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Archive for Natural Solutions Foundation – Page 33

Weaponized Avian Flu Press Release Refused Distribution

By Administrator on July 29, 2008 No Comments

July 29, 2008
Disclaimer: No one knows if the pandemic will be unleashed. Let us pray that it will not. However, we note with alarm that there are an increasing number of indicators suggesting that this Pandemic is being prepared to be used against us all using a variety of weaponized viruses. If our ringing of the alarm bells is successful, we will be spared – and we will have been wrong. Let us all devoutly hope that the Natural Solutions Foundation’s urgent and effective information dissemination is that successful.

Please help to make the Pandemic secret so ineffective that the authors of this nightmare are backed off by our shared awareness. Disseminate this information to everyone you know and ask them to do the same.

Our best weapon against the coming Pandemic is truth.
Yours in health and freedom,
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMedia.tv
www.Organics4U.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMarketPlace.org

FIRST AMENDMENT? WHAT FIRST AMENDMENT…

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:13:08 AM EDT

Ralph,

The drama unfolds! The wire service called back and REFUSED to put out the release. I have never had that happen. They said it was baseless, sensationalistic and contained ‘advertising’ promoting the NSF. Again, I have never seen this type of response. They also said you could end up being sued by the government for libel. I don’t agree, obviously, but it doesn’t matter what I think.

SO, what to do now….

Regards,

Mark

————————————–
From Ralph Fucetola JD:

First, the US Government cannot sue anyone for libel. There is no provision of law that allows such a lawsuit. The First Amendment is a complete bar to any claim that someone is libeling the government.

Second, here is the Censured Release that the mainstream media does not want the public to see – PLEASE FORWARD THIS LINK: http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=750

WE MUST SPREAD THIS MEDIA RELEASE WIDELY. Dr. Rima says, “It is time to make this issue ‘go viral’ (in a good way). Gen. Stubblebine believes such action, if taken by enough people, could stop any planned weaponized virus release.”

——————————

## FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ##

AVIAN FLU WEAPONIZED

Avian Flu May Already be Weaponized. Natural Solutions Foundation alerts world to startling evidence that H5N1 virus may already have been genetically engineered to create a man-made pandemic.

Is the U.S. Government acting in concert with pharmaceutical interests to implement a mandatory vaccination agenda?

WASHINGTON, DC – July 29, 2008 – Noted health freedom activist Rima E. Laibow, MD and her organization, the Natural Solutions Foundation, this week alerted Health Freedom supporters that rogue government operatives, in concert with pharmaceutical interests, may be preparing to unleash a genetically engineered Avian Flu pandemic for profit, possibly during the Olympics. The planned August delivery of an alleged Avian Flu “vaccine” coupled with other substantial pieces of intelligence has led Foundation President, Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine (USA Ret.) to conclude that an intentional pandemic “incident” may be the “Big Event with global consequences” to which Congressman Ron Paul MD alluded in his 2008 Independence Day message.

As a result, the Natural Solutions Foundation’s urgent Health Freedom eAlert and accompanying video, entitled: ‘Weaponized Avian Flu: Are YOU Ready to Die for the Establishment?’ has become an Internet phenomenon, forwarded to millions of readers, according to Foundation estimates of distribution.

The eAlert and YouTube video are available at http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=742

According to Stubblebine and Laibow, “The story is a long, complicated one, winding its way from China to France by way of the First World War, the Oil Cartel, the Pharmaceutical Cartel and Iraq to its final destination: a syringe full of something claiming to be a vaccine against the newly-deadly Avian Flu.

“Our best intelligence estimate is that pandemic Avian Flu has already been created through genetic engineering in the United States, fusing the deadly genome of the 1918 Pandemic, misnamed the ‘Spanish Flu’, with the DNA of the innocuous H5N1 virus in a growth medium of human kidney cells, according to the National Institutes of Health and the vaccine’s manufacturer. Some virologists believe that this would insure that the man-made mutant virus recognizes human cells and knows how to invade them.”

“A basic virological fact that the public has not been told is that it is impossible to make a vaccine against a virus that does not yet exist. Public relations efforts to the contrary, IF a vaccine is being made against the Avian Flu virus in its pandemic form, that means that the pandemic virus must already exist, period, end of discussion. So the fact that the Avian Flu vaccine is already being manufactured in China by a wholly-owned subsidiary of the French arm of the cartel is not only peculiar, but at the very least sinister.”

The Natural Solutions Foundation notes with alarm that the genome of the 1918 pandemic, the so-called “Spanish Flu”, was recently intentionally resurrected by the United States government. Because of that resurrection, both the Avian Flu, and its “vaccine” are now a significant threat to public health.

The Spanish Flu, which was not Spanish at all, was created in the U.S. through an early bioweapons program and injected into healthy young men (i.e., ‘soldiers’) as the first mandatory vaccination in the military during WWI (also known as the “War to End Wars” and the “Great War”). The “Spanish Flu”, which originated in Kansas on U.S. Military bases, killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and millions worldwide. It was one of the deadliest pandemics in modern history. It was also one of the most successful biological weapons ever created, until now.

“We can see that the pharmaceutical industry and US government are actively preparing for an Avian Flu pandemic through their own promotional literature and propaganda,” continues Laibow. “The manufacturer’s website contains a document which clearly illustrates their business model and how the company successfully capitalizes on the immensely profitable worldwide vaccination market.

To date, there have only been around 385 human cases of Avian Flu identified worldwide (assuming those identifications are trustworthy, of course), with 243 deaths. To put the absurdity of this effort into perspective, Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD), which researchers believe is heavily associated with aspartame consumption, is a leading cause of death which, according to the CDC, for example, killed 460,000 Americans in 1999 and the numbers keep rising www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5106a3.htm. But, aspartame is not under the gun, instead, a supposedly currently non-pandemic Avian Flu is the focus.

Laibow adds, “Given the shockingly obvious lack of any threat from an un-weaponized H5N1 virus, how can we explain the Bush Administration spending billions of dollars preparing each of the 50 States for what it drums into us is the “inevitable Bird Flu pandemic” anticipated to kill half or more of all Americans and similar numbers of people around the globe? Americans are outraged and must inform themselves and their families by contacting the Natural Solutions Foundation and joining the free distribution list of the informative Health Freedom eAlerts, http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=187 . eAlert list members can expect to be uniquely well informed as recipients of the Foundation’s continuing threat analysis and action steps.

###

About the Natural Solutions Foundation

The Natural Solutions Foundation was founded by Dr. Rima E. Laibow, MD and Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine, III (USA, ret.), who, along with Ralph Fucetola JD, are the Foundation Trustees. Established in 2004, the Foundation is an international NGO (Non Governmental Organization) active and registered in several countries, and is a not for profit 501(C)(3) tax exempt organization in the United States.

