How many on the left are really anti-GMO? Anti-vax?

Great Debates
1

I’m curious…just how large is the group on the left in the US or Europe who are really, genuinely opposed to GMOs and vaccines? I was in California this past weekend meeting a bunch of friends from all over the world for our annual get together. We had some folks from Canada, some from the states here, and some from various mainland European countries (even a few ex-pat Thai’s). We got into several (drunken, admittedly) discussions about things like global warming and how much of an asshole Trump is. What struck me, though, as that these people who are generally more science oriented were mainly against GMOs and, even more surprisingly (to me) vaccines. I was like…WTF?? I’ve seen some leftwing 'dopers who surprised me by being anti-GMO even though they are usually the ones talking about scientific consensus wrt, say, climate change, but it never seemed all that large a percentage of 'doper lefties. I honestly don’t understand the disconnect…I mean, if you ‘believe’ I suppose in climate change than GMOs and vaccines SHOULD be a no-brainer. It’s all part of a general continuum of science based thinking.

So, just how big IS this group of folks who are against GMOs and/or vaccines on the left? And I don’t just mean in the US…honestly, it seemed the majority of people in my group who were very vocal about how bad GMOs and vaccines are weren’t from the US (though the Californians were heavily represented in the anti group). I tried some google searching, but my drunken Google-FU seems off and I’m not getting a very good answer. Plus, it seems a good question or topic for debate anyway and I’m curious what 'dopers think of both the primary question and the sort of meta question…why the hell do people who understand climate change oppose vaccines and GMOs?? :confused:

2

IME the # of people on the left who are anti-vac is vanishingly small. So small that I’ve never actually met anyone who voiced an anti-vac sentiment.

How many on the left are anti-GMO? Of those who have an opinion about it, a small group is anti-GMO. I’d estimate them at 15-25% of those who have an opinion and I’d estimate those who have an opinion at less than 20% of the general population. And I think I’m being generous to those opposed by rounding up.

3

52% of the public apparently believe such foods are unsafe. 13% are “unsure”. So I presume that only 13% don’t have an opinion.

“There’s also a political difference. Republicans divide evenly on whether genetically modified foods are safe or unsafe. Independents rate them unsafe by a 20-point margin; Democrats, by a 26-point margin.”

So, if you consider Democrats to be “on the left”, and that 13% of them are as “unsure” as the general public is, the % of the left that is anti-GMO is 57%.

4

There’s not really a lot of good information, since polls are generally only conducted in one country, and they often to look at partisanship rather than ideology directly, but this poll in the USA found that 40% of Democrats and 39% of Republicans felt that genetically-modified foods were “worse for health.” There’s a table for combined ideology and partisanship and all four figures for “worse for health” are either 40% or 39%.

There are a bunch of different vaccine questions that can be asked, but this survey of the USA (PDF, page 54) found that 25% of people who identified their ideology as liberal believe that it’s either “definitely true” or “probably true” that vaccines have been shown to cause autism. The comparable figure is 34% for conservatives. (If you look at partisanship, it’s more even. 28% for Democrats and 29% for Republicans.)

5

Perhaps scientists tend to lean liberal, but for the population as a whole I’m not sure that there’s a strong association between left wing views and scientific literacy. So it may be only coincidence that some of a person’s views are congruent with the evidence.

For example, if the overriding narrative through which you see the world is one of big business that can’t be trusted, then you have: Big Oil lobbying to undermine efforts to protect the planet; Big Pharma making billions out of dangerous vaccines; evil Monsanto concealing the dangers of GMO while exploiting poor Third World farmers.

6

In my observation of the local nosy housewife population, the people who would say they are anti-vax or anti-GMO (they kinda read some articles and if you asked them in a poll they’d be all “I heard that stuff is bad.”) aren’t really political at all. They are just worried about scary stuff that might affect their kids right now. They’re not deeply reading about what GMOs are or watching political debates.

7

That fits with other surveys and polls I saw early on, As I observed before, on those issues NIMBY is more powerful than the political leanings of ignorant people. Although in the vaccine front the bigger damage was seen when several political leaders of the Republicans showed up pandering to the anti vaccine people.

For sure there was ignorance from the part of those leaders but I could not shake the idea that some republicans did see polls like those ones and felt that a nice wedge issue could be created.

8

I take it you’ve never been to Marin county. It’s nowhere near a majority thank goodness, but the stereotype of the somewhat affluent, naturopath-visiting, homeopathy-loving, chi-centered, vegan anti-vaxxer has some very modest degree of truth in my area.

9

There’s certainly a tiny fraction of leftists that fall into those categories. But many of them tend to fall into the ‘voting conscientious objector’ or else vote for fringe candidates. The bulk of anti vax and anti GMO people I’ve met either are very susceptible to every conspiracy theory or else they have a seriously unhealthy relationship with their kids. I spent some time supervising in a temp job and encountered outright insubordination at work from one woman who absolutely refused to follow the cell phones policy at work. She insisted on being connected to her phone every single second at work to answer a phone call in case something happened to her kids.

10

I haven’t noticed a left-leaning slant to anti-vax; the leftist naturalpaths seem to be balanced by the right anti-government types. Opposition to GMO, though, seems to be largely leftist. The politically active anti-GMO groups that I know of are all on the left, like Greenpeace and Bernie Sanders.

I don’t get it, either. There were a few anti-GMO signs at the “science” rally a few months ago. face palm

11

That’s a weird link. It lists the date as June 19, but doesn’t offer the year–unlike the article directly below it, which is from this year. The comments from the article started four years ago, so it’s likely from 2013.

