What We Ignore, What We Won’t See, What We Don’t Say
Two long running stories of health and deception have suddenly hit the news.
I don’t know about you but I feel like we’ve all had to hit the ground running in 2013.
Two issues in particular have dominated my inbox: the looming threat of GM salmon and the drip, drip, drip of compensations being awarded to families who claim their children were damaged by the MMR vaccine.
Both are long running stories with their roots in the 1980s and 1990s: GM salmon was patented in 1989 and the long saga of MMR began with a research paper in the Lancet in 1998.
Both stories also involve a lot of government deception. With the salmon, the US government finally gave tacit approval for its sale in April of 2012. Not wanting the issue of GM to hang over the US presidential elections, the announcement of this decision got buried until a magazine investigation revealed the truth last December.
As a result of this, after 24 years of deliberation, during which time the GM salmon trait was quietly reclassified as a drug in order to speed up its approval, the public have been given 60 days (until February 25) to feed into the public consultation before the pro-GM FDA puts genetically modified salmon on our tables.
We urge you to read the story and make your voices heard. We also urge you to be cynical about the recent announcement of a temporary halt on GM crops in the EU (see right). The timing – directly on the heels of the discovery of a potentially dangerous rogue viral gene in more than half of all GM crops – is probably not a coincidence. Prepare yourself for plenty of spin in the near future.
Then there’s the issue of vaccination. As a fourth family has been given compensation for a vaccine damaged child, a little-reported-on paper has resurfaced which alleges that the UK’s Department of Health and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) have skewed and suppressed data on adverse effects of childhood vaccines for decades.
How do we get into situations like this? In part the long timelines involved work in favour of politicians and major corporations. For the rest of us it’s easy to get lost in the mire of information, life gets in the way, we get tired, we assume that, when things go quiet, the story has gone away, or that someone else is dealing with it.
Someone else isn’t. It’s abundantly clear that our governments and regulators willingly accept illness and death as the collateral damage of profit generation. They lie, they cheat, they obfuscate and misdirect, they choose to ignore vital information. And we let them get away with it.
Paying attention is one of our most important backstops. That and public outrage. When we speak out at great enough volume and in great enough numbers the tide will turn. The government exists to serve the people. For our health and well being, let’s insist it understands that hierarchy and serves us well.
This piece first appeared on the NYR Natural News newsletter
