Tag Archive for: glyphosate

‘Extinction-Level’: MAHA Warns Pesticide Immunity Provision Could Mirror Anger-Inducing Bill From 1980s

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Critics are sounding the alarm over a provision in a House appropriations bill they say could shield pesticide manufacturers from legal liability — drawing comparisons to the 1986 law that granted similar protections to vaccine makers.

The rule, tucked into Section 453 of the House’s Fiscal Year 2026 Interior and Environment Appropriations Act, has sparked backlash from supporters of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. They argue it could mirror the fallout of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which created a no-fault system protecting vaccine producers from injury lawsuits.

“If you don’t like what happened with vaccine indemnification, you’re really not gonna like what happens with pesticide and herbicide indemnification,” Dr. Robert Malone, a prominent and longtime critic of COVID-19 vaccine mandates, said in a July 24 video.

“If you aren’t mad now, you damn well should be,” Malone, who currently sits on the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP), added.

Kennedy himself acknowledged the follies of the 1986 Vaccine Act in an X post.

“The 1986 Vaccine Act gave vaccine makers immunity against lawsuits by children who suffer vaccine injuries,” he tweeted Wednesday in a scathing criticism of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), a program created by Congress in conjunction with the Vaccine Act.

However, despite the popular uproar, Kennedy Jr. has yet to publicly comment on Section 453.

The lack of coverage from MAHA reformers within the government has invoked sharp criticism.

“You get that Section 453 of the new Appropriations Bill — that would shield pesticide manufacturers from liability in U.S. courts — will undo ALL of the good from the MAHA healthy food campaign, right? Yet MAHA insiders haven’t said a word of protest. Makes you wonder,” Toby Rogers, Ph.D. and fellow at Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, tweeted Wednesday.

Rogers did not lay the entirety of the blame at Kennedy Jr.’s feet, however.

“Secretary Kennedy understands that we need systemic change in order to improve the health of all Americans. We need to clean up our industrial food system to get rid of toxic chemicals and heal the soil, he told the Daily Caller.

“Unfortunately, in this administration, Secretary Kennedy has been siloed into working on just a few parts of the health system. That’s not going to work. The entire system is poisoning us and Section 453 will wipe out all of the good that MAHA has done in connection with food thus far,” Rogers also told the Caller.

He spoke of 453 in biblical terms.

“Section 453 + the 1986 Act are an extinction level event for the U.S. Together they represent the largest self-inflicted mass poisoning in human history. They reveal a level of depravity in our political system straight out of the Book of Revelations,” Rogers also tweeted.

Section 453, critics claim, would grant immunity to pesticide manufacturers from “failure to warn” lawsuits that consumers could file if chemicals within the pesticides and herbicides sicken them.

The text of the stipulation reads as follows:

“None of the funds made available by this or any other Act may be used to issue or adopt any guidance or any policy, take any regulatory action, or approve any labeling or change to such labeling that is inconsistent with or in any respect different from the conclusion of (a) a human health assessment performed pursuant to the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act … or (b) a carcinogenicity classification for a pesticide.”

While a causal observer may view the bill text as mundane, Rogers argued it was that ambiguity precisely that made the language so dangerous.

“The bill was clearly written by lobbyists for the pesticide and chemical industries. They knew exactly how to word the rider to gut existing safety laws while hiding their true intentions. Once again Congress is working on behalf of toxic industries and against the interests of the American people,” he told the Caller.

Republican Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee as well as its environmental subcommittee, does not appear to believe Section 453 is as damning as the provision’s detractors.

“The provision does not address the substance of any health assessments and does not change current authority that States have to regulate the use and sale of pesticides within their own State,” a spokesperson for Simpson’s office told the Caller.

“The health and safety of Americans is a priority throughout our FY26 process,” the spokesperson added.

AUTHOR

Robert McGreevy

Author

RELATED ARTICLE: Idea Proposed By RFK Has Some In MAHA Scratching Their Heads

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Georgia Bill Sparks MAHA Concerns About Alleged Chinese Poison Chemicals

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MAHA advocates are warning about a bill Georgia lawmakers passed in March that they allege would allow manufacturers of pesticides to escape liability for poisoning customers.

Senate Bill 144 would make it so “that a manufacturer cannot be held liable for failing to warn consumers of health risks above those required by the United States Environmental Protection Agency with respect to pesticides.”

Environmentalists and regenerative farming advocates warn that the bill would be detrimental to public health.

“Stripping our right to be able to sue if we have a different opinion than what the EPA has is really going to be catastrophic for public health, because then we have no recourse whatsoever,” Kelly Ryerson, the founder of American Regenerative and Glyphosate Facts, told the Daily Caller. Ryerson, a Stanford University MBA, has a certificate in public health policy from Stanford Business School.

