https://truthout.org/articles/secret-documents-expose-monsantos-war-on-cancer-scientists/
[links in online article]
Secret Documents Expose Monsanto’s War on Cancer Scientists
By Stacy Malkan
Published July 16, 2018
DeWayne Johnson, a 46-year-old father dying of non-Hodgkin lymphoma,
became the first person to face Monsanto in trial last week over
allegations the company hid evidence about the cancer-causing dangers of
its Roundup weedkiller. Johnson is the first of some 4,000 people suing
Monsanto in state and federal courts claiming their cancers were caused
by glyphosate-based Roundup. The litigation, and documents coming to
light because of it, are shining light on the heavy-handed tactics
Monsanto (now a subsidiary of Bayer) has used to deny cancer risk and
protect the chemical that is the lynchpin of its profits.
“Monsanto was its own ghostwriter for some safety reviews,” Bloomberg
reported, and an EPA official reportedly helped Monsanto “kill” another
agency’s cancer study. An investigation in Le Monde details Monsanto’s
effort “to destroy the United Nations’ cancer agency by any means
possible” to save glyphosate.
Two recent journal articles, based on reviews of the Roundup trial
discovery documents, report corporate interference in a scientific
publication and a federal regulatory agency, and other examples of
“poisoning the scientific well.”
“Monsanto’s ghostwriting and strong-arming threaten sound science and
society,” wrote Tufts University Professor Sheldon Krimsky in a June
essay. The discovery documents, he said, “uncover the corporate capture
of science, which puts public health and the very foundation of
democracy at risk.”
This corporate war on science has major implications for all of us,
considering that half of all men in the US and a third of women will be
diagnosed with cancer at some point in our lifetimes, according to the
National Cancer Institute.
The Documents the Food Industry Doesn’t Want You to See
For years, the food and chemical industries have set their sights on one
particular target in the science world: the International Agency for
Research on Cancer (IARC), the independent research group that for 50
years has worked to identify cancer hazards to inform policies that can
prevent cancer.
“I’ve been fighting IARC forever!!! :)” one former Kraft Foods scientist
wrote to a former Syngenta scientist in an email obtained through a
state open records request. “Foods and ag are under siege since
Glyphosate in March 2015. We all need to gather somehow and expose IARC,
as you guys did in the paper. Next priorities are all food ingredients:
aspartame, sucralose, dietary iron, B-carotene, BPA, etc. IARC is
killing us!”
The IARC expert panel decision to classify glyphosate as “probably
carcinogenic to humans” created a rallying point for the panel’s foes to
gather forces. A key Monsanto document released via litigation reveals
the plan of attack: discredit the cancer scientists with the help of
allies across the food industry.
Monsanto’s public relations plan assigned 20 corporate staffers to
prepare for the IARC carcinogenicity report on glyphosate, with
objectives including “neutralize impact,” “establish public perspective
on IARC,” “regulator outreach,” “ensure MON POV” and “engage industry
associations” in “outrage.”
The document identified four tiers of “industry partners” to help
advance the three objectives named in the PR plan: protect the
reputation of Roundup, prevent “unfounded” cancer claims from becoming
popular opinion, and “provide cover for regulatory agencies” to keep
allowing the use of glyphosate.
Uncovering Monsanto’s Network of “Industry Partners”
The industry partner groups Monsanto tapped to discredit the IARC
scientists included the largest pesticide and food industry lobby
organizations, CropLife International, BIO and the Grocery Manufacturers
Association; industry-funded spin groups such as GMO Answers and the
International Food Information Council; and “science-y” sounding front
groups like Sense about Science, the Genetic Literacy Project and
Academics Review – all using similar messaging and often referring back
to each other as sources.
Documents obtained by the US Right to Know investigation illuminate on
how these partner groups work together to promote the “MON POV” about
the safety and necessity of pesticides and GMOs.
One set of documents revealed how Monsanto’s PR operatives organized
“Academics Review” as a neutral-sounding platform from which they could
launch attacks against a target list of foes, including the Sierra Club,
author Michael Pollan, the movie Food, Inc. and the organic industry.
