National Defence?

Is immunity for glyphosate-makers a betrayal of MAHA?

I don’t think an Executive Order providing immunity to producers of glyphosate was on anybody’s bingo card for a second Trump term. It certainly wasn’t on mine. But that’s what America got on Wednesday, or so it seems.

Could there be a bigger betrayal of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, which played a crucial role in returning Donald Trump to power?

If it’s true—maybe not.

President Trump’s Order—“Promoting the National Defense by Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides”—declares those two things to be scarce materials critical to national security, and invokes the Defense Production Act of 1950 to increase domestic production.

Importantly, the Order “confers all immunity provided for in section 707 of the Act.”

Section 707 states that no person can be held liable for damages or penalty for acting in compliance with any rule, regulation or order issued under the Act.

So yeah, that really does look like immunity as you or I or a crunchy MAHA mom would understand it. Domestic producers of glyphosate can’t be held responsible for harms caused by their products, because their products are now deemed vital to national defense.

This is the holy grail for pesticide manufacturers, something they’ve lobbied for for years, as lawsuit upon class-action lawsuit has piled up against them: a licence to continue causing vast amounts of harm, and making vast amounts of money, with impunity.

There’s no way to spin this as good, at least not that I can think of.

I’ve written extensively about glyphosate. It’s a foul chemical. Here’s a primer if you want to get up to speed. Basically, glyphosate has been linked to every kind of chronic disease you can think of, from obesity and diabetes to gut dysfunction, neurological conditions and cancer.

Bayer, the maker of Roundup (the most popular glyphosate-based herbicide), has already paid billions of dollars to people who claim to have developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a very nasty form of cancer, from exposure to its product. Close to 70,000 more claims still remain unresolved, and thousands more have been consolidated into a mega-lawsuit—a “multidistrict litigation” or MDL—in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Scarcely a day passes without new evidence of the harms glyphosate can cause. Recent scientific research has suggested plausible mechanisms by which the chemical could cause autism. Rates of autism in the US have exploded in recent decades, and so has exposure to glyphosate.

Since 1974, at least 1.6 billion kg of glyphosate have been used in the US alone, or roughly 20% of total global usage. Glyphosate is sprayed by the swimming pool on corn and soy in the Midwest—genetically modified versions of the crops are “Roundup Ready,” meaning you can use even more glyphosate on them (*gleefully rubs hands*)—but it’s also used across the country on lawns and parks and verges and in people’s back gardens.

When large-scale studies of glyphosate exposure are carried out, we discover that 80.2% of Americans over the age of six have detectable levels in their urine. Food, water and also the air are the main sources of exposure, especially if you live in an agricultural area.

A study of pregnant women from the Midwest showed 99% of them had it in their bodies. Glyphosate has been shown to cross the placental barrier during pregnancy, and is found in cord blood after birth.

Glyphosate is even found in men’s semen. A French study found it concentrated in semen at levels four times higher than in the blood.

So not only is glyphosate awful, it’s everywhere and it gets everywhere.

A man who knows this is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services and the man leading the crusade to “Make America Healthy Again.” Kennedy has campaigned for years to raise awareness of the harms of pesticide exposure, especially glyphosate, and he’s made eliminating pesticides from agriculture and the food supply one of the key missions of that crusade.

Today, Secretary Kennedy published a long Tweet defending President Trump’s Executive Order.

While much of it makes sense, parts of it are little better than special pleading, despite his Kennedy’s vow to “always tell the American public the truth.” I can imagine it was a painful Tweet for him to write—or at least to dictate to one of his aides (no doubt a cute blonde with a very hard body).