I am surprised, but should not be surprised that big tobacco is behind the push to reinstitute DDT use in the United States.
It appears that this is a consequence of their efforts to attack the science of tobacco's health effects, basically poo flinging, is that they are funding attacks on anything remotely close to public health science:
Bird lovers and ornithologists had reason to celebrate at the dawn of the new millennium. Across the US, after decades of decline, birds were coming back. Osprey were building their teetering twiggy nests all across Long Island. Pelican populations had rebounded in Florida. The peregrine falcon had made such a remarkable return that it was removed from the endangered species list, and wildlife experts predicted that the bald eagle would soon follow.
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In no time at all, his words seemed prophetic, not because West Nile virus shut down cities as polio once had but because, all of a sudden, people all across the country began calling for the return of DDT, which had been banned back in 1972.
It’s time to bring back DDT, said a columnist in Washington, DC. Crank up production, if not for the people of New York, at least for the innocent children of the Third World, wrote a Colorado journalist. Thanks to DDT’s ban, which 1970s environmental groups had demanded, citing harms to wildlife, the environmental movement bore the blame not just for West Nile Virus but for millions dead worldwide from malaria, wrote a scholar named Roger Bate in the Los Angeles Times. In local papers from California to North Carolina, a former FDA official pointed out the irony that DDT was banned largely for toxicity to birds and now couldn’t be used to combat a mosquito-borne virus that was killing birds by the hundreds of thousands. Rachel Carson’s legacy, he wrote, was “lamentable.”
But most of that season’s op-ed writers had a connection to the chemical they didn’t disclose. The Washington writer was the executive director of TASSC, an organization devoted to “sound science”—and created by tobacco company Philip Morris and its PR firm several years earlier. The former FDA official was a TASSC partner. The Colorado journalist was executive director of a “journalism center” directly funded by Philip Morris. Bate, the “scholar,” had founded an organization called the European Science and Environment Forum—which was funded by Philip Morris and British American Tobacco, and whose founding description exactly matched that of TASSC.
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In the midst of all of this, [global moves to regulate tobacco] a British American Tobacco executive received a copy of a curious letter from two malaria scientists. The letter, which was circulating among delegates to a global convention on chemicals known as POPs (persistent organic pollutants), argued that no global regulation should affect DDT because it was so crucial for stopping the spread of malaria in poor countries. To the BAT executive, the letter seemed germane to one of the company’s new special projects. The company had just joined with Philip Morris and Japan Tobacco International—which together controlled more than 40 percent of the world tobacco market—to launch something called Project Cerberus, named for the three-headed dog that guarded the gates to the underworld in Greek mythology and created to defend the tobacco industry from any global regulation.
On their own, Philip Morris executives were also talking about how to defend against regulation. One outcome was a plan for TASSC to engage in an “aggressive year” of activities to promote “science based on sound principles—not on emotions or beliefs considered by some as ‘politically correct.’” As the DDT letter sparked intense debate at the POPs convention, executives at BAT and Philip Morris saw the chemical’s story as a way to undermine support for regulation more broadly. The DDT story served the industry in two ways: It focused global attention on malaria as a health threat bigger than tobacco use. And it implied an inherent hypocrisy in global health efforts led by Western interests: It threw Western nations’ ability to set global health agendas into question because Western DDT bans had cost so many lives.
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“You can’t prove DDT is safe, but after 40 years you can’t prove it’s guilty of anything either,” he [right wing think tank "economist" Roger Bate] wrote. Yet DDT had remained “such a totemic baddie for the Greens” that if you could pin a moral dilemma to it, it would pit liberals loyal to the environment against those devoted to public health, he argued.
It was, he said, an issue “on which we can divide our opponents and win.”
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Importantly, the aim of Big Tobacco and Bates’ campaigns was never to bring DDT back, no matter what those early 2000s op-eds said. They succeeded in their true aim: to undermine regulation by casting doubt on the sanctity of science in policymaking. And their achievement has endured. Another 20 years later, as Covid spread, a Heartland Institute fellow proclaimed that “the coronavirus has largely granted environmental hypocrites their wish.” As evidence of environmentalists’ “wish,” he pointed all the way back to DDT’s 1972 ban. It was proof, as he put it, that environmentalists didn’t care if millions of people in poor countries the world over died.
When I think about science denialism, my first thought is about the corruption present in science, particularly in the life sciences, where companies buy off researchers in order to promote their products and business models.
It also appears that there are a large number of corporate malefactors who are paying to encourage this on issues simply as a way to more generally attack the scientific method more generally, because, as Stephen Colbert once observed, "It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias."
This is ineluctably evil.
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