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Foreign.
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Hi, everybody. Cheryl Akison here. Welcome to another edition of Full Measure. After Hours. Today, how the pesticide industry is seeking vaccine type legal immunity. You might say there's an uproar over President Trump's recent action impacting a widely used weed killer linked to cancer. In February, President Trump issued an executive order under the Defense Production act to boost production of this chemical to supposedly protect America's food supply. It gives some immunity to the makers of the product, but experts say it is not a blanket shield. It only covers immunity for acts related to complying with the order or boosting production of glyphosate, the chemical that was widely used in Roundup and linked in many lawsuits and settlements to cancer. Why the executive order? Well, President Trump and farmers and the makers of glyphosate say we have to have these chemicals to mass produce or mass farm America's food. This is, they say, a national security issue. And without these chemicals, they, they cannot have the same kinds of yields. And it's a big potential issue. But there are health advocates who say all of this is hazardous to our health. Not only the chemical, but also the idea of giving immunity to the makers of the chemical. And in today's podcast, you're going to hear from one of those health advocates, Leah Wilson, who likens what the pesticide industry is doing now lobbying for this immunity, likens it to what the vaccine industry did a couple of decades ago in order to get immunity from lawsuits from vaccine injuries. And they successfully lobbied Congress saying if you don't give us immunity, we are being sued by so many people, successfully sued for at the time, brain injury caused by the then DPT vaccine. The industry said we're going to stop making vaccines. If you don't protect us from liability, it costs us too much. And Congress, which is the recipient of a lot of money from the pharmaceutical and vaccine industry, complied, set up a special court, basically made it where in general vaccine makers are not liable or responsible for all the injuries the products cause. And on top of that, guess what? The government defends the vaccines against the injury victims in court when those do occur in this special court and you and I pay the damages through a tax that has been placed on each dose of vaccine that people get. Leo Wilson worries that the same type of thing could be coming if it's not headed off for the pesticide industry and that that would result in huge amounts of dangerous pesticides being used and expanded further and lots of injuries without the industry having to be held accountable for them. Sunday, April 19th on my TV show, Full Measure. We will explore all of this, but in today's podcast, you're going to hear my interview with Leah Wilson. I conducted the interview before President Trump signed that executive order. Her main concern at the time centered on lobbying efforts that the pesticide industry was engaged in at the state level, also with Congress to try to get rules passed and laws passed in order to grant them immunity from injury lawsuits. So chemicals could be used with a lot of immunity when it comes to injuries or health risks from the chemicals. So keep in mind that this interview with Leah Wilson you're about to hear happened prior to us knowing President Trump was signing this executive order granting some level of immunity for the makers of glyphosate. The experts aren't sure exactly how far that extends, and maybe we won't know until some cases go to court, but it's being hotly debated. And briefly, I will give you my take on one aspect of this. This is really crossing party lines. I mean, there are people, Republicans on both sides and Democrats on both sides of this debate. In fact, within the federal government, the Kennedy folks at HHS feel far differently about this than do the EPA people who tend to be siding with industry and probably also the farm folks in the federal government are siding with the chemical industry because many of the farmers support having use and broader use and continued use of glyphosate and other chemicals they say are important to their crop yields. Anyway, there is certainly some truth to the argument that farmers would really be left looking for different tools and potentially their crop yields harmed, at least in the short term for sure, if they can't use glyphosate, it's become so critical to their operations. On the other hand, glyphosate is absolutely positively, if you look a lot of studies linked to many health concerns, there are billions of dollars in settlements and payouts over cancer. So it's almost as if the farmers are saying we have to poison you slowly over time through this chemical in your food in order to feed you in the short term, poison you in the long run to feed you in the short term. And if you look at it that way, I think you really do need to consider that we have to find some different alternatives. If we didn't have glyphosate, I'm only guessing, but we all probably wouldn't be starving right now. There would be some other way to grow food, some successfully. But it's not as if there aren't many tough choices to be made when it comes to all kinds of health risks. So many toxic things we've allowed to become ubiquitous in our environment. Whether we're talking about chemicals or plastics or medicine we expose ourselves to, or all the things in our water, from lead to medicine to fluoride and so on, that we now know are problematic, we do have to make some hard choices. It will be maybe more expensive and less convenient in the short term to make big changes, but we're talking about saving America from a myriad of toxic stews and chronic disorders that really, as a society are overwhelming us. And the sources are many, not just one or two things. Seems to me these issues need to be addressed in some realistic fashion. So see what you think after you hear from Leah Wilson with Stand for Health Freedom.
