, the brother of the host of MSNBC's "Hardball With Chris Matthews," for lieutenant governor.

PANTS ON FIRE TIME!

The White House acknowledged yesterday the authenticity of the first photograph made public that shows President Bush and embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, while stressing it does not mean the two had a personal relationship.
The photo, published by both the New York Times and Time magazine, shows Bush shaking hands with an Abramoff client, chairman Raul Garza of the Kickapoo Indian tribe in Texas. Abramoff's bearded face also appears in the background.
White House spokesman Allen Abney said the photo was taken in 2001, when the president dropped by a meeting of about two dozen state legislators to thank them for supporting tax relief. Originally, the White House said it had no record of Abramoff's attendance at the meeting.

TOO LITTLE...TOO LATE?

Medical researchers bracing for an H5N1l influenza pandemic are in frantic search of a way to perform a loaves-and-fishes miracle with the world's skimpy annual production of flu vaccine.
That production -- about 300 million flu shots a year -- cannot be increased quickly or easily, no matter how dire the circumstances. If the supply is going to protect more than a tiny fraction of the world's 6.5 billion people, some way has to be found to stretch it.
Nearly all the experts believe that a vaccine is the only tool capable of stopping a flu pandemic. They also agree the world is closer today to that potentially calamitous event than it has been in decades.
In the last six months, the H5N1 strain of "bird flu" that first caused human deaths in Hong Kong in 1997 has moved across Central Asia into Eastern Europe and Africa. Just in the last month, it has appeared in three new places: Iraq, Cyprus and Nigeria. Of the 150 confirmed human victims worldwide, 85 have died. All the virus needs to trigger a pandemic is the capacity to spread easily among humans.
To prepare for that -- to try to work the miracle -- biologists have turned to "adjuvants," substances added to conventional vaccines to increase their potency.
Adjuvants make small doses of vaccine act big. They focus the immune system's attention on the "antigen" -- the substance that stimulates the protective effect. Some adjuvants even broaden immunity and make it longer-lasting. Scientists do not know exactly how adjuvants do all this. But they do know they make it possible to dilute a vaccine with no loss of effect.
"The global demand for pandemic vaccines will be immense," said David S. Fedson, a physician, epidemiologist and former consultant to the World Health Organization. The only way to meet the demand, he believes, "is to use an adjuvant."
To pharmaceutical companies, these peculiar substances are hot properties.
"We are in possession of one of the key ingredients of a potential solution to the pandemic threat," said Howard Pien, president of Chiron Corp. The California biotech firm has an adjuvant, an emulsion called MF59 whose main constituent is shark-liver oil. It is already in use in a flu vaccine in Europe.
"We believe that the adjuvant may become the holy grail of vaccines," Chrystyna Bedrij, an analyst with Griffin Securities, wrote in November in a review of avian flu-related business.
Since their discovery in 1925, adjuvants have been mostly curiosities -- occasionally useful, occasionally dangerous. It now appears they will make or break a pandemic flu vaccine. Nineteen clinical trials of pandemic flu shots -- against H5N1 and three other types of avian influenza -- are scheduled to be run this year. Seventeen of the vaccines will contain an adjuvant.
But it probably will be an uphill battle. The only study completed of an H5N1 vaccine made in the manner of a traditional flu shot found that adding an adjuvant did not help much. The reason might lie as much with the virus as with the adjuvant. There is growing evidence that H5N1 is inherently less stimulating to the immune system than other influenza strains -- yet another dangerous trait it possesses.
Many adjuvants mimic parts of viruses or bacteria known to trigger important steps in the complicated process by which the immune system rebuffs a microbial invader and then stores the information to allow a more rapid defense if the same invader returns.
The best-known adjuvant, however, is low-tech and does not look like anything made by microbes. It is a group of stable, easily dissolved aluminum salts known collectively as "alum." The vaccine antigen apparently sticks to the salt.
"Just by keeping the antigen from floating away, [the adjuvant] improves the immune response," said John Treanor, a researcher at the University of Rochester.
At the fancy end of the spectrum are "archaeosomes" -- microscopic envelopes packed with antigen that essentially function as artificial viruses. Devised by two researchers at the Canadian government's Institute for Biological Sciences, archaeosome technology has been licensed to a drug company in India.
Adjuvants that mimic biological structures stimulate broader immunity than alum. But the fear is they might work too well, triggering an out-of-control response.
A nasal-spray flu vaccine introduced in Switzerland in 2000 using a toxin from the bacterium E. coli as an adjuvant was pulled from the market when users developed a rare form of facial paralysis called Bell's palsy at a rate 20 times higher than non-users. The cause is not certain, but the adjuvant is the leading suspect.
Nevertheless, the need to put an adjuvant in a pandemic flu shot is clear from the harsh arithmetic of global vaccine supply.
Seasonal flu shots contain three different strains of virus. In the face of a pandemic, companies would devote all their efforts to growing only the pandemic strain. That means existing production could turn out about 900 million pandemic flu shots.
However, a study last year of an H5N1 vaccine -- without adjuvant -- showed that a person needs two doses of a shot with six times the amount of virus in the standard flu shot in order to be protected. That means the world could make pandemic flu shots for only about 75 million of the world's 6.5 billion people -- a meaninglessly small amount.
In December, the French vaccine maker Sanofi Pasteur announced that its experimental H5N1 vaccine containing an alum adjuvant did a little better. Two shots containing 30 micrograms of virus -- twice the amount used for each virus strain in the seasonal flu shot -- were protective. But even that would be of little use in a pandemic whose toll in an unprepared world has been estimated as likely to be as low as 2 million and as high as 100 million dead.
In 1999, Chiron found that an experimental avian flu vaccine given with the company's shark-oil adjuvant MF59 provided protection at a dose as low as 7.5 micrograms in two shots. The vaccine also seemed to provide some protection against descendants of the original virus whose genetic identity has "drifted" through mutation.
That unexpected finding has led some experts to argue that an H5N1 strain should be added to the annual flu shot now in the hope it might provide at least partial protection against a future pandemic.
The problem with that strategy is that vaccines with MF59 are not yet approved for use in the United States. Even if they get approved, the Chiron adjuvant is patented and would undoubtedly raise the price of shots considerably.
But alum adjuvants -- which are cheap, unpatented and FDA-approved -- might yet prove useful.
A team of German researchers two years ago tested a vaccine containing alum and a flu strain in which the virus was "whole killed" -- chemically inactivated but not broken into pieces. With as little as 1.9 micrograms, that vaccine provided protection in 80 percent of people.
The problem with that solution is that the dozen companies making 90 percent of the world's flu shots all use virus that has been broken up by chemical detergents -- a treatment that makes the injection less painful than a whole-killed vaccine but also less stimulating to the immune system.
To capture the advantage of a whole-killed vaccine, the vaccine makers would have to change their manufacturing methods, and whether they are willing to do that is a big unanswered question.