The Mission of the Foundation is to discover, develop, demonstrate and disseminate natural solutions to the problems threatening health and freedom, achieving and maintaining a healthy self, community and world. Since its founding the Natural Solutions Foundation has pursued a vigorous program on many fronts, including natural solutions to significant social, legal and international problems involving health and wellness. We consider health freedom to be part of those solutions. Among the major threats to health freedom are Codex Alimentarius (the World Food Code) and national agencies that are tasked with protecting the public, but are not. The threats to health and freedom are both domestic and international, as are the solutions…
Further listing of Natural Solutions Foundation accomplishments at: http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=195

Source: Natural Solutions Foundation

Contact:
Dr. Rima Laibow, M.D.
Natural Solutions Foundation
dr.laibow@gmail.com

Ralph Fucetola JD
ralph.fucetola@usa.net

Websites:
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
http://YouTube.com/NaturalSolutions

PLEASE HELP US GET THIS IMPORTANT MESSAGE OUT:

1. Please subscribe to the Health Freedom eAlert for further urgent updates:
http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=187

2. Please send us your generous tax-deductible donation:
http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189

Categories : Avian Flu, Blog / Vlog, Vaccination
Tags : Avian Flu, Bird Flu, Natural Solutions Foundation, NSF, Pandemic, Pandemic Avian Flu, Pandemic Bird Flu, Pandemic Flu, Weaponized Avian Flu

“Chaff” Defines ChemTrails Says US Government

By Administrator on May 28, 2008 No Comments

The Idaho Observer reported with considerable skepticism that the General Accounting Office admitted that chemtrails exist but that they are “merely” fiberglass particles coated with aluminum whose health effects are unknown but whose existence is now acknowledged after decades of official denial.

As the article, below, points out, however, there is much more to the story and it is pretty ominous.
Asthma, cardiac disease, possibly a variant of Morgellon’s Disease, changes in the pH and metallic content of the soil around the world, immune system compromise, and a host of other possible effects for this constant and ubiquitous spraying have been noted and studied.
Can we really call the damage these sprays, the forced exposure to who knows what, anything but a hostile experiment using our bodies as the lab animals?
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.Organics4U.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org

GAO Report Admits ‘Chaff’ — Lab Report Reveals Much More Last May a family in Iowa contacted the office of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) to report the constant criss-crossing of “chemtrails” in the sky above their neighborhood. They received back from the senator’s office a General Accounting Office (GAO) report on “military chaff” and the material safety data sheet for aluminum-coated fiberglass fibers being spread-seven days a week for several hours each day-in the skies above their home. The chaff is spread by pilots learning how to mask planes or send false radar images. It was reported that the military also has lead-based chaff, but that it is not being used at this time. Chaff was used by the military in Europe in WWII and, according to the GAO, had been used in training here at home since the 50s. Once chaff reaches the ground, it breaks down into particles small enough to inhale. Though military spokespeople insist that chaff is not harmful, the GAO report concluded that health effects are unknown and more studies are needed. Regardless, some members of this family are very sick. On May 23, after a hard rain the day before, they a noticed glittering substance and a pinkish- colored powder substance on the roof of their house. They then noticed the glittering substance on many surfaces, even the dashboard of the family car. Both substances were collected and sent to a lab for analysis. Among the substances found to be in the samples were several that should simply not be there:

* 6 bacteria, including anthrax and pneumonia
* 9 chemicals including acetylcholine chloride
* 26 heavy metals including arsenic, gold, lead,mercury, silver, uranium and zinc
* 4 molds and fungi
* 7 viruses
* 2 cancers
* 2 vaccines
* 2 sedatives

Over the last several months, The Iowa Observer has received a significant increase in chemtrail-related calls and letters. Most report a dramatic increase in chemtrail “spraying” activity in their areas; some are reporting the development of chronic flu-like symptoms, chronic fatigue and body aches that they have never before experienced. If you are seeing the relationship between accelerated chemtrail spraying in your area and symptoms among friends, family and members of your community, begin writing it down and send the information to us by mail or email. Note times, dates and specific symptoms. If you live near a military installation, expect that you are being “sprayed.” You may want to contact your senator or rep and, politely (that is how you get the information you are seeking) request the forwarding of any information that may be available on the military chaff being used in your area. After obtaining relevant documents from your rep or senator, consider using it to obtain epidemiological data from your local health department. Idaho Observer, July 2006

Categories : Blog / Vlog, ChemTrails, Disinformation
Tags : aches, allergies, chaff, ChemTrails, chronic fatigue, immune challenge, involuntary experimentation, Morgellon's Disease, Natural Solutions Foundation, spraying

BARDA, The Vaccination Police, Believes in the Four Vaccine Myths. Do You?

By Administrator on May 28, 2008 No Comments

Compulsory drugging is wrong, as far as I am concerned. Mandatory vaccination is compulsory drugging and is not only wrong, it is unnecessary and dangerous. Disinformation is easily found claiming that vaccination is both safe and effective. These falsehoods are so far from the truth that the Natural Solutions Foundation has filed a Citizens Petition with the Federal Trade Commission urging it to hold public hearings and ban all advertising and information to patients and doctors which claims that vaccination is either safe, effective or both. (That Citizens Petition has been “lost” and illegally denied a total of at least 4 times so far!)

The reality is that vaccination is dangerous and ineffective, despite hundreds of year of propaganda to the contrary.

When the act to establish the Vaccine Police, BARDA, was under consideration, I published an article called “The Syringe of Death: Coming Soon to a Police Station Near You” in which I argued that establishment of BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency by the Richard Burr’s Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005 was a very bad, and very dangerous secret agency and should not be created. BARDA was created, none the less, and now serves as the mandatory vaccination police of the Patriot Act “Public Health” fascism.

“The Syringe of Death” is published in full below. Although BARDA was then under consideration and is now a reality, the discussion of this frightening agency is relevant to today’s discussion as is a look at the 4 myths upon which the barbaric, unnecessary and dangerous treatments called “vaccination” or “inoculation” rest.

Frighteningly, the creation of BARDA was announced on April 26, 2007 by the Department of Health and Human Services. Its Secretary at that time, Mike Leavitt, said in his Press Release, “The creation of BARDA enhances the opportunity for innovation in our efforts to develop effective medical countermeasures against a host of public health threats, either natural or man made,” Secretary Leavitt said. “I am pleased that Congress recognized the importance of advanced development in the establishment of BARDA, and the President’s FY 2008 budget request of $189 million for this purpose will help further the department’s efforts to bridge the gap between the National Institutes of Health’s research and development programs and Project BioShield.”

BARDA, however, is, in essence, a secret Vaccination Police which can, once a “Pandemic” is declared, with or without reason or evidence, require mandatory vaccination for the real or imagined “Pandemic”. If vaccinations were safe or effective, assuming a real Pandemic, of course, perhaps there would be some faint justification for such totalitarian police state tactics in the approach to public health. In fact, vaccination is such a risky activity that it is classified as an un-insurable risk since no insurance company or underwriter in the world will guarantee the financial compensation of those harmed by it – and they are, as we now know, legion.

Documentation of extensive, shameful cover-ups by industry (now absolved from all liability for dangerous vaccines and drugs by a compliant FDA) and government abound and are sadly, old news. Documentation of vaccination dangers abound as well, ranging from the well known tragic and nearly totally preventable autism epidemic to life long neurological dysfunction of many sorts to asthma and immune suppression, leukemias and other cancers, infertility (secondary to UN/US/WHO sponsored vaccination programs in Africa, South and Central America allegedly for diseases like small pox and tetanus but which secretly induce permanent sterility) and a host of other conditions and diseases. But still the beat goes on: one state after another decides that yet another vaccine must be added to the vaccination schedule. New Jersey, for example, has decided that ineffective, but financially productive, mandatory seasonal flu vaccine, which often contains mercury, but always contains other horrific contaminants and toxic substances, MUST be administered to every child from the age of 6 months to 18 year EVERY YEAR (twice in the first year, by the way). Never mind that in the winter of 2007-8, the CDC announced that this same vaccine was ineffective at least 60% of the time. Never mind the dangers. Just focus on the profits!

