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

Great Debates
141

Actually, I addressed that to Kimstu, but if the shoe fits…
Still have a fetish about pretending that Bjorn Lomborg is the only person who recognizes how anti-GMOers have been responsible for long delays in getting golden rice to those who need it (to save vision and lives), even after it was pointed out to you that many others including those with impeccable scientific credentials agree?*

“Most ironic is the self-fulfilling critique that many activists now use. Greenpeace calls golden rice a “failure,” because it “has been in development for almost 20 years and has still not made any impact on the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency.” But, as Ingo Potrykus, the scientist who developed golden rice, has made clear, that failure is due almost entirely to relentless opposition to GM foods—often by rich, well-meaning Westerners far removed from the risks of actual vitamin A deficiency.”

https://www.agweb.com/article/golden-rice-separates-reason-radicalism-naa-chris-bennett/

This willful blindness of yours is on a par with your refusal in prior GMO debates to acknowledge the great number of scientific organizations which have validated GM food safety, insisting that only the National Academy of Sciences panel was worthy of attention (when you thought they’d agree with your anti-GMO views). Then, when the panel issued a report agreeing with those other scientific bodies, whoopsie, first you pretended they were on your side and then grudgingly accepted their conclusions, while warning that future GM foods could be vewy vewy dangerous and that we must beware, because, y’know, CORPORATIONS.

And it’s beyond pitiful that you keep citing an old Canadian report from the early days of GM foods as supposed evidence that Canadian authorities mistrust them - when you’ve been repeatedly shown that’s not the case now.

https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/food-nutrition/genetically-modified-foods-other-novel-foods/factsheets-frequently-asked-questions/part-1-regulation-novel-foods.html

Do I have to keep reminding you of this in thread after thread?

Credibility on this subject requires a respect for facts, as opposed to repeatedly churning out the same disproven falsehoods.

Nope, never said that. The point which has escaped you is that shouting “Corporations! Beware” is not a sufficient basis with which to oppose genetically modified foods, and is a threadbare tactic commonly associated with other kinds of woo, notably antivaxers.

*among the many supporters of the golden rice project has been the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who as we’ve been assured many times are enemies of the people with a plot to depopulate the world.

142

Your source is quite deceptive and lacking. It sources one study, and thats behind a paywall in a pay-to-publish journal. It hand waves over the deliberate destruction of a golden rice crop, and ignores utterly the legal hurdles anti-GMO people have been making.

Also: Washington UNviersity in St. Louis? Maybe something not in a for-profit college.

I love how in the commentssll the anti-GMO people are saying the Phillipinos should just eat carrots.

143

I didn’t claim you used those exact words, I said that was how you attempted to portray the subject. Specifically, by the following dismissive remark:

That asinine little sneer about very old events was indeed an attempt to portray the problem of corporate malfeasance as archaic and irrelevant to modern concerns. You should stop doing that shit.

It is perfectly possible to argue seriously against specific instances of unjustified anti-corporate paranoia and unfounded conspiracy theories without disingenuously trying to disparage the whole issue of corporate malfeasance as an unimportant relic from the history books.

144

:confused: Irrespective of whether the affiliation of one of the authors of the cited article is determinative of the quality of the research (the other author is apparently based at the University of Sussex, in case you find that more acceptable), I don’t understand the reference to a “for-profit college” here. Isn’t Washington University in St. Louis a private research university founded in 1853?

I suppose you could call that “for-profit” in that it’s a private institution rather than a state school, but it’s a very different structure from what we usually think of as “for-profit” colleges. AFAIK WashU, like most other private colleges in the US, funds its activities via endowment, grants and tuition: it is not making profits for owners or investors the way a for-profit college like University of Phoenix is.

In any case, if you can’t read the research article mentioned in the link, here’s a quoted section from it that’s relevant to the discussion.

145

Regarding Golden Rice the issue is not as clear cut as both sides are making it.