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Can you give me just one paragraph on Stand for Health Freedom? What that is?
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Yes, we exist to show up as stakeholders for the people in public health policy. And what that means is that informed consent cannot be ignored when it comes to making health decisions for ourselves and for our children. And where we see the underpinnings of informed consent and policy is parental rights, religious freedom, informed consent, privacy, and free speech. So we work at every level of government to show up for the people and make sure that the people's voice is heard, not just the industry.
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If you had to summarize for someone not familiar with the intricacies of the issue we're here to talk about, but in just a paragraph or like the flat cover of a book, what would you say is the key issue that, as you see it, that deserves attention?
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What if I told you that there's a coordinated effort to stop food reform in the US and that effort is being carried out by the big chemical industry to make sure that they don't lose their market share of the food market, of our food supply. In the US the organic food market has exploded over the last couple years. In 2024, they saw record sales of over $65 billion and grew at twice as fast of a rate as the conventional food market. And then you see that people are now acknowledging they don't want pesticides in their food and there's four times more likelihood to have a pesticide on your produce in your fruits and vegetables if it's conventional instead of organic. Regenerative food market, they saw a 16% growth last year.
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What is regenerative food?
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Regenerative is getting back to really the respect for land and nature and the symbiotic relationship as opposed to monoculture chemical farming where they do a single crop on a big field like they Focus on things like cover crop and the symbiotic relationship with the animals and the plants and the natural way for things to feed off of and flourish together.
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How did you learn that There was this campaign going on. Do you remember when it first came to you or you first recognized that
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for healthy food or.
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No, I'm sorry. For the chemical industry fighting it, or maybe it's probably always been some aspect of this going on, but when you saw this had been heating up into a big organized movement now.
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So back in 2024, our policy director saw language in a federal bill that wanted to give immunity from liability, so stop lawsuits against the big chemical pesticide manufacturers for things like cancer. And when we saw the language, our team looked at each other and we said, we're not sure yet if this is our issue to fight because it's a big one, but it's definitely an opportunity to tell the story of what happened with the vaccine industry and a seismic shift in power when the government did the exact same thing. They heard a story from the industry that, look, if you don't protect us from these really expensive lawsuits, the products are going to be sued out of existence. And that would leave America's children ripe for disease. It would create a national security threat. So we need you, Congress, and you, President Reagan at the time, to pass a bill that says you cannot sue vaccine makers. So we knew that at least there would be an opportunity to tell that story with putting another liability shield for industry in place. But then fast forward to legislative session at the state level. So where states start filing bills and we have this alert set up because we saw the language about an EPA sanctioned label is enough of a warning to do due diligence on the manufacturer side. So if you have an EPA label, then you can't be sued for failure to warn. So we put up alerts for that. And then we. We saw the bill drop at the state level in Idaho, Iowa and Missouri. They were the first three states. And then seven more quickly followed. And we thought, whoa, this is a strong trend. What's behind this? So we started showing up at the hearings to figure out who was behind it, what was being said and what the true issues were.
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To put a little punctuation mark at the end of what you mentioned about the vaccine industry for the podcast at the time, I believe the industry was facing a lot of brain injury lawsuits from the old DPT vaccine that kids were getting. And they saw some people believe, and I think the evidence shows the autism wave coming. And they lobbied Congress to, as you say, give them immunity from lawsuits through what turned out to be a specially created court, so that when those cases came to fruition and other injuries, they would not have to, and to this day, do not have to pay these damages directly. We pay their damages in vaccine court through a special arrangement. And you're saying it looks like the chemical industry is seeking something similar, which has been very good and very lucrative for the vaccine industry, but many would argue not so good for public health. Exactly.
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What we saw after 1986, when that law was put into place to protect the vaccine industry, was, like I mentioned, a seismic shift in power. And what that looked like was the childhood schedule, which was what was protected, became this golden opportunity for the industry. If you can get a product on the childhood schedule, then not only can you know that you're not going to have the budget item to continue to make the product safer, to defend lawsuits, but you also have a mandate for school children across the U.S. and that meant every year doses were being added to the schedule. So in 1986, you were looking at around 24 doses for a child between birth and age 18. And then adding, adding, adding. Once they put Covid recommendations on the childhood schedule, we were above 90 doses for a child between birth and age 18. And recently, this is the first time that we've seen this happen since the act passed. They took away Covid as a universal recommendation and notched it down to in collaboration with your provider, so with clinical consideration. And that's a huge difference because what that means is it's not automatically recommended for every child that you need to talk to your doctor if this is going to be something that's given to your child. So now we're back down to 72 doses, which is the first time we saw the schedule shrink instead of expand year after year.