One of the most important things to know about GMOs* is that they’re fairly recent–less than three decades old, I believe–and that the science on them is also recent. Go back a decade, or two decades, and it was pretty reasonable to be cautious about them. These days it’s irrational to maintain much caution about the techniques (although of course caution about specific organisms may or may not be warranted), but folks who were unhappy with GMOs in the mid-nineties, for example, were sometimes reasonable in their fears.

It’s interesting to see the difference between this presumably four-year-old link, and the one Lord Feldon found from late last year, in which there was no gap.

  • which, lest someone decide to get clever, refers not to all domesticated crops but only to those whose genetic makeups have been altered not through crossbreeding but through other modern biotechnological methods such as transgenic modifications
12

I have a friend that told me “my far-right relatives only meet my far-left relatives at chicken pox parties.”

13

It’s simple–they can make all the GMO plants they like, provided that they are clearly labelled as such at every stage, and none of this bullshit where having non-GMO plants that get pollenated by copyrighted GMO plants subject the owner to legal sanctions by the company that engineered them. Non-GMO farmers should also be able to recover damages from incursion of neighboring GMO crops–they should be treated like any other noxious weed a farmer might harbor.

I likely won’t eat GMO foods, but that’s my choice and I rather insist that I not be experimented on without my knowledge and consent. And before the pecksniff brigade gets up in arms calling me a conspiracy theorist, I will just make note that I’ve already heard chapter and verse over the decades. I’ve been derided for my aversion to using canned food and plastic containers due to BPAs, use of nail polish due to endocrine disruption, use of hormonal birth control and HRT for menopause, avoidance of refined sugar and flour and a host of other things that nobody knew were a bad idea back then but do now. Anyone who stands in the way of requirements that they simply, clearly label the origin and composition of the food they expect people to eat and other products they absorb into their bodies is pretty shady in my book.

14

I am left of center and very, VERY much in favor of both GMOs and vaccines. (I thought it was right-wingers who were suspicious of vaccines? Can never keep that straight.)

15

[QUOTE=SmartAleq]
It’s simple–they can make all the GMO plants they like, provided that they are clearly labelled as such at every stage, and none of this bullshit where having non-GMO plants that get pollenated by copyrighted GMO plants subject the owner to legal sanctions by the company that engineered them. Non-GMO farmers should also be able to recover damages from incursion of neighboring GMO crops–they should be treated like any other noxious weed a farmer might harbor.
[/QUOTE]

I saw a video recently that claimed between 300,000 and 1 million people die a year from pesticides…and 0 people have died in the history of GMOs (even if we don’t consider that basically every food is human modified going back thousands or even 10,000 years and just count the stuff in the last 40). So, I guess my question is, should all the foods also be labeled with every pesticide used too? More people die a year from natural fertilizers and stuff from ‘organic’ foods than, well, the zero from GMOs…how about those? Labeled as well?

I honestly don’t get the fear. I mean, it’s sort of like the irrational fear about nuclear energy…but worse, as there actually have been people who have died from nuclear energy, even if it’s pretty rare outside of one major fuck up in the Soviet Union. Zero though…that’s kind of hard to beat. Yet, because of this irrational fear, many undeveloped countries don’t use GMO crops like they should. This kills thousands, 10’s of thousands, hell millions a year that, well, don’t have to die and only do because of folks who are afraid of…nothing.

I’m not saying don’t study things, or regulate them, but labels that for all intents and purposes are just there to perpetuate the fear, and try and make distinctions that aren’t based on science but based on fear? This seems a lot like what the vaxxers want, at least to me.

At any rate, I appreciate the responses. For those of you who did respond with your impressions and anecdotes, is this mainly for the US or do we have some 'dopers giving a non-US response? I’m interested in the US here, for sure, but I would really like to see what non-US 'dopers think. Many (a majority) of non-US people at our get together were anti-GM…these were mainly Europeans…and a surprising number were anti-vax. I knew anti-vax was a thing here in the states, but I didn’t think it was so much in Europe. I knew the anti-GM thing is a big hangup though for Europeans for some reason.

16

Not in my personal experience. There are people on both sides of the political spectrum on that train.

I am pretty left of center (in the US scale) and I am very much in favor of GMOs and vaccines.

17

I don’t know what country you’re in, but if you’re in the US, it’s very likely you’ve eaten GMO foods. GMO soybeans and corn are almost ubiquitous, and if you’ve ever gone out to eat in a non-vegan, non-organic restaurant, you’ve probably had GMO corn oil, soybean oil, or other corn- and soy-based foods.

18

Why do you want the GMO process to be on the label? There are many processes that go into crop production, why don’t you insist that those be labelled as well? What is it about being GMO that warrants labelling over all other processes?

19

Many of the arguments over GMO are not about whether they’re biologically safe to eat, but about the supposition that the big agribusinesses who promote them use them (and abuse patent law) to create captive markets and squeeze out the small traditional farmers.

I suppose there are some on the left who think vaccination may be subject to similar commercial pressures, but I haven’t seen much evidence of it (as opposed to concern over the medicalisation of various “conditions” for which Big Pharma just happens to have developed this new wonder pill - but since vaccination is generally speaking a one-off exercise with little or no repeat business in any individual case, that would seem to be an opposite case).

20

You could also get those things in vegan, organic restaurants. There are a lot of granola buzzwords for “the good kind of crops”, and they do not all mean the same thing. Look for what you’re actually looking for. If what you want is cruelty-free, then look for cruelty-free. If what you want is sustainable, then look for sustainable. Don’t just look for “organic” or “vegan” and assume that it’ll be those other things.