*SAMPLE TEXT TO ROBERT KENNEDY JR., SECRETARY OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN AND HEALTH SERVICES*
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Dear Secretary Kennedy,
Thank you for your commitment to close the Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) loophole.
Genetically engineered insecticide-producing crops should have been subject to rigorous pre-market safety-testing under Congress’s 1958 Food Additives law that would have required the Food & Drug Administration to approve or reject each new GMO based on scientific evidence.
Instead, they were slipped into the food supply under a 1992 policy of the George H.W. Bush Administration’s FDA to exempt GMOs from the law by declaring them “generally recognized as safe.”
It’s about time the GMOs-are-GRAS policy was reversed.
You have ordered the Food & Drug Administration to close the GRAS loophole.
If you’re serious about your campaign to Make America Healthy Again, this will mean GMOs get the scientific reviews waived by earlier administrations. If that happens, the truth will come out, and these GMOs will have to be banned or voluntarily taken off the market to avoid liability.
Because of the 1992 FDA decision to treat all GMOs as GRAS, the safety of eating plants that have been genetically engineered to produce insecticides has never been comprehensively reviewed in the U.S., but it was extensively studied in the U.K., by Árpád Pusztai, Ph.D.
In 1995, Dr. Pusztai was working at the U.K.’s Rowett Research Institute where he had served with distinction for 35 years. Rowett was one of three institutions that won a £1.6 million competitive, peer-reviewed joint contract from the Scottish Office of Agriculture, Environment and Fisheries Department to conduct the world’s first independent research on the safety of genetically engineered food. In truth, it wasn’t even entirely independent. The contract provided that Dr. Pusztai and his fellow researchers would share the profits of the enterprise with Axis Genetics, the Cambridge biotechnology company whose product, genetically engineered insecticide-producing potatoes, would be tested.
The scientists were virtually certain their research would prove that GMOs were safe. As Dr. Pusztai wrote in 2002, he was researching a gene that he had every reason to believe could do “the job of controlling insect damage but which wouldn’t do any harm to the rat.”
But the results were unexpected. Somehow the gene product was safe when sprinkled on food, but it was less safe when expressed by the genetically engineered potatoes, even when expressed at a lower level than in the control diet. He couldn’t understand how.
Before the findings were published, the British TV show “World in Action” reached out to the Rowett Research Institute to get a scientist’s opinion on the safety of genetically modified foods. Rowett’s director assigned Dr. Pusztai to do the interview.
The surprise was, Dr. Pusztai told the truth!
He explained that the effect of the experimental genetically engineered potatoes on rats ”was slight growth retardation and an effect on the immune system. One of the genetically modified potatoes, after 110 days, made rats less responsive to immune effects.”
Asked if he would eat genetically engineered foods himself, he said, “If I had the choice I would certainly not eat it till I see at least comparable experimental evidence which we are producing for our genetically modified potatoes. I actually believe that this technology can be made to work for us. And if genetically modified food will be shown to be safe then we have really done a great service to all our fellow citizens. And I very strongly believe in this, and that’s one of the main reasons why I demand to tighten up the rules, tighten up the standards.”
He added, “We are assured that: ‘This is absolutely safe. We can eat it all the time. We must eat it all the time. There is no conceivable harm which can come to us.’ But, as a scientist looking at it, actively working on the field, I find that it is very, very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs. We have to find the guinea pigs in the laboratory.”
Dr. Pusztai never meant to become an anti-GMO campaigner. He was just doing his job and telling the truth, but after his “World in Action” appearance, he was fired, his lab notes were confiscated, he was locked out of his computers, and he was put under a gag order.
Stanley Ewen, a fellow scientist who still had access to some of the data bravely stepped up to help and they published “Effect of diets containing genetically modified potatoes expressing Galanthus nivalis lectin on rat small intestine” together in the Lancet in October 1999.
Dr. Pusztai’s findings were replicated in the few studies that were done after his research was shut down.
Evidence for the survival of the Bt toxins in the digestive tract and internal organs is clear-cut, and scientists have repeatedly found evidence of kidney, liver and intestinal toxicity, as well as male infertility. And, just as Dr. Pusztai learned, Monsanto's own data reveals that the corporation always knew Bt proteins expressed in genetically modified plants are significantly more toxic than natural Bt toxins.
Dr. Pusztai passed away in 2021 at the age of 91.
The harm Monsanto has done to human health with its insecticide-producing crops is all the more diabolical now that we know that it’s been a disaster for farmers, too.
Just as the weeds developed resistance to Roundup, pests became immune to the insecticide crops. This is great for Monsanto—farmers have to give them more money to buy more insecticides to control the resistant bugs.
By 2020, the pest problem was so out of control and farmers were so desperate that the Trump Administration’s Environment Protection Agency proposed a national phase-out of all Bt corn and cotton varieties except for one, Syngenta's Vip3A protein, which had yet to develop insect resistance.
This wouldn’t have helped make our food any safer. If we go by what Dr. Pusztai learned, we have to assume Syngenta’s GMO—now owned by ChemChina—is just as dangerous as Monsanto’s, but at least farmers wouldn’t be forced to pay top dollar for useless GMO seeds.
Monsanto merged with Bayer and retired its infamous name in 2018, but long before then it had taken all its non-GMO competitors off the market by buying up nearly every commercial seed company on the planet: Calgene in 1995, DeKalb and Asgrow in 1996, Holden‘s in 1997, Seminis in 2005, Delta & Pine in 2006, and De Ruiter Seeds in 2008.
It isn’t easy to stand up to such a powerful monopoly, but if that isn’t what the FDA and EPA are there for, what’s the use of a government?
Thank you for using your power to do what you know is right.
[Your Name]