Sure, I do think also that quoting Bjorn Lomborg is like quoting Duane Gish in a biology discussion, IMHO the fear mongering is still very strong from some environmentalists groups, but in the issue of the rice I have seen proponents of it go full “environmentalists are killing people or making them blind” fears too, I think that as NPR reported the delays on implementing the rice have to do more with testing and making the local varieties of rice (the ones farmers in different locations do prefer to use) to work with the new genes.

This BTW goes to one complaint that I think is valid, while I do think that GMOs are safe and that they should be implemented. There **was/is *** a lack of humanitarians like Norman Borlaug, the father of the green revolution, who gave his wheat and other crops for free. AFAIK a lot of the efforts of today still add limits to what even poor farmers can do with the technology. This is not really as humanitarian as past efforts and I do think that a lot of the delays from local approvals have to do with the added costs that less poor larger farmers have to run into. IMHO there is a lot of “bottom line” thinking by waiting for patents to run out.

Well, that is one reason I suspect, there are other reasons supported by more evidence. It is easier to blame environmentalists for the delays when the most important reasons now are the long regulatory process and some science that stills needs to be completed.

I think that while some environmentalists are a factor, once the bottom line changes (when the patents run out and no money will have to be paid to corporations too) then some of those misguided environmentalists will be run over, as they should and were when other GMO crops were introduced before.

  • IIUC virtually all the efforts now regarding Golden Rice are “open source” I do remember that until recently there were demands to ask for more well to do farmers or big farmer groups to pay for the technology while the poor farmers were going to get it free.
146

Now personally I know some liberals who are anti-vaccine. One problem is labeling yourself that leaves you open to shunning, scorn, losing friends, and even losing your job. Your kids can be kicked out of school for it. Parents are told to not let their children play with your kids because “they will make them sick”. On another discussion board I was banned for even discussing it.

Ex. About last year their was a local Kansas City tv station that wanted to do interviews with anti vaccine families. I advised everyone to shun them and keep this to ourselves because of possible backlash.

Also personally I find liberals tend to align personal views with politics and association. Being anti vaccine is looked at as being associated with republicans and ignorant people.

147

First of all, thanks to Kimstu for your latest informative contributions, and GIGO, I always appreciate your input.

That’s an amazingly delusional description of what actually happened. The NAS report had a different focus but otherwise was not substantially different from earlier ones and was no great surprise. The only point I was making all along is that in assessing biotechnology, we don’t see the kind of definitive, absolute statements that we see from the NAS on climate change like this. Instead we quite properly see much more nuanced statements with far less certainty in the field of biotech, especially in dealing with the future. The NAS report was clear on the need for new regulatory methods as genetic engineering evolves, and on the need to keep the public informed and involved. Nor did they hedge on the fact that matters like regulation and labeling involve more than just technical assessments of safety, but also have legal and social dimensions.

You know, this is exactly the kind of gratuitous mockery that supports the point I made in post #109, namely that “anything other than enthusiastic unconditional support for all biotechnology, present and future, causes you to pop out of the woodwork with scathing attacks on the slightest suggestion for caution and prudent regulation, which you routinely mischaracterize and link to fraudulent arguments like those of anti-vaxers.”

Well, isn’t that lovely, except that I have never – not in this thread, not in any other – ever said anything that contradicts that. But I guess mischaracterizing my views is now more or less de rigueur with you, amirite?

And finally, let me get back to the matter of whether your source for your recent citation, the industry shill Bjorn Lomborg, is supported by many others as you claim. As has been pointed out here, the point is that he has significantly oversimplified and misrepresented the situation to support his particular ideology, and it’s astounding that anyone who claims to be an adherent of scientific and factual accuracy would quote someone with an appalling track record like Lomborg.

And I’m not just singling out Lomborg because he’s such an obvious shill. You have others, too. Like your pal Jon Entine, the founder of your oft-cited Genetic Literacy Project website that you rely on so much for cites and data, who turns out to be not a scientist at all but a professional industry shill – among other things the founder of the PR firm ESG Media Metrics whose major client was… yeah, Monsanto. Entine was and still is a lobbyist for the right-wing pro-business American Enterprise Institute which also specializes in climate change denial. He’s been called a shill for the chemical industry and an apologist for agribusiness. That particular article describes him defending atrazine. Atrazine is an endocrine disrupting pesticide and a predominant contaminant of drinking water, and Entine was naturally defending it with spittle-mouthed contempt for all its critics. It is banned in Europe.

