Scientists at the EPA have been pressured for years to approve a dangerous pesticide that poses massive health risks to humans, animals, and the environment. And when scientists raised these concerns, they were told to cover them up or perform their tests again to come up with different results. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Scientists at the EPA have been pressured for years to approve a dangerous pesticide that poses massive health risk to humans, animals, and the environment. And when scientists raise these concerns, they were told that, you know what, we might have to cover this up. And that’s what’s going on. How many times does this story have to be told? You know, Paraquat, Roundup, Atrazine, I could go on forever, where the EPA, they just fall under political pressure. You know, some regulator calls ’em from another department, or some senator calls ’em and says, you know, we really need to make this happen. Pick it up.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This is a pesticide called Aldicarb. And Aldicarb, the EPA has been going back and forth on it for 14 years at least. Oh, do we approve it? Do we not? Well, according to the EPA’s own scientists, this stuff is gonna give you developmental issues. It alters babies’ brains. It’ll kill people. It’ll kill animals. It’ll kill the environment. It’ll poison the water. Poison the food. Literally poison everything out there. So let’s not approve it. But every time they say that, the higher ups and sometimes the politicians, the industry insiders.
Mike Papantonio: It’s senators. I mean, it’s senators, it’s congressmen.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. They make the phone calls and they say, hey, run your test again, but this time only look for X, Y, and Z, things they know they won’t find.
Mike Papantonio: We see it all the time. As you know, I handled Roundup. I’m handling Paraquat. I handled PFAS. Every time, the department would phony up clinicals, they literally would phony ’em up and come up with a test that would make it look safer. They would just move some numbers, a decimal point here, a decimal point there, and they’d move numbers around. This thing is so bad, it even has a nickname in the industry. It’s called All De Crap. It is absolute poison where they can see functional changes on PET scans, neurological changes on PET scans with children, babies. So they wanna use this in orange groves. All the orange juice is gonna be contaminated. Where they use it, the aquifer’s gonna be contaminated. It’s gonna be in our water, it’s gonna be in our air. But the EPA is literally still considering after 14 years, they’ve been giving, everybody has told ’em, it’s banned in 100 countries, Farron. 100 countries have looked this and said, hell no, we can’t use this.
Farron Cousins: We see that all the time too. In a lot of those cases you’re mentioning that you’ve either handled or are handling, a lot of those chemicals have been banned across the planet. But here in the United States, because we have this industry regulatory capture, we keep putting it out there and poisoning our own country, when everybody else in the world looks at us and says, are you insane? We took this off the market 20 years ago because we knew it was killing everybody.
Mike Papantonio: Imagine the politicians making these calls. I mean, most of them, IQ about room temperature. Have no idea what the science is. Well, Mr. EPA, this guy’s in my district, he gives me a lot of money. Could you just give him a break? We’re talking about killing thousands of children. I mean, that’s what the conclusion is. You would cause brain damage for infants and young children, the most susceptible to this.
Farron Cousins: Orange juice in the store would become poison for everybody drinking it.
Mike Papantonio: We’re talking about hundreds of millions of pounds of this pesticide that’s already been banned around the world. And we have a dysfunctional, stupid unworkable EPA with the same morons involved that have given us Paraquat, they’ve given us Roundup, they’ve given us PFAS. At what point do you say this is not working? You know, Richard Nixon of all people started the EPA. How crazy is that? And he said, this is a good idea to have somebody looking over these guys’ shoulders. Well, it doesn’t make any difference anymore. It is absolute fraud. It’s EPA fraud. The scientists are frauds that make this happen. They move decimals around and they make it look safe. They know exactly what they’re doing. Congress knows what they’re doing. And you know what, have you seen this article anywhere? Have you seen the corporate media covering this anywhere?
Farron Cousins: Oh, heck no. And they certainly won’t. Absolutely not.
Mike Papantonio: No. They won’t cover it a bit. But it’s kind of the perfect storm. Politicians put their foot into it to make it happen. The media has, I mean, if it’s not a low hanging fruit story, they don’t do the story. They don’t even understand how dangerous. Dicamba, great example. Same thing. And then you have regulators who end up going to work for the industry. They talk to some regulator who’s making $50,000 a year and say, hey, how would you like to make $500,000 a year? Give us a break on this, will you, Joe? And that’s what happens.
