Delingpole: Science Establishment Rocked by Scandal of UN ‘Cancer’ Chemical

Another day, enough major science scandal involving corrupt, self-serving, ideologically-driven functionaries at the United Nations.

This one concerns the World Health Organization’s cancer agency, which has been caught promoting false claims about the weedkiller glyphosate.

According to a report issued back in 2015 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) there is “sufficient evidence” that glyphosate causes cancer in animals and “limited evidence” it can do so in humans.

As a result, glyphosate was categorized as a “Group 2a carcinogen” – leading to a proposed ban across the European Union beginning next year, as well as mass litigation in the U.S. against its manufacturer Monsanto Corp.

If true, this is huge: it means the weedkiller you and I have been using in our gardens for decades under the brand name RoundUp has been putting us all in deadly danger.

But if it’s untrue, it’s even huger: what it means is that a democratically unaccountable world government agency has been grotesquely abusing its power and its prestige by spreading lies about a popular and useful household product, causing needless injury to Monsanto’s shareholders and impeding the freedoms of all the millions of amateur gardeners and farmers who use it regularly.

And guess what: it’s untrue.

There is no credible evidence whatsoever that glyphosate – or RoundUp – is carcinogenic.

The only reason some people believe otherwise is because of scaremongering articles like this, derived from misinformation which originates from this UN agency, the IARC.

How do we know it’s untrue?

Thanks to a special investigation by Reuters, which found that the IARC had completely misrepresented the available research on glyphosate.

In one instance, a fresh statistical analysis was inserted – effectively reversing the original finding of a study being reviewed by IARC.

In another, a sentence in the draft referenced a pathology report ordered by experts at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It noted the report “firmly” and “unanimously” agreed that the “compound” – glyphosate – had not caused abnormal growths in the mice being studied. In the final published IARC monograph, this sentence had been deleted.

Reuters found 10 significant changes that were made between the draft chapter on animal studies and the published version of IARC’s glyphosate assessment. In each case, a negative conclusion about glyphosate leading to tumors was either deleted or replaced with a neutral or positive one.

Let’s just spell this one out.

Every scientific assessment body, apart from the IARC, thinks that glyphosate is safe:

A year after IARC issued its evaluation, a joint United Nations and World Health Organization panel reviewed the potential for glyphosate in food to cause cancer in people. It concluded the weedkiller was “unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which first assessed glyphosate in the 1980s and has reviewed it several times since, says it has “low toxicity for humans.” The European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency, which advise the 28 members of the EU, have also assessed glyphosate within the past two years and ruled it safe.

However, the IARC – not just any old cancer institution but, if you trust the United Nations’ imprimatur, The Most Important Cancer Institution In The World – has declared that glyphosate can give you cancer when the reports on which it has based this claim say the exact opposite.

Why would it do such a thing?

Well one man who appears to have some explaining to do is this guy:

The chairman of the IARC sub-group tasked with reviewing evidence of glyphosate’s effect on laboratory animals was Charles Jameson, an American toxicologist. In testimony as part of personal-injury lawsuits against Monsanto in the United States, Jameson told lawyers for Monsanto he did not know when, why or by whom the edits had been made.

Monsanto is facing multiple legal claims in the U.S. from plaintiffs who allege glyphosate gave them or their loved ones cancer. Jameson is an expert witness for the plaintiffs. He did not respond to questions for this article.

Perhaps – as the author of this piece by Politico would clearly like to believe – Jameson is a hero. Perhaps he’s the lone scientist who dared to speak out when all others were bullied into silence by the mighty behemoth of evil that is Monsanto.

Yeah, I guess it’s a possibility.

Except, we’ve been here before.

In 2014, I reported for Breitbart about on politically-motivated attempts to ban a form of pesticide called neonicotinoids.

In 2013, I reported on a similar attempt to ban a herbicide called Atrazine. 

These campaigns are part of an extremely well-funded, carefully orchestrated campaign by the environmentalist left to harass the chemical industry – and the agriculture industry which uses its products.

Superficially – and as invariably reported in the mainstream media – these are all stories about plucky Erin Brockovitch types battling against Big Pharma and its wicked mission to give everyone in the world cancer with its evil chemicals.

But when you look at these cases more closely, the flimsiness of the science behind these campaigns is shocking.

The war on Atrazine, for example, was fronted by a huckster called Tyrone Hayes – a kooky, Mother-Jones-feted PhD from Berkeley – who did much to popularize the theory that their “endocrine-disruptors” were causing frogs to change sex.

This campaign was taken up enthusiastically by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, both of which called for “endocrine-disruptors” to be banned.

Where, though, was the evidence?

Problem is, studies that have attempted to replicate Hayes’s findings — one in Japan, one in Germany, and one in Maryland (the last two involving 2,000 frogs) — found no harmful effects even at extremely low doses. Hayes has consistently refused to make his data publicly available and painted himself as a victim of the brutal chemical industry. (Shades of Michael Mann and his multiply discredited Hockey Stick, anyone?)

It was the same with the campaign against neonicotinoids, which attracted massive celebrity support from the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Stephen Fry, plus lots of Greenpeace activists dressed as bees, because, supposedly these evil chemicals were ravaging the world’s bee populations.

Again, though, anyone who cared to look into the details – as I did here – would have found that there was little if any evidence to justify banning the chemical. Yet thanks to a toxic combination of activist-driven junk science and green campaigning, a multi-million dollar industry was being needlessly threatened, with farmers greatly inconvenienced, and livelihoods threatened.

These tactics – it cannot be stressed enough – are standard operating procedure across the agencies of both the United Nations and the European Union, all of which are hopelessly in thrall to the Green Lobby, often because they themselves have been infiltrated by environmental ideologues with an anti-free markets, and anti-U.S. agenda.

When President Trump announced that he is to withdraw the U.S. from UNESCO – the U.N.’s educational, scientific, and cultural body – because of its flagrant, anti-Israel bias this was undoubtedly a step in the right direction. But really, he should go much further.

There’s not a United Nations agency which isn’t rotten to the core: the entire edifice has long since been captured by politically-correct globalists who see the United States and her espousal of liberty and free markets as an enemy to be regulated out of existence.