How the Battle Over a Pesticide Led to Scientific Skepticism | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/ddt-battle-scientific-skepticism
In the midst of all of this, a British American Tobacco executive received a copy of a curious letter from two malaria scientists. The letter, which was circulating among delegates to a global convention on chemicals known as POPs (persistent organic pollutants), argued that no global regulation should affect DDT because it was so crucial for stopping the spread of malaria in poor countries. To the BAT executive, the letter seemed germane to one of the company’s new special projects. The company had just joined with Philip Morris and Japan Tobacco International—which together controlled more than 40 percent of the world tobacco market—to launch something called Project Cerberus, named for the three-headed dog that guarded the gates to the underworld in Greek mythology and created to defend the tobacco industry from any global regulation.
On their own, Philip Morris executives were also talking about how to defend against regulation. One outcome was a plan for TASSC to engage in an “aggressive year” of activities to promote “science based on sound principles—not on emotions or beliefs considered by some as ‘politically correct.’” As the DDT letter sparked intense debate at the POPs convention, executives at BAT and Philip Morris saw the chemical’s story as a way to undermine support for regulation more broadly. The DDT story served the industry in two ways: It focused global attention on malaria as a health threat bigger than tobacco use. And it implied an inherent hypocrisy in global health efforts led by Western interests: It threw Western nations’ ability to set global health agendas into question because Western DDT bans had cost so many lives.
Like TASSC’s other “sound science” campaigns of the late nineties and early 2000s, the DDT campaign drew on the expertise and media connections of a cadre of professional science deniers who had been denying and distracting from science unfavorable to industry for years. The tobacco companies funded a neoliberal economist who had previously written dismissively of secondhand smoking’s harms; now, he published a book that detailed how DDT had been wrongly banned. They also funded Bate, whose ESEF had previously denied the harms of secondhand smoke, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and global warming. Now, Bate authored a document titled “International Public Health Strategy,” which wove its way through tobacco executives’ inboxes as the POPs convention talks brought DDT into the public eye.
Bate’s strategy pulled threads from the scientific debate about DDT and spun them into a tale that warned against Western-led public health. Malaria rates were climbing globally, he wrote, especially in Africa, and decades of epidemiological research on DDT had failed to turn up conclusive evidence of harm to health. Evidence of a connection between DDT and cancer, in particular, was weak at best. It was time, he said, to amplify the idea that environmentalists’ unfounded vilification of DDT had placed millions of young, poor children at risk of deadly infection. DDT wasn’t just another example of “junk science,” according to Bate. A revision of its history would accomplish what few other stories about science, health, and the environment could.
“It’s time to spray DDT,” wrote popular columnist and author Nicholas Kristof. “DDT killed bald eagles because of its persistence in the environment,” wrote editorialist Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times. “Silent Spring is now killing African children because of its persistence in the public mind.” ABC News reporter John Stossel wondered how else environmentalists had misled the country. “If they and others could be so wrong about DDT, why should we trust them now?” he said.
The tobacco companies were pleased. “Bate is a very valuable resource,” said one Philip Morris executive. “Bate returned value for money,” said another.
Bate didn’t act alone. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a think tank whose scholars had spent the nineties defending tobacco and denying global warming, launched a website, www .RachelWasWrong.org, featuring the school photos of African children who had died of malaria. CEI’s site said its partners included a group called the American Council on Science and Health (long devoted to decrying chemical bans) and an equally anodyne-sounding organization called Africa Fighting Malaria.
The global POPs convention was signed in 2001, with an exception in place for DDT among the persistent chemicals it brought under global regulation. The malaria scientists who had advocated most heartily for the exception moved on. But to free-market defenders like Bate, the exception only amplified the value of DDT’s story. So they continued to spread their DDT narrative far and wide. People who bought the story as they came across it on the fast-growing internet in the early 2000s took it from there. Before long, websites, blogs, and chat rooms were filled with people calling Rachel Carson a “paranoid liar,” “mass murderer,” and worse. Because of the DDT ban her book inspired, she was responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler, they said. Dead more than 40 years, she and her argument against DDT became potent symbols for conservatives of the hazards of liberalism.
Importantly, the aim of Big Tobacco and Bates’ campaigns was never to bring DDT back, no matter what those early 2000s op-eds said. They succeeded in their true aim: to undermine regulation by casting doubt on the sanctity of science in policymaking.