Let me be clear. Not everything these people or their organizations say is necessarily wrong or always misleading, but they are biased sources and it’s telling that you rely on them with such boundless enthusiasm while immediately ridiculing and mocking any expressed concerns about the long term future of food biotechnology. When you completely misrepresent my position as egregiously and as often as you do while continuing to quote industry shills like Lomborg and Entine, well, others can judge where your credibility is at this point.

148

Not cool banning someone from a board for just discussing vaccines, but as far as keeping kids away, absolutely. IF there is a group of kids that are unvaccinated, they are going to be shunned. It’s not their fault, I suppose, and so it kinda sucks for those kids that their parents made an irresponsible decision as regards to their children’s health, but the other kids don’t need to suffer for that choice. If I had kids, I would keep them away from those who chose not to be vaccinated. There are quite a number of childhood diseases that we don’t even think about anymore because they were virtually eliminated due to vaccines that are making a come back these days because of the poorly informed choices of these parents. I see no reason to put my child at risk in order to accommodate another parent’s ignorance.

Unfortunately, liberals do accept that there are anti-vaxxers in our ranks, and we try to talk them out of it, and we certainly do not allow them any sort of political power, so I am not sure why you would think that they are associated with republicans. At a guess I would actually say that there are probably as many or more liberal non-vaxxers as there are conservative, though they do it for different reasons.

As far as ignorance, well, yeah, it’s not an association, it is a direct correlation. Anti-vax is an ignorant position to take. One can be smart and well informed on many things in one’s life, but if one is against vaccines, then that is one subject upon which
one is ignorant.

149

No, I was highlighting the asininity of dragging in decades-old events (like using tobacco company behavior as a fact-free way of demonizing biotechnology), by sarcastically suggesting even more remote and irrelevant history. You might benefit by a course in reading comprehension.

This still doesn’t explain why you persistently ignored similar consensus on GM food safety (illustrated in the link to the 280 scientific organizations that concur), holding out desperate hope that the NAS panel would agree with you on dire dangers - which it didn’t. :slight_smile:

…which is entirely appropriate to address sleazy tactics like characterizing me and others who disagree with you as industry shills* and maundering on about the evils of corporations. As your patron Kimstu would say, you should stop doing that shit, and instead focus on evidence. If you had any, that is.

As for golden rice, it’s indisputable that it would be far further along in the pipeline and reaching the people who need it if it wasn’t for the opposition of groups like Greenpeace and the sabotage committed against test growers (ironically, by the same sort of people who proclaim that we need lots more testing). Again, it’s not a panacea for malnutrition and proponents have never claimed that (despite the strawman argument made by anti-GMOers). Like many other biotech applications, it promises to be a highly useful tool, providing benefit not readily available from traditional means. Golden rice has long been the third rail of anti-GMOers. It can’t be allowed to succeed (any more than the other nutrient-fortified crops in the works or already approved), because anti-GMOers are highly p.r.-minded and recognize the potential disaster to their campaign. Much better to pat the poor ignorant Third Worlders on the head, assure them traditional methods are the best, and that they should stick with subsistence farming using the good old traditional seeds passed down between generations.

*speaking of which, I call on you to cite any GMO article appearing on the Genetic Literacy Project website (which Jon Entine founded), by any of the scientists and commentators who contribute to it (or any article reproduced there from other sources) and refute it using facts instead of shill-calling. Bet you can’t, or won’t.

150

Jackmanni, while I do agree with virtually all you said (and yes, the fearmongering from the anti-GMOs is bad and should be countered as you do) you should know that I do agree with testing. That is BTW how it is that we can say that GMOs are safe but there is still one nit on your almost proper rant.