And just focus on the social control, as well. It is well known by now that the Patriot Acts, the BIOSHIELD Acts and other US laws make mandatory vaccination a reality once the world “Pandemic” is invoked. And those who resist will, says the law, be interred or quarantined for an indeterminate period.

The propaganda war continues: Those who opt out of this questionable procedure are endangering us all, they say. But is that true? No, not at all.

Vaccination is, in fact, based on 4 major myths or, if you want to be more precise, lies.

Vaccination is based on junk science, and has been since the first “experiments” by that mountebank enshrined by history, Edward Jenner, the founder of virology and vaccination. In 1796, when Jenner transferred “cowpox”, actually syphilis, from the hand of milk maid Sarah Nelmes to 8 year old James Phipps, allegedly protecting James from smallpox. In fact, James and Jenner’s own son died from the repeated immune challenges induced by Jenner’s repeated inoculation.

Within 60 years, it was clear that Jenner’s procedures were neither safe nor effective. Since the British Parliament decided that although Jenner’s now-mandatory vaccination against small pox was causing deadly epidemics of syphilis and leprosy in otherwise healthy babies, it would be embarrassing to admit its error to the British public. Rather than reverse its support of both vaccination and Jenner, it chose to protect its own face at the expense of its citizens’ well-being, therefore laying the groundwork for today’s government position on vaccinations.

Much has been written about the dangers of vaccination and those who are interested in learning what vaccination is really about and how to avoid it for themselves and their children are invited to join the Natural Solutions Foundation vigorous and informative No-Forced-Vaccination Forum at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/no-forced-vaccination/join

The article, “The Syringe of Death” is more timely than ever since BARDA was established last year and the United States Government is determined to add both voluntary and mandatory vaccinations to our lives at ever-accelerating rates, despite common sense and good science.

To stop compulsory vaccination and drugging, click on each of the following action steps and ask your friends and neighbors to do the same:
Stop Compulsory Vaccination and Drugging
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=21833

Protect Philosophical Exemptions to Vaccinations
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=23087

Sign the Tiburon Declaration on Compulsory Vaccination
http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=460

Remember, your voice is the one that can make the difference.

Yours in health and freedom,

Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.Organics4U.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org

The Syringe of Death, Coming Soon To A Police Station Near You
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation

Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) thinks he owns your body. If he’s right, you will have no
say over what gets injected into it and no recourse under the law if it harms or kills you.
That is, if Burr gets what he’s after and S. 1873 passes the US Senate. Burr’s bill,
“Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005”, establishes the
Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA), a secretive and
secret agency exempt from public scrutiny, the Freedom of Information Act and the
Federal Advisory Committee Act. BARDA will be the only agency which can declare a
pandemic condition and may do so for any (or no) reason. Operating in secret, BARDA
will be responsible for the advanced research and development of drugs and vaccines (in
partnership with pharmaceutical companies), and, because the contents of those vaccines
will remain shrouded in BARDA darkness, any injuries and deaths caused by drugs and
vaccines which BARDA labels “countermeasures” to any BARDA-declared threat may
never be known.

Even if those contents do become known, S. 1873 cancels any manufacturer liability for
the companies that made the vaccines or drugs. Injured parties will have no legal means
of securing compensation from either the government or the companies themselves.

And BARDA can declare a pandemic (at any time) and require mandatory universal
forced vaccination.

Can we assume that these vaccines will provide us any protection at all? Perhaps, but
it’s not likely. First, clearly understand that under BARDA you may be (legally)
subjected to experimental drugs – drugs which have no track record at all – and, second,
with or without the advent of BARDA, it is now more important than ever that the real
truth about vaccines be widely and quickly disseminated. There are reported to be more
than 200 new vaccines “in the pipeline”. If they, along with the ones in use now, are not
safe, we, and our children, are not safe.

All of us have been carefully conditioned to believe that vaccines are safe. But the truth
is ugly and, with BARDA staring us in the face, more than a little frightening. Here are
the cold, hard facts:

Cold, Hard Fact # 1: Vaccines are not safe: vaccines are dangerous. The evidence is
abundant that the tragic cost of loading babies and children up with toxic brews of
mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, injected foreign protein, stealth viruses and, in the
second generation vaccines, the deadly immune enhancer squalene, is unacceptably high.
Lives are ruined and lost in these children when toxins overwhelm their immune systems
and brains and cause tragic, totally preventable suffering and death. Autism (occurring in
4 children per 10,000 when I graduated from medical school in 1970) now afflicts a
minimum of 1 child in 168 in the US. Children have not changed: the poisons we give
them have. Gulf War Syndrome, a pervasive, progressive, deadly auto-immune disease
afflicting over half a million US veterans, appears to be a deadly vaccine reaction to an
experimental vaccine (Anthrax) which the US used on soldiers without their consent in
clear violation of the Helsinki Declaration and the Nuremberg Protocols, international
conventions and agreements which prohibit human experimentation without full
informed consent.

The concept of informed consent, is, of course, is meaningless in the face of compulsory
vaccination with secret ingredients and no manufacturer accountability.

Contaminants make vaccines tremendously dangerous. Swine flu (for a pandemic which
never materialized) was contaminated with polio virus in 1976. Over 45 million
Americans were vaccinated in just 77 days and although there were only 6 cases of Swine
flu in the entire country the vaccine reportedly caused at least 565 cases of polio paralysis
(renamed “Guillain-Barre Syndrome” for the occasion), 60 deaths and other serious
problems, including blindness and impotence. (There is no reason to feel reassured
because this particular disaster occurred in the past: every flu vaccine is capable of
passing along Guillain-Barre (polio) and other unsuspected viral diseases.)

Cold, Hard Fact # 2: Vaccines have not eradicated diseases: vaccines spread diseases.
Attenuated viruses (infective, weakened versions of the dangerous ones) are commonly
used in vaccines so that your body will develop an immune ‘memory’ for that virus. The
next time your immune system meets that specific virus, it rapidly combats it by
producing large numbers of antibodies. This practice and theory derive from the dawn of
vaccination: Edward Jenner’s pioneering use of cowpox pus inoculations to eliminate
smallpox. This innovative and surprising medical treatment is touted as one of the
triumphs of modern medicine. It makes a wonderful story but, in fact, inoculation not
only spread smallpox, it caused well-documented epidemics of syphilis and leprosy in
inoculated people, especially babies (who have immature immune systems). In spite of
the documented associated dangers of leprosy, syphilis, smallpox, death and blindness,
England provided free vaccination in 1840, made it compulsory in 1853, and punished
lack of vaccination with seizure of property and imprisonment in 1857 (which should
sound familiar). It took a British Royal Commission some 41 years more to put a stop to
the deaths and disease that Jenner’s unproven technique caused. Finally, in 1898,
England’s compulsory smallpox vaccination laws were overturned.

In 1854, the first year of British compulsory vaccination, deaths from syphilis in infants
under 1 year increased by 50% and continued to rise steadily after that. In 1802 Jenner
was paid 10,000 pounds by the House of Commons. Shortly afterwards, it became clear
that vaccines did not work. Rather than lose face, the House of Commons granted Jenner
another 20,000 pounds in 1807 and 3,000 pounds a year thereafter.

Jenner knew that milk maids who milked with active pus-filled sores on their hands
transmitted pox to their cows. Local superstition held that the cow’s pus was a
preventive against small pox. Jennings learned from a local farmer, Benjamin Jestey, that
he had inoculated his wife and 3 children with cowpox pus by jabbing them with a
darning needle and they did not contract small pox. Jenner assumed that this meant they
were protected against smallpox. To the modern ear this is absurd. In Jenner’s day,
neither methodology nor the scientific method were part of the culture.