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So from what you gather and what you've read in the legislation, the chemical industry is arguing, you need us to grow enough food in this country and we'll stop making chemicals if you don't limit the lawsuits.
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Right. There were a few huge lawsuits that bear Monsanto lost, and they were for non Hodgkin's lymphoma. All three of the first lawsuits were for the same disease, the non Hodgkin's lymphoma. And they lost with huge damages. And this was right after Bayer had purchased Monsanto. So this is. Things that are revealed during the lawsuits are, okay, we purchased this company with all of their baggage. So now we're having to set aside $16 billion to fight these lawsuits that we know over Round up over Roundup because of the specific ingredient glyphosate. They always refer to this class of pesticides as the, the glyphosate containing pesticides because there's tons of different products that could have glyphosate in it. Not just a single one used by not only the agricultural industry and big farmers, but also by landscapers, by gardeners, people who just wanna spray their sidewalk or their fence line. I mean, it has very widespread use. Up to over 230 million gallons of this is used in the US each year. So it's a huge part of the chemical industry and the farmers don't want this to be affected. So they're pro liability shield bills. A lot of these bigger farmers are because this is a key crop protection tool for them.
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How did you find out who is behind the lobbying effort that got all of these to the table so quickly in 2024?
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Showing up to the committee hearings at the state level. So we do a lot of our advocacy work at the state level because that's where health freedom is protected. One of the very first hearings in Tennessee, the Modern Ag alliance steps up to testify and they introduce themselves as an industry group with founding organization Bayer Monsanto. So they were there to testify on behalf. And now if you look up the Modern Ag alliance, it's very clear that they're the ones behind all these lawsuits. They're running TV ads, they're running commercials in these states that have the bills. So if you're in Tennessee or were while the bill was being pushed, or Georgia, right before they pushed the bill through there, North Dakota, on the radio you're constantly hearing ads from the Modern Ag alliance saying go to this website, tell your state lawmakers that farmers need protection, otherwise you'll starve. We won't be able to produce food anymore. So that's how they've been convincing even conservative lawmakers that these bills are necessary because what's on the line is starvation. According to their story, are they correct
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that if they stop making these chemicals that are so valuable to farmers trying to grow a lot of food that we're going to be in trouble?
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So they've already, Barry Monsanto has already reformulated some of their products and we know they are capable of reformulation. The question is, will they do it? And there are also other products that farmers might be able to use. However, with all the subsidies that protect these big pesticide heavy crops, the government has set these farmers up to succeed under a very specific model, so they become dependent upon the crop protection. And when we talk to farmers who have transitioned from this monoculture pesticide farming to regenerative or to organic to be closer to the land or to how nature does it, they'll tell you that it's a transition and that it's not easy, but it's possible. And, you know, even they won't promise us that there wouldn't be a hiccup or two if there was a widespread reformation overnight. But that's not how it would happen. You know, the government always gives time for change, and their programs have been very influential over who succeeds and who doesn't in agriculture. So why wouldn't we put things in place that allow the reform that people are asking for instead of stopping it, instead of hampering ingenuity? I mean, isn't that what America is known for is being creative and for valuing freedom over providing innovation, over the certainty of saying we will be able to feed everyone, even if it's in a more toxic manner than we would like? And that's not even the message. Like, we don't have to agree on whether or not Roundup is a bad thing or glyphosate is a bad thing. But I think what most of us can agree on is that transparency is non negotiable and that the inviolate right to a jury trial is non negotiable. And that's one of the things that has changed the minds of these lawmakers who get to ultimately vote on the issue of whether or not to put a law like this in place to shield pesticide companies is that when you explain to them, look, what you're voting on is saying that failure to warn claims cannot be brought in your state anymore. And there was one gentleman in Tennessee, he was an attorney lawmaker, and he stepped up to the stand before his vote and he said, I took an oath to uphold the Constitution when I took office, and for that reason, I cannot vote against the inviolate right to trial by jury.
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I saw one of those ads that you referred to, and it made me think that they're arguing, but not in this explicit way, that we have to be allowed to potentially poison you and society over the long run with these chemicals in a slow way in order to feed you. I mean, it kind of doesn't make sense when you play it out that way in terms of we have to be allowed to feed you these things that could be causing great harm to society. So do you think that the advent of President Trump And HHS Secretary Kennedy has impacted this a lot. Is the chemical industry suddenly afraid that something will be done maybe more seriously than was considered in the past?