The way the history has been going is that, while Greenpeace are wrong on their fear mongering, they are one of the reasons why this was tested to death and a reason why we can tell them now to bug off. And what I do pointed is still valid: Greenpeace will be and has been run over when GMOs that were tested are already being used. Other reasons are more factually based on why the Golden Rice is not available yet, IIRC in the Philippines they just finished testing the genes applied to local varieties and just early this year did apply with the government for a release date.

The point here is that while I do agree on busting the ignorance of many on the left bits like that fear mongering from the companies can not be left alone either.

151

Why do you say that’s “indisputable”? The article that I quoted discussed some specific problems with the technical development of Golden Rice. What concrete evidence do you have that complaints about GMOs from Greenpeace and sabotage (consisting, AFAICT, of one destructive attack on a Golden Rice testing field in August 2013) have seriously impeded the resolution of these problems for this particular product?

I don’t think anybody’s opposing “non-traditional” methods such as dietary supplements and nutritional fortification for, e.g., fighting Vitamin A deficiency in developing countries. Nobody AFAIK is advocating that malnutrition and disease associated with modern poverty-level subsistence farming are good things or that we shouldn’t work to improve public health in such areas.

On the contrary, the basic argument, AFAICT, is simply that there already exist better, cheaper and faster remedies for many nutritional-deficiency problems, such as the approaches that are already significantly reducing Vitamin A deficiency incidence in the Phillippines. It’s not patronizing to advocate that public health efforts should be focused on effective and economical approaches that don’t require dependence on new proprietary agricultural products, whose owners and investors naturally favor maximizing the profits they can make from them.

Again, I’m not claiming that there isn’t also a lot of nonsense talked by ignorant people about allegations of GMO dangers and corporate conspiracies, etc. etc. I just don’t think you’ve made a convincing case that popular opposition is really somehow seriously impeding scientific breakthroughs on GMOs, or that advocacy of various non-GMO public health strategies is necessarily reducible to mere paternalistic oppression.

152

It’s not hard, believe me. Since I mentioned atrazine earlier and Entine’s spittle-mouthed condemnation of anyone who dared to criticize those who have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his personal bank account, let’s find something that the shill has to say on the subject. Ah, here’s one:
A paper published in October in the Public Library of Science One (PLOS One) reveals that frogs are thriving in America’s agricultural heartland. More explosively, it shows that the researcher who pushed hardest for a ban of the herbicide called Atrazine, sat on the exculpatory data for a decade while high-stakes regulatory battles raged at the state and federal level … Until Hayes’ laboratory research, no studies had found significant health or environmental concerns over atrazine and its use, even among farm workers.

The first thing I should point out is that this is an excerpt from an opinion piece on a right-wing pro-business website written by someone who is a Fellow of a right-wing pro-business think tank. Funny how Entine is always found among those, like pigs in shit. But let’s move on and examine some facts.

One fact is that neither Entine nor the original writer seems to have any interest in providing a cite to the actual paper in question. Never mind about the controversial nature of the journal PLOS One itself – a pay-to-publish open access model – but let’s just take the paper at face value.

Here is the actual paper. A couple of facts emerge which make it clear why Entine isn’t going to encourage anyone to read it. Entine’s article leaves us with the impression that atrazine is so awesomely safe that no legitimate studies have ever held anything against it, and that Hayes is obviously a fraud. Well, fact #1 is that the paper doesn’t say anything even remotely like what Entine’s article claims. What it says is that limited studies of four specific conservation areas showed no statistically significant impact on the amphibians studied, and concludes that the ecological impacts of atrazine are complex. Fact #2 is that Hayes was a co-author! Yup, the paper is attributed to four authors, one of whom is Tyrone Hayes himself, so apparently Hayes is now busy discrediting himself! :smiley:

But all of this mendacity aside, let’s zero in on the money quote: “Until Hayes’ laboratory research, no studies had found significant health or environmental concerns over atrazine and its use, even among farm workers.”