Jenner, a village apothecary who purchased a University of Edinburgh MD for 15
pounds, was a showman who made much of his “discovery” and hastened to induce
Sarah Nelmes, a young milk maid with a fresh lesion on her finger, to allow him to
collect pus from her sore. He inoculated an 8 year old named James Phipps who
developed a fever and a pustule on his skin. Seventeen days later he inoculated the boy
again, this time with small pox. Since the boy did not develop smallpox, Jenner
concluded that “protection was complete”.

Jenner hawked his inoculation but people started to complain because they were
developing smallpox (and syphilis) after vaccination with Jenner’s cowpox. Jenner
switched to infected material from horses’ heels instead (“Horse-grease”). John Baker,
the child he inoculated with horse-grease, however, died before he could expose him to
small pox. Undeterred, he inoculated 6 more children with horse-grease and was so
convinced that the results would be positive that he rushed to London to publish them
before there were any results. The [untested] “success” of James Phipps’ inoculation and
his London paper established Jenner’s method and his success. Revolted by the idea of
horse-grease inoculations, people demanded cowpox inoculations again. Jenner
complied.

But just what is cow pox? In tropical countries it is cutaneous smallpox plus leprosy (a
non-lethal disease often present along with leprosy) while in more moderate climates the
milk maids were transferring syphilis to the cattle along with their cutaneous smallpox.
Jenner was making his brew from the cowpox pus and the results were
nothing short of disastrous for untold numbers of people.

Modern small pox vaccines are produced in much the same way: lesions are induced on
the skin of calves and, after they are “sacrificed” [and sold for veal?], the harvested
material from their lesions is cultured in eggs and prepared as vaccines.

However, although immunity fails to develop more than 80% of the time, serious side
effects are distressingly common from the modern small pox vaccines: At least 52 people
out of every million will have life threatening events and 1-2 will die. Permanent damage
to heart, brain, skin and GI effects are also well known side effects. The Center for
Disease Control (CDC) notes that serious side effects and dangers probably occur much
more often since many people can be harmed by live virus vaccines: immune
compromised people (on steroids, with eczema or psoriasis, nursing babies, pregnant
women and their fetuses, people with HIV/AIDs, transplant patients, chemotherapy and
radiation patients, people with auto-immune diseases, young children, asthmatics, etc.)
are at serious risk for contracting the same disease that the inoculation is designed to
prevent or worse.

In the US, the CDC classifies more than 60 million people as immune compromised.
People who are re-inoculated after many years are particularly susceptible to severe and
life threatening reactions. Those who are ill are likely to develop sever effects as well.
In fact, Tommy Thompson, former Health and Human Services boss, said that he would
not take the vaccine although the US is stock piling “a dose of smallpox vaccine with
every American’s name on it”. Perhaps the one with his name has been changed so it
reads, “To Whom It May Concern”.

S. 1873 and BARDA would, according to its proponents, allow absolutely no exemptions
for medical conditions or personal conviction. None.

Dr. Mike Lane, former director of the CDC’s so-called “smallpox eradication program”
in the 1970’s, is a proponent of mass vaccination with no exemptions saying, “Medical
contraindications would not apply… there would be NO exceptions. [In India] I’m sure
that we killed a few people, but we did the best that we could….If the person is exposed
there will be no exemptions, medical or otherwise.”

When a live virus is used in the vaccine, infective virus is shed for anywhere from 4 to 21
days (or more) and, during that time, inoculated persons can give the disease, or the side
effects of the inoculation, to any vulnerable person they come into contact with.

So, while it may be true that vaccines have spread disease, isn’t it true that vaccines have
eliminated the epidemic diseases of the past? No, actually they have not. Neither
Jenner’s cowpox inoculation nor modern smallpox inoculation did anything to eliminate
smallpox (quite the contrary). The fact is, Dr. Charles A. R. Campbell discovered that
smallpox is transmitted by the flying bedbug, Cimex lectularius, and that eliminating this
parasitic insect from human habitation eliminates smallpox, too. Personal hygiene and
better housekeeping eliminated the deadly scourge. (Dr. Campbell also discovered that
the disfiguring pocks of the disease could be prevented by a diet high in Vitamin C.)

When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the planet “smallpox free” in
1980, they did so administratively, not medically: small pox incidence was reduced, but
not gone, despite nearly universal vaccination. What to do? WHO solved the problem
cleverly: they renamed the disease “cowpox” and “monkey pox”. Shazam: a smallpox
free planet, quicker than you can say, “Junk Science!”

Other epidemic diseases were in sharp decline at the end of the 19th and early 20th
centuries as a direct consequence of improved hygiene and other life-style changes.
Measles, Diphtheria, Whooping Cough, Polio and Hepatitis B were all in sharp decline
long before vaccines were introduced. The contribution to the decline made by vaccines,
however, was negligible or non-existent. Scarlet Fever, typhoid fever and cholera, for
which inoculation either did not exist or was never wide-spread, declined on the same
sharp curve for the same reasons. So do we need inoculations because of the public
health hazard? Despite the considerable hype, in fact, there is no unbiased evidence
which connects disease prevention with inoculation.

Cold, Hard Fact # 3: Flu vaccines do not protect people from flu-related deaths.
The CDC claims that an astonishing 36,000 people die from flu in an average year. But
according to the former Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, 68
people under 65 die from flu each year in the US. The truth is that in 4 years, a total
4,440 people, mostly elderly, died from flu, no where near the CDC’s touted 144,000
deaths. While that figure is great for flu vaccine sales, it derivers not from reality but
from the CDC’s industry-friendly statistical trick of classifying all pneumonia-related
deaths, despite any lack of evidence, as flu deaths. Discussing this nonsense, Lone
Simonsen of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease/NIH, writes in The
Archives of Internal Medicine “We could not correlate increasing vaccination coverage
after 1980 with declining mortality rates in any age group. Because fewer than 10% of all
winter deaths were attributable to influenza in any season, we conclude that observational
studies substantially overestimate vaccination benefit.”1

Cold, Hard Fact # 4: Potential pandemic viral diseases like the Bird Flu do not have safe
and effective vaccines to prevent them and there are no drugs to treat them effectively.
Despite that fact, on September 15, 2005 the US purchased $100 Million of a French
experimental flu vaccine designed to protect against bird flu. It’s so experimental, in fact,
that although we have purchased megabucks worth of the stuff, the French manufacturer,
Sanofi-Pasteur, is planning to experiment with adjutants (immune response enhancers) to
rev up human response to it. Perhaps the adjuvant is the same one that the Army used in
the deadly Vaccine A against anthrax: squalene. The purchase is real, but there is
currently no such thing as a vaccine for pandemic bird flu.

Unfortunately, even if vaccines did work (they don’t) and were safe (they’re not), a virus
has to actually exist before you can make a vaccine that can control the disease. The
pandemic version of the latest bird flu does not yet exist. Vaccines are very specific: they
train the immune system to make antibodies to a particular protein sequence. Because
those antibodies are highly specific, guessing wrong on which flu strain is coming soon
to a droplet near you has led to an embarrassing history, year after year, of ineffective flu
shots against the wrong strain of virus. People developed side effects, but the shots did
not ward off the flu since the vaccine misfired with regard to the virus it was supposed to
be protecting people against. And, oh by the way, experimental vaccines are not even
alleged to be safe. No one knows what effects they will have. And, under BARDA, no
one (least of all the manufacturer) will need to worry about that.