The architects of Academics Review – co-founders Bruce Chassy and David
Tribe, Monsanto executive Eric Sachs, former Monsanto communications
director Jay Byrne, and former VP of the biotech industry trade group
Val Giddings – talked openly in the emails about setting up Academics
Review as a front group to promote industry interests and attract
industry cash, while keeping corporate fingerprints hidden.
Even now with their playbook exposed – and their primary funding
identified as coming from a trade group funded by Monsanto, Bayer, BASF,
Syngenta and DowDuPont – Academics Review still claims on its website to
accept donations only from “non-corporate sources.” Academics Review
also claims that the “IARC glyphosate cancer review fails on multiple
fronts,” in a post sourced by the industry-funded PR website GMO
Answers, the industry-funded front group American Council on Science and
Health, and a Forbes article by Henry Miller that was ghostwritten by
Monsanto.
Miller and the Academics Review organizers Chassy, Tribe, Byrne, Sachs
and Giddings are all also members of AgBioChatter, a private listserver
that appeared in Monsanto’s PR plan as a tier 2 industry partner. Emails
from the AgBioChatter list suggest it was used as a forum to coordinate
industry allies on messaging and lobbying activities to promote GMOs and
pesticides. Members included senior agrichemical industry staff, PR
consultants and pro-industry academics, many of whom write for industry
media platforms such as GMO Answers and Genetic Literacy Project, or
play leadership roles in other Monsanto partner groups.
Genetic Literacy Project, led by longtime chemical industry PR operative
Jon Entine, also partnered with Academics Review to run a series of
conferences funded by the agrichemical industry to train journalists and
scientists how to better promote GMOs and pesticides and argue for their
deregulation. The organizers were, again, dishonest about the sources of
their funding.
These groups cast themselves as honest arbiters of science even as they
spread false information and level near hysterical attacks against
scientists who raised concerns about the cancer risk of glyphosate.
A search for “IARC” on the Genetic Literacy Project website brings up
more than 220 articles with industry messaging, maligning the cancer
scientists as “anti-chemical enviros” who “lied” and “conspired to
misrepresent” the health risks of glyphosate, and arguing that the
global cancer agency should be defunded and abolished.
Many of the anti-IARC articles posted on that site, or pushed by other
industry surrogates, ignore the many news reports based on the Monsanto
Papers documenting corporate interference in the scientific research,
and focus instead on the misleading reporting of Kate Kelland, a
Reuters’ reporter who has close ties to the Science Media Centre, the
sister organization of Sense About Science, a group Monsanto suggested
in its PR plan to “lead industry response” in the media.
The battle against IARC, based on these attacks, has now reached Capitol
Hill, with Congressional Republicans led by Rep. Lamar Smith
investigating and trying to withhold US funding from the world’s leading
cancer research agency.
Who Is on the Side of Science?
Monsanto’s lobbying and messaging to discredit the IARC cancer panel is
based on the argument that other agencies using risk-based assessments
have exonerated glyphosate of cancer risk. But as many news outlets have
reported, along with the two recent journal articles based on the
Monsanto Papers, evidence is piling up that the regulatory risk
assessments on glyphosate, which rely heavily on industry-provided
research, have been compromised by undisclosed conflicts of interest,
reliance on dubious science, ghostwritten materials and other methods of
corporate strong-arming that puts public health at risk, as the Tufts
Professor Sheldon Krimsky wrote.
“To protect the scientific enterprise, one of the core pillars of a
modern democratic society, against the forces that would turn it into
the handmaiden of industry or politics, our society must support
firewalls between academic science and the corporate sectors and educate
young scientists and journal editors on the moral principles behind
their respective professional roles,” Krimsky wrote.
Policy makers must not allow corporate-spun science to guide decisions
about cancer prevention. Media must do a better job reporting and
probing into conflicts of interest behind the corporate science spin.
It’s time to end the corporate war on cancer science.