Punked by John Stossel
I probably shouldn’t have said yes, but his producer was so nice and, while I recognized the name, I didn’t really know who John Stossel was.
Then, the night before the interview, I searched his site to see if he’d ever reported on genetic engineering and found “Designer Babies.”
In his text version, “Real X-Men,” he says that genetically engineering human babies might “shorten lifespans. Most scientists say it’s too soon to gene-edit humans safely,” but he doesn’t include that disclaimer in his YouTube video. Instead, he mercilessly edits his interview with Tufts University professor Sheldon Krimsky to shave the persuasiveness off his arguments and childishly calls him “an old fuddy-duddy.”
Krimsky, a founding member of the Council for Responsible Genetics, is the author of thirteen books, from Genetic Alchemy: The Social History of the Recombinant DNA Controversy (MIT Press, 1982) to Understanding DNA Ancestry (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He’s an expert with plenty of things to say about the risks of genetically engineering babies, but you wouldn’t know it from watching Stossel’s edited interview. (The best part is when Stossel imagines a world where genetic engineering has made humans “much smarter — maybe smart enough to avoid wars, to take us easily to other planets and to do other things we can’t even imagine.”)
I agree with the point Krimsky makes that if there are any benefits to be gained from genetic engineering babies they will accrue to the rich, increasing inequalities of wealth and power.
Look what Monsanto (now Bayer) has done with genetic engineering in agriculture, using it to sell pesticides, most famously its carcinogenic glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide. Monsanto went down the list of the top U.S. crops, genetically engineering each one to be “RoundupReady,” even crops like alfalfa that didn’t need herbicides. , By acreage, more than 99 percent of the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are pesticide plants engineered to soak up herbicides or produce insecticides.
If corporations like Bayer are ever allowed to genetically engineer babies, you can bet they’ll find similar ways to make money throughout the life of the “product”.
Wait a minute… this might be happening already.
Stefan Oelrich of Bayer was recently caught gloating over the change in consumers’ attitudes towards the genetically engineering of human beings. If we had asked people before the pandemic if they wanted to inject mRNA gene therapy, he said, 95 percent would have said no, but now look at the opportunities!
You might be surprised to hear that mRNA jabs are a form of genetic engineering, but, think about it…
Was the human body a spike protein factory before being injected with mRNA gene “therapy”?
No? Well, isn’t that genetic engineering?
Once derided as a conspiracy theory, Bloomberg reported that Pfizer plans “to use mRNA to deliver edits that, if successful, would change a person’s DNA to fix or possibly even cure genetic disease.”
Scientists recently found evidence that the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID injections’ “SARS-CoV-2 RNA can be reverse-transcribed and integrated into the genome of human cells.”
Does it matter whether the change is permanent or temporary?
The Monsanto’s RoundupReady example can help us here, too. Many have derided herbicide-tolerant GMOs as a failed technology, because the weeds became RoundupReady, too. When that happened, farmers needed more and different weedkillers, giving Monsanto the excuse to bring back older herbicides, like the Agent Orange ingredient 2,4-D and dicamba, and roll out new herbicide-tolerant GMOs.
For farmers, this has been devastating. If they were growing RoundupReady crops, the RoundupReady weed problem increased input cost on crops they were already selling below the cost of production. For farmers growing crops susceptible to damage from 2,4-D and dicamba drift, the increased herbicide use has been nothing short of apocalyptic.
But, as a business model, for Monsanto at least, it was a clever strategy of planned obsolesce. Their GMOs were designed to increase pesticide sales. The so-called “failure” of the technology meant new products and more sales.
Bayer’s latest product is “five-way” GMO corn (MON87429) designed to soak up a total of five herbicides, 2,4-D, dicamba, glufosinate, glyphosate and quizalofop
Applying this business model to Bayer’s mRNA jabs, is it any surprise that the COVID “vaccine” requires booster shots? I mean, what could be better for business than a shot everyone has to take—every few months?
* * *
When John Stossel interviewed me, he took the same approach as he did with Sheldon Krimsky, but instead of “fuddy-duddy” he called me was “fool.”
Who’s paying John Stossel to punk GMO-safety advocates?
Charles Koch?
I asked him during my interview and he used the same line he’s used before, claiming the Kochs had paid him for speaking engagements, but that was it.
But, I knew I must be on to something when I searched the Twitterverse and the top tweet called Stossel a “faux-straight-talk-but-actually-Koch-brothers-PR-guy.”
I found a great Substack post by Connor Gibson of Grassrootbeer Investigations that says Koch gives Stossel half a million dollars a year!
More soon…