Allegedly, the bird flu pandemic version has not yet mutated and therefore does not exist
so there is no way whatsoever to make a vaccine against it. Not even the US Government
can make a vaccine against an imaginary virus. But that is just what the government
wants us to believe they can do. Clearly, the French experimental flu vaccine purchase is
a political, not a public health one. IF the bird flu mutates and becomes pandemic, it
would take between 4 and 18 months to gear up to make commercial quantities of the

1
(http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/165/3/265)
vaccine. In the meantime, anyone getting the bird flu and surviving it would have natural
antibodies to the disease. But right now, unless the already-mutated pandemic H5N1
virus is being stock-piled in a laboratory for convenient release at an opportune moment
(which is certainly possible), the virus needed to make a real bird flu vaccine exists only
in fearful imagination. So what would BARDA inoculate you with? Who knows? A
nanochip to track you, perhaps? The technology exists. An experimental drug, maybe?
Something that someone wants to test on huge numbers of people whether they like it or
not? Squalene? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Only BARDA would know. You won’t.

BARDA would be above the law and beyond investigation. Consider: the anthrax vaccine
currently being tested on US 2nd and 3rd graders contains squalene. The experiment is
therefore not about anthrax (the vaccine is only approved for cutaneous anthrax, a non-
life threatening disease highly unlikely to be used, therefore, as a bio-weapon) but rather
about what happens to children given a deadly substance which stimulates their immune
systems to destroy their bodies over time. After World War II, the managers of IG
Farben, the vast German industrial combine, were imprisoned for Crimes Against
Humanity for precisely this kind of activity. Who will be convicted this time? The head
of super-secret BARDA? On what secret evidence? This is what the
government/pharmaceutical cabal is doing now in full view of the public and of
Congress. Can you imagine what would happen if there were no public scrutiny at all
and no legal liability for any ill deeds whatsoever? Only if you can imagine BARDA.

BARDA is a medical Gestapo. It would have the power to initiate a medical marshal law
from which the only escapes would be prison, death, fleeing the country or rebellion.

Bill S. 1873 has five powerful Republican co-sponsors: Republican Senate Majority
Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee
Chairman Mike Enzi (R-WY), Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg (R-NH),
Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) and Alexander Lamar (R-TN).

Visit www.HealthFreedomUSA.org for the latest in health freedom news. Sign up for
Health Freedom eAlerts (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=187). And don’t forget to make your sustaining, recurring tax exempt donation (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) to the Natural Solutions Foundation, a tax exempt organization.

Categories : Activism, Blog / Vlog, Compulsory Drugging, Disinformation, Get Involved, Medical Hazards, Vaccination
Tags : BARDA, Biodefense, Biosecurity, Disinformation, FDA, Health Hazards, Innoculation, Natural Solutions Foundation, Pandemic, Vaccination

GM Files: The Apologists’s Spin on GMOs

By Administrator on April 5, 2008 No Comments

What Do the FrankenFood/FrankenCrop/FrankenAnimal Defenders Have to Say for Themselves?

The Natural Solutions Foundation, the leading Global Health Freedom organization, is proud to present this information to you. We protect your right to know about – and to use – natural ways to maintain and regain your health, no matter where in the world you live. Among your freedoms is the right to clean, unadulterated food free of genetic manipulation, pesticides, heavy metals or other contaminants and access to herbs, supplements, frequency devices and other means as therapies that may benefit or to protect your well-being without drugs and other dangerous interventions, if you choose.

For more information on our global programs, including the International Decade of Nutrition, and our US based ones, please visit us at www.HealthFreedomUSA.org and www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org and join the free email list for the Health Freedom eAlerts to keep you in the loop, informed and active defending your right to make your own decisions about your health and wellbeing!
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Feel free to disseminate this information as widely as possible with full attribution.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima

Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.organics4U.org

Reason Denied

Reason Magazine may be a voice of libertarian politics and economics, but, at least on the issue of Genetically Modified Crops, it has made a serious mistake. Kerry Howley, a Senior Editor at Reason, http://www.reason.com/news/show/125722.html, has somehow forgotten a critical element when writing an ringing apologia full of industry propaganda for the apotheosis, the pinnacle in the triumph of free market over sense or, indeed, reason (and perhaps survival) itself. What he has forgotten is science. Fact, the handmaiden of science, lies trampled in the dust as well. And so does health, yours, mine and the planet’s.

In fact, although unbridled free market economics is the central chord of the libertarian song, the chorus is “As long as your freedom does not hurt me”. And therein lies the rub: Genetically Modified ANYTHING hurts me, and you, and every sufferer of Morgellon’s Disease and every biological function of the earth. But, at least until recently, it certainly has been good business!

But since when is damaging the biosphere not hurting me?
Since when is modifying bacteria which take up residence in our soil and in my gut with potentially lethal long and short term consequences, not harming me?
Since when is creating corn which ensures permanent male sterility and mixing it, unlabeled, into my food, not harming me?
Since when is altering crops to produce so much of a natural pesticide that farmers and their families die from the allergic reaction they experience to breathing the crop’s pollen not harming me?
Since when is introducing “food” into my body, without my consent, which increases allergic reactions, including deadly ones, by 50% not harming me?
Since when is modifying fish so that they are larger, more aggressive and breed earlier in their life cycle so that they will replace native, unmodified fish in the wild, leaving me no choice to eat non GM FrankenFish (because they have been made extinct) not harming me?
Since when is inserting unstable genes into my food which then, undigested by a gut not prepared by long acquaintance to digest them, wander around my body and insert themselves in unpredictable locations in my genes and those of a baby I am carrying if I am pregnant not harming me?
Since when is creating materials which infect and infest me with pseudo life forms bringing a new plague upon the earth, the horrifying and disfiguring Morgellon’s Disease, not harming me?
Since when is creating foods whose wandering genes turn on, or off, my own genes in a totally unpredictable way leading to disruption of the orderly process of genetic control in my body not harming me?
Since when is introducing genetic material which, in the random context of where it happens to land this time in this or that cell, produces proteins never before made inside of any living body (or, perhaps, outside of one, either) without my explicit permission not harming me?
Since when is lowering fetal survival rates though the food the pregnant woman eats during pregnancy, or ate during her own child hood, perhaps, not harming me?
Since when is introducing food into my children’s diet which, in laboratory studies, has been shown to cause damage to the gut, the kidneys, the immune system and the survivability of the young not harming me?
Since when is creating super weeds through genetic drift not harming me?
Since when is creating bugs which, in response to super pesticide production in genetically modified crops, have become resistant to pesticides and capable of new crop devastation without available control not harming me?
Since when is invading farms where non GM crops are growing and destroying their millennia-old genetic material (which I have the enzymatic capacity to digest) not harming me?
Since when is providing food which contains enzymes which confer tolerance for deadly pesticides to a genetically modified plant, but which, in my gut, may transform to produce the same deadly pesticide (a known cause of cancer, infertility and other highly dangerous conditions) they were altered to tolerate not harming me?

Who asked my permission to introduce these things into my body and my world. I would remind Mr. Howley that it is, indeed my world, as well as the world of his commerical free market buddies.

I do not recall signing an informed consent to be a trial subject for the greatest (and possibly most deadly) experiment in human history. Interestingly, I also do not recall signing a contract to allow the degradation and dangerous contamination of 75-80% of every bit of food that I eat with Genetically Modified ingredients. Do you recall signing those documents? So the libertarian chorus, “As long as it does not harm me” seems a little flat in this particular song. Dead flat.