Here is the recent assessment from the US Environmental Protection Agency, quoted from the April, 2016 EPA ecological risk assessment for atrazine:
Based on the results from hundreds of toxicity studies on the effects of atrazine on plants and animals, over 20 years of surface water monitoring data, and higher tier aquatic exposure models, this risk assessment concludes that aquatic plant communities are impacted in many areas where atrazine use is heaviest, and there is potential chronic risk to fish, amphibians, and aquatic invertebrates in these same locations. In the terrestrial environment, there are risk concerns for mammals, birds, reptiles, plants and plant communities across the country for many of the atrazine uses. EPA levels of concern for chronic risk are exceeded by as much as 22, 198, and 62 times for birds, mammals, and fish, respectively.
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2013-0266-0315
Given this kind of shameless mendacity, it’s no surprise to hear about organizations like STATS and how deeply intertwined all these shadow PR organizations are on behalf of the chemical and agribusiness industries. Entine is involved in all of them, and this analysis of his deep involvements is worth a thorough read. Seriously. It gets more and more disturbing the farther down you go. Having read it all myself, I think I have to retract my maligning Entine as an “industry shill” as that is a serious understatement. Industry shills are a dime a dozen and that description doesn’t really do him justice. From what I’m seeing on closer inspection, a more apt description would be that Entine is an unscrupulous propagandizing lying career shill for the worst of the chemical and agribusiness industries with deep ties to dozens of shadow organizations engaged in similar efforts, including climate change denial.

On that note, let me reiterate my major point. I have never said that the GMOs we have today are unsafe, contrary to your constant misrepresentations. I have no issue with either the NAS reports or those of Health Canada. I have huge concerns about the industry dominance of the legislative process and the untrustworthy environment in which future developments and regulatory decisions are playing out, now and in the future, as we’ve just seen in my example. The complete lack of action and regulatory opposition to any meaningful climate change mitigation should be a powerful object lesson here.

153

Of course.

There does come a point when “we can’t be sure it’s safe, we need more testing!” becomes an excuse for not recognizing ample evidence of safety. The regulatory environment affecting golden rice was so restrictive (thanks in part to Greenpeace et al) that the project has faced years of unnecessary delay, as detailed here. Even one of Greenpeace’s former leaders has called out the organization for its behavior on this issue.

Regarding claims that golden rice yield is lower than that of conventional varieties, you may be interested in the results of a recent trial in Bangladesh. Bullet point from the article:

“None of the major diseases like blast, sheath blight, bacterial blight and tungro was observed in the transgenic GR2E BRRI dhan29 and the yield was as good as that of the BRRI dhan29 (check variety) with good expression of beta carotene, according to a paper titled “Recent Advances in Breeding Golden Rice in Bangladesh”.”

So, this golden rice is yielding as well as a control variety, is showing good disease resistance and can provide a major part of necessary vitamin A in the diet. Sounds good to me.

Perhaps you are unaware of agreements giving farmers the right to save golden rice seed and use it year to year without having to pay fees to “owners and investors”. I suggest reading this article to get an idea of why biofortification through genetically engineered crops is more economical than traditional supplementation methods (important for poor countries).

As for the alleged “mendacity” cited by wolfpup in an article about research on the herbicide atrazine appearing on the Genetic Literacy Project website:

  1. the article specifically mentions that it’s Tyrone Hayes’ own data, and the full linked article makes clear that he co-authored the paper, so no one was concealing that fact (it was considered especially noteworthy that claims he’d been making all along were contradicted by research that he co-performed),

  2. the article is accurate that the data in that paper does not support Hayes’ claims of atrazine killing off amphibians,

  3. Hayes is really, really not the person to be citing as a credible, professional guy to contrast with those nasty industry sorts over at the Genetic Literacy Project. I was not familiar with Hayes prior to your post, but he appears to be…out there.

*"Hayes claims Syngenta and the drug company Novartis are engaged in a ghoulish conspiracy to create cancer with Syngenta’s herbicide in order to reap profits by selling Novartis’s oncology drugs to the victims. But aside from the absurdity of the theory (and the fact that the science is clear that the herbicide does not cause cancer), Novartis does not own Syngenta as Hayes’s falsely and ignorantly asserts. The two are completely separate companies – connected only by the fact that they were both created by the mergers followed by spin offs of two larger agribusiness and pharmaceutical companies more than a dozen years ago.

