Alexis's Blog
On January 27, 2021, President Joe Biden signed his “Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.” This historic action commited the U.S. to achieving “significant short-term global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and net-zero global emissions by mid-century or before.”
Biden’s climate EO was immediately likened to the Green New Deal resolution championed by the Sunrise Movement.
One big difference between the two is, while the Green New Deal sticks to direct government investment in proven climate solutions, Biden’s climate EO relies, in part, on “market-based mechanisms” and “robust standards for the market ... to catalyze private sector investment.”
The differences between the Green New Deal and Biden’s climate EO wouldn’t have us so concerned if it weren’t for the support for three dangerous false solutions that his Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack brings to the Biden-Harris Cabinet.
President Biden’s decision to reinstate Tom “Mr. Monsanto” Vilsack as Agriculture Secretary is a disaster for nutrition and farming, but his choice of Deb Haaland for Interior Secretary, managing the 500 million acres of public lands, could benefit the climate in ways that could also improve food security.
Following up on “Back to the Future with Tom ‘Mr. Monsanto’ Vilsack,” this is the second installment in a series of articles we’re doing on President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
If you haven’t already, please tell your U.S. Senators to vote NO on Vilsack.
In our last post, we listed the dozens of new genetically modified crops Vilsack pushed through the U.S.D.A. and cloned animals that he allowed to enter the market without review.
Today, we focus on Vilsack’s 2015 approval of dicamba-resistant cotton and soy. He knew these GMOs would unleash a raft of hellish herbicide drift incidents plaguing organic and conventional farmers alike. But, it was Monsanto's biggest product launch ever, supposedly a fix for the weed problems with Roundup Ready crops (resistant to glyphosate), so he turned a blind eye to the danger.
In this installment of the Gain-of-Function Hall of Shame, we add fellow anthrax alumnus David R. Franz, now an adviser to EcoHealth Alliance, the coronavirus-hunting funder of the Wuhan Institute of Virology that we covered in our profile of Peter Daszak.
Franz is a retired army colonel who served at USAMRIID beginning in 1987. He was Chief of the Cardiorespiratory Toxicology Department (1987-1989), Chief of the Toxicology Division (1989-1992), Deputy Commander (1993-1995), and Commander (1995-1998).
His years as commander overlap with those of the covert biological weapons programs described in Judith Miller’s book Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, and he was a source for much of the information about them in the book. These included Projects Jefferson (the genetic engineering of vaccine-resistant anthrax, something the U.S. military had been doing since the 1980s), Clear Vision (the production of “biobomblets” that could be used to disperse anthrax), and Bite Size and Bacchus, or BACUS, Biotechnology Activity Characterization by Unconventional Signatures (the production of anthrax simulant outside the lab, as a terrorist cell might).
President-Elect Joe Biden has nominated Tom Vilsack as Agriculture Secretary.
This is bad news.
Tom Vilsack was “Mr. Monsanto” even before he started at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2009. As Iowa’s governor (1999–2007), he had been named Governor of the Year by the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Today, he continues to serve agribusiness as the head of the US Dairy Export Council, which is deeply invested in perpetuating the system of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), the use of pesticide-drenched genetically modified feed, and the practice of keeping prices paid to farmers below the cost of production to drive the consolidation of ever-larger factory farms.
As USDA Secretary from 2009-2017, Vilsack approved more new genetically modified organisms (GMOs) than any Secretary before him or since.
In our recent profile of Bill Gates, we posed the following questions:
• Were his eerily accurate predictions of COVID-19 a form of wish fulfillment?
• Was he simply prescient, or did he have a hand in shaping the conditions that made the pandemic inevitable?
Most importantly, since SARS-CoV-2 may have escaped from a Chinese lab where gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses were funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Pentagon, has Gates been involved in the collection and manipulation of deadly viruses?
As this report will show, the answer is yes.
There are two leading scientists who claim to have physical evidence that the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, originated in bats and was transmitted directly, or through an intermediate host, to humans: Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and his collaborator Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is a medical doctor who has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. He’s best known in his current role as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans put their faith in Fauci. His bedside manner―straightforward, modest and unassuming―made it easy to warm up to this grandfatherly nerd. Inspiring trust that he was unbiased, non-partisan and strictly scientific, he quickly became “America’s Favorite Doctor.”
The Organic Consumers Association has fought the use of genetic engineering in food production since our founding in 1998.
But, in recent years, experiments in genetic engineering have spread to other areas, specifically medical research and warfare—and this too has serious implications for our health and wellbeing.
As co-founder Ronnie Cummins explained in his discussion with biological warfare epidemiologist Dr. Meryl Nass (watch the video here), as an anti-genetic-engineering campaigner whose work predated Monsanto’s launch of GMOs for agriculture, the first concern about this technology was that recombinant DNA experiments “might accidentally create a dangerous new pathogen.”
Lab accidents happen.
When the first Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-1) pandemic ended in 2003, lab-acquired infections continued.
Immediately following the end of the 2003 pandemic of SARS-1, there were four separate outbreaks of lab-acquired infections of SARS-1 within one year at three different labs in Beijing, Singapore and Taipei. The situation was so bad that Science Magazine warned, “health experts fear that the next SARS epidemic may be more likely to emerge from a research lab than from the presumed animal reservoir.”
In one lab accident, a 26-year-old graduate student was exposed while working at the Institute of Viral Disease Control at the Chinese CDC. Her mother caught the disease from her and died.
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