When then-President George H. W. Bush declared that GMOs were equivalent to non GM food and determined public policy, do you recall any safety testing used to guide that decision? Neither do I. When the FDA permits GM foods on the market – that means in your body and mine – without ANY safety testing or a review of the internal safety assessment of the companies that have patented these foods, do they ask us to concur with their decision to allow GMOs in our food which are either under moratorium or banned in a large part of the world, developed or not? But here, in what is alleged to be the most developed nation in the world (with little to back that up in the health and food safety areas!), we are subjected to “foods” and crops and animals which are simultaneously declared to be exactly the same as unmodified foods yet sufficiently unique to patent. And those products of innovation and free market success are, according to the FDA’s website, to be judged in their safety and product liability through the sorting out process of the Court system.

Of course, without traceability there can be no liability. Without labeling there can be no traceability. Thanks for nothing.

So where is the free market, libertarian ethic here? What it comes down to in Mr. Howley’s underlying, structural view is that if you can get away with selling it, not only must that be a good thing to do (“free market”), but hey, “caveat emptor”, let the buyer beware – if they can get away with selling the stuff, they sell it, so it must be good. Of course, the ever-industry-friendly FDA and USDA tie the buyer’s hands and blindfold their eyes by making sure that the consumer has no knowledge whatsoever of what foods do and do not contain GM ingredients. They actually specifically prohibit such labeling because they know full well that consumers will shun the contaminated, altered and potentially very dangerous products which their industry friends have created if they know what they are eating or buying.

Full Free Market Speed ahead and Damn the Facts

GM food crops which have been modified for pesticide tolerance lead to more, not less, pesticide use. Since they are proffered by the maker of the very pesticide they tolerate so well, farmers are encouraged to use more and the free market gets another boost while the food supply, both the consumer’s and the farmer’s health and the environment all take substantial hits.

I attended a meeting in Africa at which Sylvia Matsebo, then Minister of Health of Zambia, was present and we had a chance to talk. I do not know when I have met a more clear sighted and dedicated woman in public life, unless it was the Minister of Health of Kenya, also present at that meeting. When President Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia rejected GM food for his people, as referenced by the article below, I cannot but believe that Ms. Matsebo was at the head of his advisers, telling him what was good for his people, not for his pockets. Would that our advisers and our leaders had the courage and wisdom on this issue of President Mwanawasa!

In 2004, author Robert Paarlberg noted, “Roughly 90 percent of the cotton and soybeans produced in the US are genetically modified. Fifty or 70 percent of the corn is genetically modified. If you look at the products on a retail store shelf, probably 70 percent of them contain some ingredients from genetically modified crops. Mostly corn or soybeans.” Today the situation is worse with more products and more percentages of crops grown in the US and elsewhere modified to the point that the supply of GM ingredients to manufacture organic foods is not in jeopardy. For Natural Solutions Foundation concerns, see above.

Reason rests its comfort level with this technology on the assertion that Mr. Paarlberg makes that there are no studies showing the danger of GM foods. That is as patently false as the statement made to me, personally, in a meeting on June 9, 2005, by Dr. Edward Scarborough, the US Codex Contact Point, that there is simply no literature showing the impact of nutrients on health. I sent him, in response, a bibliography containing references to 10s of thousands of peer reviewed articles and books showing the impact of nutrients on health, a good part of them sponsored by grants, or conducted directly by, the US Government. He never responded, of course. My letter, and that bibliography, were published through our website, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org and the bibliography was referenced in our Citizens Petition to the FDA to compel them to cease their illegal “HARMonization” of US dietary supplements to Codex standards. You can join this legal challenge to US Supplement Codex policy here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=184).

Mr. Paarlberg exudes joy over the fact that plants modified to make their own pesticides do so at levels up to 10,000 time the amount made by the organism that manufactures it in nature. It is quite effective at the lower level in nature but at these enormous concentrations not only do insects, both crop pests and beneficial ones, die, but the impact on our bodies when we eat the food from the crops – or wear the clothing made from these fibers – modified in this way, is completely unknown. What is know is that the pollen can cause pneumonia and kill people exposed to it as happened in the Phillipines during cotton pollination time.

What is also missing from this enthusiastic recounting of the wonders of this technology is the 22,000 farmers who have killed themselves in the State of Gujerat (India) in their final grim protest against what this crop has done to them – driven them off the land because they cannot afford to pay the intellectual property tax added to the cost of the seed after they were given the seed free for the first year, destroyed their cultures and devastated their families. Somehow that does not count in the economium of free market thinking.

Happily publishing Mr. Paalberg’s unsubstantiated (and inaccurate) assessment that there is no damage to the environment, in the face of well-documented information to the contrary, and blithly accepting the premise that “gene flow”, aka “contamination” is no different from natural crop cross pollination (which does not require the payment of taxes to the “owner” of the natural gene), and the prohibitions against saving seed because of intellectual property rights which accrue to the owner of the patented genes), Reason has lost its reason.

On the issue of organic farming, things get even weirder. Instead of using vermicluture (adding worms to soil) and returning nutrients and soil organisms (or adding them for the first time) through natural means such as composting (every village produces waste: using it properly returns nutrients to the soil – see the Songhai videos here (http://www.youtube.com/naturalsolutions) – the answer of this industrial agriculturalist and Reason seems to be using synthetic fertilizers which deplete the soil more and more with each growing cycle, leading to green, but non nutritive plants. Both Mr. Howley and Mr. Paarlberg seem to have forgotten, or have never known, that organic agriculture replenishes and enriches the soil as a basic technique of food production, rather than wresting contaminated and demineralized plants from an increasingly devitalized soil. Their intentions may be good, but their information, and hence their conclusions, make no biological sense whatsoever. True, they make free market sense. That’s the problem, as I see it.

However, despite his frustration with the lack of penetration of GMOs in Africa, Mr. Paalberg genially recounts that he sees hope on the horizon “Just last week in Nairobi the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that they would be going forward with the [GMO] drought-tolerant maize project.” Mr. Paalberg may find hope in that. I find it depressing and frightening in light of the aptly named “Doomsday Vault” in which native seeds are being stored by the hundreds of millions in the frozen wastes of Norway above the arctic circle in the bowels of a hollowed-out mountain. The Doomsday Vault was sponsored, in part, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same people who brought nearly universal vaccination to the children of Africa.

If you are a believer in the wonders of vaccination, that is a generous and humanitarian project. If you are familiar, however, with the literature, not just the propaganda, on vaccination and the impact it has on human populations (autism, cancer, immune collapse, heavy metal poisoning, auto immune disease, etc.), then this “generosity” becomes a cause for concern. The concern is, in my mind, equal to the concern on learning that Mr. and Mrs. Gates have chosen yet another way to forward the biological nightmare of genetically modified foods in yet another vulnerable population.

The Natural Solutions Foundation will attend the 2008 Codex Committee on Food Labeling (April, Ottawa) where the African nations will deal, once again, with the US attempt to push unlabeled GM foods on them through both product and seeds. We will be actively engaged in supporting their leadership to prevent this effort from succeeding. In February, at a meeting on this issue in Accra, the African nations created a de facto coalition which elicited the support of Norway, Russia, Japan, the EU and Switzerland. They, unlike the free market folks, understand that governments have a role to play in protecting the health of their people from corporate desires to expand markets.