The bill’s primary sponsor, Republican Georgia State Sen. Sam Watson, pushed back on the idea that the bill would prevent Americans from being able to sue manufacturers.

“It’s dealing with failure to warn, it’s not providing immunity,” Sen. Watson told the Caller. “It’s not preventing anyone to go after [manufacturers] because they thought that a product caused cancer. You can still do that, you just can’t do it for failure to warn of it causing cancer.”

Manufacturers that would be covered under Georgia’s bill include Bayer, who owns Monsanto, the maker of RoundUp. A Georgia jury is fresh off awarding a plaintiff over $2 billion in a judgement against Bayer after he blamed RoundUp for his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in a lawsuit.

RoundUp’s active ingredient is glyphosate, the most commonly used pesticide in the United States. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said glyphosate likely causes cancer in 2015, labelling it as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

“It says it’s likely and we saw that same report. It doesn’t say it does. It says that it suggests or it may be or probably or could cause,” Sen. Watson told the Caller.

The EPA reached a different conclusion. After a February 2020 review, the agency found “that there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label,” according to its website.

The IARC was accused of manipulating their data in 2017. A draft document of IARC’s 2015 study was unearthed and, according to Reuters, showed the agency dismissed and edited out conclusions contrary to their final report.

Watson claimed that the study which the IARC based its carcinogenic conclusion on also found a number of other common American lifestyle choices increased the risk of cancer.

“If you’ll keep reading in that study it also says that red meat is carcinogenic and night shift work is carcinogenic and a lot of other things that people do are carcinogenic. So, I mean, you need to read the whole study because one studies shift and dictate,” Watson told the Caller.

While the EPA did not concur with the IARC’s conclusion that glyphosate is a carcinogen, Ryerson alleged that the research they based that conclusion on was manipulated by Bayer/Monsanto.

Wisner Baum, a law firm which Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once worked for, published a trove of documents that appeared to implicate Monsanto in ghostwriting a number of reports on glyphosate’s toxicity.

One email published by the firm allegedly shows that Monsanto commissioned scientist David Saltmiras and former Monsanto consultant Larry Keir to recruit respected names to write a review of glyphosate’s toxicity. “[E]ven though we feel confident that glyphosate is not genotoxic, this became a very difficult story to tell given all the complicated ‘noise’ out there,” the correspondence reads.

Keir’s name appears on the review that was eventually published, according to the documents obtained by Wisner Baum.

Other manufacturers that could benefit from the limited liability include Chinese chemical manufacturers. When ChemChina, a Chinese state-controlled chemical manufacturer, bought Swiss AgTech company Syngenta for $43 billion in 2017, it was forced by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to divest its rights to the company’s paraquat chemical business in the U.S. to an American firm.

However, China is still the primary producer of paraquat used in the U.S. while America is the world’s biggest importer, according to global shipping tracker Volza. The U.S. imports from 4,000 to 5,000 tons of the product annually, making up over 10 percent of China’s export supply, according to agropages.com

Like glyphosate, the EPA found “no dietary risks of concern associated with paraquat when it is used according to the label.” But others have called it “the deadliest chemical in US agriculture.”

National Institutes of Health (NIH) studies have linked the chemical to Parkinson’s disease, finding that people who used paraquat were 2.5 times more likely to develop Parkinson’s. Over 50 countries have banned its use, including China.

Sen. Watson, a vegetable farmer who uses RoundUp himself, argued it’s China’s very stranglehold over the paraquat market that makes SB 144 so necessary.

“If the Chinese become the only manufacturer of a product, you can’t go after them. It’s very difficult to go after a Chinese manufacturer for any kind of negligence claim,” he told the Caller.

“So I feel like they’re already protected, which makes it even more important to keep manufacturers in the United States because those are the ones that we can have recourse if they here in the United States.”

Ryerson disagreed. “I actually don’t care who manufactures it,” she said. “I just don’t want it anywhere in our system.”

Additionally, 99 percent of glyphosate used in the U.S. originated from China in 2024, according to a Farm Business Network survey.

The bill now sits on Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for him to sign. “Our office has 40 days following the last day of the legislative session to conduct a thorough review of legislation that received final passage by the Georgia General Assembly. We will make an announcement upon the conclusion of that review process,” a spokesperson for Kemp’s office told the Caller.

Georgia’s legislative session ended April 4, giving the governor until May 14 to make a decision.

The bill represents a test of power for RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) coalition. Self-proclaimed “MAHA moms” have been lobbying hard against its passage, imploring Kemp not to sign it. RFK, who tried and won cases on behalf of Monsanto victims in his past life as an attorney, has yet to publicly comment on the bill.

The Daily Caller reached out to HHS to get Secretary Kennedy’s thoughts on the bill but did not receive a response.

AUTHOR

Robert McGreevy

Reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.