When Hayes’s obscene emails became public as part of an ethics complaint to Berkeley in 2012, Hayes upped the ante with increasingly bizarre accusations of persecution by Syngenta. He has several times repeated the claim – most recently on a nationally syndicated radio and television show “Democracy Now!” — that a well-respected scientist who works for the company stalks him and “whispers” in his ear at public events. On one or more occasions, says Hayes, this scientist threatened to have him lynched and to send “good old boys” to rape him, his wife and his daughter.  Of course, Hayes has not one shred of evidence to back up this slander. I personally know the scientist about whom Hayes makes these repugnant allegations and it is beyond my and any other reasonable person’s belief that he would make such threats.  However, it is not beyond the belief of those who know Hayes that he would fabricate such claims to serve his own agenda. 

Hayes’ claims that last year Syngenta pressured his employer, the University of California at Berkeley, to cut funding for his lab and that Berkeley complied in order to protect a grant made by Novartis in the late 1990s.   Hayes’s lab funding were not cut by Berkeley.  Rather they ran run out (spent by Hayes), and it had nothing to do with Syngenta, or the Novartis grant, which had run out over ten years earlier. When Hayes’s allegations first surfaced in a credulous piece of reporting by the Chronicle of Higher Education, the University was uncharacteristically forthright in its denials. The article, wrote Berkeley’s vice chancellor for research, “supported a wholly false narrative by conveying without comment—and with no corroboration or supporting facts—the professor’s belief that we were motivated by a desire to protect a research grant with Novartis… There is just one problem: The university’s contract with Novartis expired 10 years ago and was not renewed, and we have no institutional relationship with Syngenta…” Hayes’ vice chancellor closed his letter noting, “We are utterly perplexed by his allegations that there exists some sort of conspiracy directed at him.”*

Do read the full article, as it’s quite entertaining :slight_smile:

Hayes actually fits the profile of scientists worshiped by anti-GMOers quite well, including Stephanie Seneff (co-author of the notoriously bad “pig inflammation” study, antivaxer, and fervent believer that glyphosate causes autism), David Huber (he of the mystery pathogen/“entity” created by GMO agriculture but which no one else can detect), Seralini with his widely debunked and derided GMO maize/rat study and so on. Why these inhabitants of the anti-GMO “science” clown car continue to be taken seriously is hard to understand.*

*it depends on how badly one wants to believe. There are climate change deniers who eagerly cite a handful of supporting scientists - but even those outliers are seldom quite as loony and/or ethically challenged as their counterparts in the realm of anti-GMO activism.

154

Me too! However, it doesn’t contradict in any way the statements of the article I quoted about tests on different Golden Rice strains in the Philippines. Nor, AFAICT, does it constitute any evidence for your claim that GMO opposition from Greenpeace or crop sabotage have significantly hampered the progress of Golden Rice development.

I’m aware of the “humanitarian licensing” policies set up by patent owners for Golden Rice—largely due, by the way, to public pressure from widespread critiques of GMO technology and policies. So if you think humanitarian licensing of such products is a good thing, maybe a grudging tip of the hat is in order to activists who have focused public attention on these issues?

But your rather vague characterization of such licenses as “giving farmers the right to save golden rice seed” avoids the issue of exactly who meets the criteria for benefiting from such licenses. The humanitarian-license conditions cover, for instance, so-called “resource-poor farmers” defined as “earning less than US $10,000 per year from farming”. Who applies those eligibility tests, and what will the impacts be on farmers who are only slightly overqualified for them? And how will the bans on export sales impact poor farmers who depend on cash crops, and who are not necessarily less vulnerable to nutrient deficiencies? And so on and so forth. In short, ISTM that humanitarian licensing, while commendable in its basic principle, is a red-tape-heavy legal instrument that’s not actually equivalent to public-domain use.

If GMO developers do decide to put their research in the public domain for freely available use, that would be great and good on them. But as I said, developers naturally wish to profit from their ownership of such technology. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that the profit motive magically disappears from the equation.