Please support the efforts of the Natural Solutions Foundation to educate and disseminate information on these crucial issues.
Make a tax deductible recurring donation (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) and ask as many people as possible to sign up for the free, secure Health Freedom eAlerts (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=187) to make sure that the voice of Health Freedom is loud, clear and effective.

Natural Solutions Foundation: We are more than just talk!
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima

Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org

Demon Seed

How fear of life-saving technology swept through Africa

Kerry Howley | March 28, 2008

In May 2002, in the midst of a severe food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa, the government of Zimbabwe turned away 10,000 tons of corn from the World Food Program (WFP). The WFP then diverted the food to other countries, including Zambia, where 2.5 million people were in need. The Zambian government locked away the corn, banned its distribution, and stopped another shipment on its way to the country. “Simply because my people are hungry,” President Levy Mwanawasa later said, “is no justification to give them poison.”

The corn came from farms in the United States, where most corn produced—and consumed—comes from seeds that have been engineered to resist some pests, and thus qualifies as genetically modified. Throughout the 90s, genetically modified foods were seen as holding promise for the farmers of Africa, so long as multinationals would invest in developing superior African crops rather than extend the technology only to the rich. When Zambia and Zimbabwe turned away food aid, simmering controversy over the crops themselves brimmed over and seeped into almost every African state. Cast as toxic to humans, destructive to the environment, and part of a corporate plot to immiserate the poor, cutting edge farming technology is most feared where it is most needed. As Robert Paarlberg notes in his new book, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa (Harvard University Press), in 2004 the Sudanese government “took time out from its genocidal suppression of a rebellion in Darfur to issue a memorandum requiring that all food aid brought into the country should be certified as free of any GM ingredients.”

Starved for Science includes forwards by both Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug, the architect of Asia’s Green Revolution and the man credited with saving more human lives than anyone else in history. Paarlberg, a Professor of Political Science at Wellesley and a specialist in agricultural policy, wants the West to help small African farmers obtain promising technologies just as it helped Asia discover biological breakthroughs in the 60s and 70s. Instead, he says, a coalition of European governments and African elites are promoting a Western vision of rustic, low-productivity labor.

reason: Was there a particular experience with African farmers that led you to write this book?

Robert Paarlberg: Partly it was the strong impression made on me by my own visits to rural Africa, working with African organizations, working with USAID, working with International Food Policy Research Institute. I started visiting small farms in Africa 15 years ago. I’d seen a lot of poor farmers in Asia and Latin America but absolutely nothing like this. There was simply no uptake of any modern productivity-enhancing technologies at all in some cases. And I wondered why I hadn’t been aware of this. And then, when I saw more and more narrative in the NGO community and the donor community that was frankly hostile to science, I thought “I have to put this down and write a book for younger people in the donor community who may not remember the importance of technology uptake in Asian agriculture 40 years ago.”

reason: You suggest that your understanding of modern ideas about food production arises from interactions with your students. What is it that they want?

Paarlberg: My students know just what kind of food system they want: a food system that isn’t based on industrial scale monoculture. They want instead small farms built around nature imitating polycultures. They don’t want chemical use; they certainly don’t want genetic engineering. They want slow food instead of fast food. They’ve got this image of what would be better than what we have now. And what they probably don’t realize is that Africa is an extreme version of that fantasy. If we were producing our own food that way, 60 percent of us would still be farming and would be earning a dollar a day, and a third of us would be malnourished. I’m trying to find some way to honor the rejection that my students have for some aspects of modern farming, but I don’t want them to fantasize about the exact opposite.

reason: Can you give an example of a genetically modified seed or organism, something in use today?

Paarlberg: Bt crops have been engineered to contain a gene from a naturally occurring soil bacterium that expresses a certain protein that cannot be digested by caterpillars. Mammals can digest the protein with absolutely no problem, but caterpillars cannot. When the caterpillars eat the plant, they die.

What’s wonderful about this is that it’s so precisely targeted at the insects eating the plant. The other insects in the field aren’t affected. Using conventional corn instead of Bt corn, you have to spray the whole field and you end up killing a lot of non-targeted species. With this variety, you don’t have to spray.

reason: That sounds less scary than “Genetically Modified Organism.”

Paarlberg: The book makes the argument that the overregulation of this technology in Europe and the anxieties felt about it in the United States are not so much a reflection of risks, because there aren’t any documented risks from any GM crops on the market. I explain that reaction through the absence of direct benefit. The technology is directly beneficial to only a tiny number of citizens in rich countries—soybean farmers, corn farmers, a few seed companies, patent holders. Consumers don’t get a direct benefit at all, so it doesn’t cost them anything to drive it off the market with regulations. The problem comes when the regulatory systems created in rich countries are then exported to regions like Africa, where two thirds of the people are farmers, and where they would be the direct beneficiaries.

reason: How pervasive are genetically modified foods in the U.S.?

Paarlberg: Roughly 90 percent of the cotton and soybeans produced in the US are genetically modified. Fifty or 70 percent of the corn is genetically modified. If you look at the products on a retail store shelf, probably 70 percent of them contain some ingredients from genetically modified crops. Mostly corn or soybeans.

reason: Are there documented safety risks that merit caution?

Paarlberg: There aren’t any. It’s like the first ten years of aviation without a plane crash.

reason: What about environmental risks? Don’t GM crops affect surrounding plantlife?

Paarlberg: The only impacts they have different from conventional crops are beneficial to the environment. They allow you to control weeds and insects with fewer sprayings of toxic chemicals. And they don’t require as many trips through the field with your diesel tractor, so you burn less fossil fuel. And there is more carbon sequestered because you’re not tilling the soil the way you otherwise would.

There are environmental impacts; there is gene flow. The pollen from a genetically modified maize plant will flow into a neighboring field and will fertilize the crops in that neighboring field. Some of the seeds, as a consequence, will contain the transgene, but that’s no different from pollen from a conventional maize plant flowing into the next field. It’s only if you decide arbitrarily to define gene flow from genetically modified crops as “contamination” and flow from all other crops as natural. Only then does it start to become describable as an adverse effect.

The worst environmental damage ever done by American agricultural was the dustbowl of the 1930s, when we plowed up the southern plains to grow wheat, and all the topsoil blew away. The way we increased production back then was to expand crop area, which was environmentally disastrous. It was a calamity. That was the way we tried to increase production before we had high yielding crops, before we had high yielding wheat varieties, before we had hybrid maize, before we learned to increase the productivity of the land already under cultivation.

reason: Can you give us a sense of what an average African farmer in, say, Zambia, is currently working with?

Paarlberg: It would be a woman and her children primarily, and they would plant not a hybrid maize, but a traditional openly pollinated variety, and they would time the preparation of the soil and planting as best they could for when they thought the rains would come. But the rains might not come in time, or they might be too heavy and wash the seeds out of the ground. It’s a risky endeavor. They can’t afford fertilizer, and it’s too risky to use fertilizer because in a drought the maize would shrivel up and the fertilizer would be wasted. They don’t have any irrigation. As a consequence, even in a good year their yields per hectare will be only about one third as high as in Asian countries, 1/10 as high as in the United States.

reason: Just as it used to be in Asia.

Paarlberg: Everywhere!

reason: Right, everywhere. But Asia has moved on in recent memory. The Green Revolution introduced new biological breakthroughs to Asian agriculture to the point where no one today thinks of South Korea as a rural backwater. Why was Africa not a part of this?

Paarlberg: One reason is that Africa is not easily irrigated. The big irrigated crops like rice aren’t to be found in Africa and the big investments in the Green Revolution went into improving Asian crops like rice. The crops Africans grow weren’t the crops that were being improved during the green revolution.

