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As of June 21, 2021, the World Health Organization now says: Children should not be vaccinated for COVID-19 for the moment.

Even as the cardiac risks and heart inflammation affecting children and young adults following COVID-19 vaccination is gaining visibility, a concerted effort is underway to coerce this same group to get the vaccine anyway.

The same day that the WHO said not to vaccinate children, a White House spokesperson said that they planned to start vaccinating children 12 and younger by the end of the year or early 2022.

With lower rates of infection among children compared with adults, the CDC’s recommendations are perplexing. Why encourage a vaccine that has no long term safety data to support its use and carries more risk to children’s health than the actual disease?  

We’re being told there’s an urgent public health necessity to censor vaccine misinformation.

What is this assumption based on? Who gets to decide what is “misinformation” and whether it should be censored?

These aren’t theoretical questions for the Organic Consumers Association. 

On May 27, the entire Democratic leadership of the House Energy & Commerce Committee sent letters to Facebook, Google and Twitter asking these social media companies to de-platform a hit list of organic and natural health experts and organizations, including OCA, accusing us―without evidence―of spreading vaccine disinformation.

In March, the New Yorker ran a “Letter from the U.K.” by Anna Russell, “The Fight Against Vaccine Misinformation.” The article provided clues to who’s behind the efforts to deplatform us.

Despite our reticence and self-censorship, the Organic Consumers Association was put on a list of vaccine safety advocates that the House Energy & Commerce Committee has sent to Facebook, Google and Twitter, demanding our deplatforming.

We have a theory about how this hit list was compiled. The targeted vaccine safety advocates are all natural health practitioners and educators and supporters of organic food and farming. 

Has the unholy alliance between agribusiness and the pharmaceutical industry, exemplified by the Bayer-Monsanto merger, given these corporations an added incentive to team up to take out their biggest detractors?

That possibility occurred to us when, despite our reticence and self-censorship, the Organic Consumers Association was put on a hit list of vaccine safety advocates known as the “Disinformation Dozen.”

We noticed that Voices for Vaccines was one of the pharmaceutical front-groups that’s been circulating the hit list and that it is a project of the Task Force for Global Health, which is funded by vaccine and pharmaceutical companies―including Bayer.

There are proven and profitable agricultural practices that have the power to draw excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

But, before agriculture can be a climate change solution, it has to deal with its own greenhouse gas pollution.

Synthetic fertilizers and factory farms must be phased out, while regenerative organic practices that sequester carbon are ramped up.

There’s certainly a lot of potential, especially on grasslands where ruminant animals can forage for the entirety of their lives instead of being fattened on synthetic-fertilizer-grown grains in greenhouse-gas-polluting factory farm feedlots.

We can get grazing animals off grain and phase out of factory farms by increasing on-farm and farmer-owned processing capacity, so that farmers can act independently of the meat and grain monopolies.

But, it won’t be easy to steer clear of these multi-billion-dollar agribusinesses. They’re always one step ahead, working with their supporters in government on false solutions to perpetuate the industrial food system and avoid addressing the systemic causes of our climate crisis.