Your cite doesn’t say what you seem to think it says. It’s comparing the actual documented costs of nutritional aid programs with hypothesized costs of widespread Golden Rice agricultural practices that don’t actually exist at present. It’s easy to claim that a projected future program is going to be successful and inexpensive compared to quantifiable existing programs, and I hope it turns out to be true, but it’s comparing apples and oranges as far as concrete data is concerned.

155

Nice job deflecting the point by hurling ad hominems against an eccentric scientist that I have absolutely no interest in defending and know virtually nothing about. That’s not the topic here. In case you missed the bleeding obvious, the point was the following, which might be clearer netted out in its simplest terms, recalling that it was a response to your challenge to show anything on Entine’s site that wasn’t factually accurate:

Your pal Entine and his fellow shill at the right-wing rag said this, direct quote:
Until Hayes’ laboratory research, no studies had found significant health or environmental concerns over atrazine and its use, even among farm workers.
The EPA said this:
Based on the results from hundreds of toxicity studies on the effects of atrazine on plants and animals, over 20 years of surface water monitoring data, and higher tier aquatic exposure models, this risk assessment concludes that aquatic plant communities are impacted in many areas where atrazine use is heaviest, and there is potential chronic risk to fish, amphibians, and aquatic invertebrates in these same locations. In the terrestrial environment, there are risk concerns for mammals, birds, reptiles, plants and plant communities across the country for many of the atrazine uses. EPA levels of concern for chronic risk are exceeded by as much as 22, 198, and 62 times for birds, mammals, and fish, respectively.
Is that clear enough? Entine is a liar and a blatant a shill for the chemical and agricultural industries. His website is nothing more than another front for promoting and defending those industries and their products. What this means is that it should be viewed with the appropriate degree of caution and skepticism. The fact that some things in it may be right doesn’t change the fact that a lot of others are biased, misleading, or, like this example, just outright wrong, and that its management and purpose makes it highly untrustworthy.

As long as we’re recommending reading materials to each other, let me suggest again that you read this about Entine’s background and his general level of trustworthiness.

156

And you know this how? A more likely explanation is that the scientists and non-corporate entities behind the development of golden rice wanted to give it every chance to help those who need to prevent hundreds of thousands of cases of blindness and death every year, and didn’t figure that hatred of genetic modification would lead opponents to ignore this aspect of the program.
Kudos though for belatedly recognizing that golden rice isn’t about “owners and investors…maximizing the profits”. :slight_smile:

You know, the zeal with which wolfpup attempts to deligitimize Genetic Literacy Project reminds me of the frenzy with which quackery supporters attack Quackwatch by sliming Dr. Stephen Barrett (who developed and runs the site), falsely claiming he was “delicensed” and portraying him as a Pharma stooge. Another frequent target is Dr. Paul Offit, a dedicated and highly knowledgable pro-immunization activist, who is the subject of sneers as “Dr. Proffit”, attacked for “making millions from vaccines” (it is somehow reprehensible that he and his colleagues who developed a lifesaving rotavirus vaccine were well compensated for their efforts, and that he continues to work tirelessly on behalf of immunization despite constant personal attacks and even death threats).
And in the realm of GMO science, another knowledgeable and effective biotech proponent (Dr. Kevin Folta of ) is frequently assaulted as a Monsanto stooge. Folta’s big sin was in accepting university funding for travel expenses associated with speaking engagements on genetic modification, funds that were contributed to by Monsanto. Folta was certainly naive in thinking opponents wouldn’t try to taint him with this and suggest that his research and views are bought and paid for by Evil Corporate.

Those who focus on spreading innuendo about competent and effective sources of information rather than refuting good evidence, are confessing that they have little to nothing to bring to the debate.