But I don’t blame it all on the Asia-focus of the original green revolution; we have had plenty of time to invest in scientific research for Africa’s crops, and to make investments in rural public goods like roads or power to make it affordable for African farmers to purchase fertilizer. But African governments have not done that job. In my book I show that typically African governments will spend less than 5 percent of their budget on agriculture even though that’s where two thirds of their citizens work. And if you don’t have larger public sector investments than that, there is just not going to be any uptake in the countryside. But then I go around and show that you can’t blame African governments, entirely, because prosperous donor countries are no longer supporting agriculture in Africa.

reason: No African government other than South Africa’s has made it legal to plant GMOs. You call this “out of character” for the same governments.

Paarlberg: They have not yet enacted the law, set up the biosafety committee, and granted approval, which is the laborious process that [the United Nations Environmental Program] and the European governments have coached them into adopting.

It’s interesting. In no other area are governments in Africa particularly concerned about hypothetical environmental risks. They know better than to invoke the precautionary principle when it comes to unsafe food in open air markets. They know that they need to first get rid of actual food shortages and raise income; then and only then can they afford to impose the same extremely high standards of food safety on open air markets that are imposed on supermarkets in Europe. Yet curiously when it comes to GMOs they adopt the highly precautionary European standard, which makes it impossible to put these products on the market at all. I take that as evidence that this is not an authentic African response, it’s a response imported from Europe.

reason: So the romanticization of bucolic farm landscapes unmarred by scientific advance has an American and European pedigree.

Paarlberg: It’s not what we do at home—only two percent of agricultural products in the US are organically grown. And many of those that are organically grown are grown on industrial scale organic farms in California that don’t bear any resemblance to small bucolic farms. But it’s the image we promote in our new cultural narrative. It’s something that affects the way we give foreign assistance.

reason: Many of the anti-agricultural science gurus you mention in your book have a spiritual dimension. Can you talk a bit about Sylvester Graham?

Paarlberg: Sylvester Graham, the father of the modern graham cracker, was opposed to the modern flour milling industry. He didn’t like the industrialization of bread production, and he wanted women to go back to grinding flour. He was a religious man, a minister, and he had all of the narrow minded prejudices we might associate with a New England clergyman from the 19th century. He thought that women should stay in the home, he believed people should be vegetarians because that would keep their sexual appetite back. We sometimes forget what goes along with the food purist zealotry. It’s often zealotry about more than just a certain kind of food to eat.

In Zambia today there are expatriate Jesuits from the United States who have come to believe genetic engineering is against God’s teaching, though this is not a belief that is embraced by the Vatican. They believe that all living things, including plants, have a right not to have their genetic makeup modified. Of course we have been modifying the genetic makeup of plants ever since we domesticated them 10,000 years ago, but these particular fathers are focused only on genetic engineering.

reason: Isn’t it paternalistic to blame Europeans for the decisions of African governments? Is this something African elites are at least as complicit in?

Paarlberg: It’s a codependency. The African elites depend upon Europe for financial assistance, they depend upon European export markets, they depend on NGOs for technical assistance, it’s just easier for them to follow the European lead than to go against that lead. And to some extent the European governments depend upon having dependents in Africa that will, despite the difficult experience of colonization, continue to imitate and validate and honor European culture and taste.

reason: What exactly have European NGOs done to discourage productivity in farming? You quote Doug Parr, a chemist at Greenpeace, arguing that the de facto organic status of farms in Africa is an opportunity to lock in organic farming, since African farmers have yet to advance beyond that.

Paarlberg: Some of it is well intentioned. The organic farming movement believes this is an appropriate corrective to the chemical intensive farming that they see in Europe. In Europe, where prosperous consumers are willing to pay a premium for organic products, it sometimes makes sense to use a more costly production process. So they think, “Well it’s the wave of the future here in Europe, so it should be the future in Africa as well.”

So they tell Africans who don’t use enough fertilizer that instead of using more they should go to zero and certify themselves as organic. That’s probably the most damaging influence — discouraging Africans from using enough fertilizer to restore the nutrients they mine out of their soil. They classify African farmers as either certified organic, or de facto organic. Indeed, many are de facto organic. And their goal is not to increase the productivity of the organic farmers, but to certify them as organic.

I just find that to be lacking in moral clarity.

reason: But there are functioning organic farms. If I decide to buy only organic food from Africa, what will I be buying?

Paarlberg: It wouldn’t be grown by small fair-trade-type poor farmers. It would be grown through a vertically integrated, probably European, company that would bring in the machinery, bring in the seeds, bring in the fertilizers, set up a production system that would more nearly resemble a colonial-era plantation than a small independent African farm.

reason: We’ve seen similar resistance to GMOs in India and Brazil, both of which now have legalized the use of genetically modified crops. What happened?

Paarlberg: Farmers were planting them illicitly before the final approval—that’s one reason they were forced into the approval. The technology worked so well that farmers were planting them on their own and you couldn’t criminalize all Brazilian soybean growers so you had to approve them. Similarly in India, Bt cotton spread on its own and performed so well that the government was eventually shamed into approving it.

reason: You aren’t just calling for people to get out of the way. You want increased aid for agricultural research. But why would any of this require aid? If it’s going to prove profitable, shouldn’t the incentive for private investment be there?

Paarlberg: The farmers who need the technology in Africa don’t have enough purchasing power to be of interest to private companies. Or they’re growing crops that aren’t a part of a commercial seed market that would interest private seed companies. The only way to reach them, really, is to consider the crops that they grow, for example tropical white maize or cassava. It’s a little bit like the orphan disease problem. It’s really something that has to be done as a public good by the public sector.

That’s how the green revolution proceeded in India in the 1960s. It was a wonderful success, and it wasn’t really driven by the private sector. It was driven by philanthropic foundations and public investment. Also you need not just seed improvement, but more rural farm-to-market roads, electrification, and things that really governments and only governments are incentivized and capable of doing.

There was a time, before scare stories about technology spread, when the concern was a much more legitimate one: that we’ve handed this technology over to private companies to develop, and they won’t have any incentive to get it to Africa. And to some extent that’s still a legitimate concern. There was never any fear that Brazilian farmers or Canadian farmers wouldn’t be able to get the technology, because they’re big commercial growers. The concern was originally that Africans would want the technology but wouldn’t be able to get it because they didn’t have the purchasing power or the investment climate that could attract private companies.

reason: The book is 200 pages of frustration. Are there any glimmers of hope ahead?

Paarlberg: Just last week in Nairobi the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that they would be going forward with the drought-tolerant maize project that I describe in chapter 5 of my book. I’m very pleased that the Gates Foundation has seen the opportunity that this new technology provides. It would be too bad if drought tolerant corn were being grown in Iowa in 2010 and not available to the farmer who really needed it in Africa.

Drought in Africa pushes small farmers back into poverty whenever it strikes. They have to sell off all their household possessions to buy the food their families need until the next season. It blocks the escape from poverty that they might otherwise achieve. Anything that puts a safety net under crop yields is going to protect small African farmers from that periodic decapitalization and let them start accumulating assets for a change.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at reason.

Categories : Blog / Vlog, CODEX Consequences, CODEX Industries, GMOs, Medical Hazards
Tags : Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Doomsday Vault, environmental hazards, Franken Food, Genetically Modified, genetically modified dangers, GM, GMO, GMOs, Natural Solutions Foundation, Organic, Pesticides
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