Interesting that wolfpup is on the warpath about the herbicide atrazine, which I’d agree is not harmless and in fact has a toxicity profile that is much more of concern than the herbicide that’s largely replaced it in recent years, glyphosate (a.k.a. Roundup). The reason that glyphosate (relatively safe on an environmental level and often used to kill off invasive species in threatened habitats and largely nonthreatening to other species*) has come into common use is the development of Roundup-resistant crop species created through GM techniques. This comparatively benign profile hasn’t stopped anti-GMOers from proclaiming dire catastrophe from Roundup’s use. Yes, overall herbicide use has gone up in recent years in agriculture (even as insecticide use has dropped) - but glyphosate is a much less toxic herbicide than the chemicals it replaced, and the environment has benefited.**

*speaking of withholding and covering up science - it was recently revealed that a top scientist in charge of an IARC review panel withheld key data on glyphosate from his own research, leading to the panel declaring that glyphosate was a “probable carcinogen” (the concealed data showed it was not). Anti-GMOers were quick to jump on the IARC finding, but they’ve been dead silent about the concealment of data vindicating glyphosate’s use. Here’s a story about the coverup - from those well-known corporate stooges over at Mother Jones. :smiley:
**soapbox moment: I avoid use of Roundup (except on rampant poison ivy of the kind that keeps trying to climb up the downspout of my house) and herbicides of any kind, despite the increased popularity of Preen and other pre-emergent herbicides for the lazy. Fellow gardeners, we don’t need this stuff.

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FWIW, I will mention that my daughter lives in heavily left leaning Park Slope, Brooklyn and she makes damn sure her son gets every possible vaccination because there are so many anit-vaxxers that there is simply no herd immunity. My family physician DIL will cater to the anti-vaxxers only to the extent of spreading out vaccinations, despite there being no evidence whatever that vaccines can “overload” the immune system. But she will not allow an unvaccinated kid in her waiting room. My family physician thinks withholding vaccinations ought to prosecuted as child abuse.

I don’t know about the GMO resistance. My opinion of GMO foods is that fish caught in the open ocean are just about the only non-GMO foods any of us eat. There are two differences between the ones that are intentionally modified: they and not the others are tested and a giant chemical company makes a lot of money from them. If you object to the latter, you have my sympathy. Incidentally, drug companies don’t make that much from vaccines. One or two shots and out. They make their big money on pills for chronic illnesses. I take 8 pills every day, for example.

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I’ve spend a loooooot of time arguing with anti-vaxxers, and my observation is that it isn’t a left or right thing, it’s an anti-authority thing, which is of course found on the left and the right. It’s more of an extremist position than one that’s aligned with a specific political stance.

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I should add that it seems to align pretty closely with people who homeschool because they don’t trust the government to teach their kids. One haven of anti-vaxxers is the mothering.com “natural parenting” message boards. A few elections ago, they had to ban all talk of politics because the far-righties and far-lefties were all at a hysterical pitch and board fights were erupting all over the place.

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In CA they banned all philosophical and religious exemptions from school vaccinations.

Allowing only medical exemptions. Now the rates on those have risen, and risen highest in those Countys where the philosophical and religious exemptions from school vaccinations were once highest.

Those also are generally the most Liberal. Doctors even advertise to anti-vaxxers.

I*n the year following passage of California’s S.B. 277 in 2015, the rate of medical exemptions in California increased sharply, according to research published this week in JAMA.

An analysis of medical exemptions among kindergartners showed while the rate of medical exemptions within the state has remained relatively stable for 20 years prior to S.B. 277, the rate jumped from 0.17% to 0.51% during the 2015-16 school year.

Meanwhile, the rate of personal-belief exemptions reported decreased from 2.37% in 2015 to 0.56% in 2016. Overall, the total rate of exemptions fell from 2.54% in 2015 to 1.06% in 2016.

Study lead author Paul Delamater, an assistant professor of health and medical geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the sudden rise in medical exemptions seem to suggest that parents were finding doctors who were willing to use a broader scope to justify the need for a medical exemption from vaccinations.

A look at exemptions rates on a county-by-county level found areas that had high rates of personal-belief exemptions prior to S.B. 277 had some of the biggest increases in medical exemptions after the law went into effect. *

I think it is time to pull some Medical licenses. After all, if those doctors dont believe in Science, who knows what other dangerous crap they might pull?