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I do think that it has amplified or stoked the fire for this tension between the agriculture industry we currently have that has a huge market share in America, and the people asking for something less toxic, for something more transparent, for foods that are cleaner. So there's definitely. The tension has strengthened, has come to a bubbling point, which is why this is so significant. But. But the crazy thing is I still think the pesticide industry is wildly confident in their success. I don't think that they understand the true power of the people. And we've seen that with fighting these state bills, because bill sponsors will be completely shocked that there's opposition to the bill that they've brought forward. They were expecting it to sail through that, oh, the agricultural industry needs this. We support farmers. We're a state that supports farmers. So of course we do this. But not understanding that the American way is to look out for individual freedom and not come between people and industry in the way that the government is supporting or protecting industry from the people. And that's really what this is, is government protecting industry from the people for the people's sake. And how does that make sense at the end of the day, if we truly believe that transparency and things like informed consent and making knowing choices are the best way for freedom to flourish. So if we want freedom to win, then we need to prop up and support transparency and accountability in industry.
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So there are efforts at the state level and also an effort at the federal level to try to create this indemnity or exemption. So states could do on their own statewide liability protection for the chemical companies. But obviously the companies would probably prefer a federal law, but it can happen either way.
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Yes. So there could be federal supremacy. So if they passed a fed. If Congress passed a federal law to say that you cannot sue chemical companies, it would act like the federal law for vaccine makers. So it blocked lawsuits at the federal and state level for every state. And they tried to do that in 2024 in the farm bill, but the farm bill didn't move. And now they've tried to take pieces of this puzzle, of this agenda to insulate themselves from this type of information that's igniting the people. So there's efforts, there's pieces of the agenda at the federal level still, even if it's not an overt law that says the EPA label fulfills a duty to warn on behalf of the manufacturer, which the Reason that's significant and people might not understand is the dude, the failure to warn are the cases that are being won for non Hodgkin's lymphoma for saying that Roundup glyphosate was a substantial cause of the non Hodgkin's lymphoma. And those cases that are being won are a specific cause of action, which is failure to warn. Like, okay, company, you knew something that you should have told the consumer for them to have adequate warning before using the product. And the lawsuits have flown fully exposed through discovery, through saying, look, you have to produce documents showing us your side of the story. What did you know? What should you have known? What should you have disclosed to the epa? And these documents have clearly shown that Bayer Monsanto knew and should have disclosed these things. I mean, when I read through the papers myself, I called one of our team members and the only thing I could say was they lied. And that seems like such a rudimentary or simple conclusion. But when you see the cost of their lies, it's unthinkable that they would be perpetuated in a country that is supposed to support individual freedom and individual welfare.
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For background, is there a simple one you can cite that you something you saw in a document that showed to you that you think they knew what was going on but didn't warn?
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There were lots of emails. So the repeated, the trend was the emails between different internal people at Monsanto, at Bayer Monsanto, talking about how we don't have the information to say this is not carcinogenic. So that would be one thing that was said. And then there were other emails that showed that they pressured the EPA to lower the classification of the product. And the EPA did that. They had a part in the epa. You know, it wasn't an independent decision. And then one of the most striking things that came out of the Monsanto papers revealed in court was that they ghost wrote a study and then had that study published in order to influence the EPA's classification of their product. And so they paid for the studies, they wrote the studies, and then acted as if they were independent research, which is fraud. I mean, they're lying to the public. They're doing things that have widespread effects on America's health and national security and on our rights. And so it's just, it's astonishing to think that in a country like ours, we can't say, okay, enough is enough, we're going to force the free market to work this out instead of protecting a company and allowing the harm to persist?
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What is the status of their progress, or lack thereof in the states and federal government?
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The bill failed in nine states over the last. Well, failing can mean that they tabled it and then it passed in two states.
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So states did it pass.
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North Dakota and Georgia. And one of the ways they passed the bill was that they would tell the lawmakers or the bill sponsor would tell the other lawmakers in the state that this doesn't stop lawsuits. And, you know, there's some merit to that in the sense that you could still bring a design defect lawsuit, but that's not the lawsuits that the consumers are winning. It stops the very lawsuits that the consumers are winning for cancer. And right now in our country, cancer is one out of two men, one out of three women. I mean, that's too big to just ignore and say, oh, we'll just brush this factor under the rug and allow industry to continue to do its thing. But we need to unturn every stone and increase transparency and accountability in every way that we can, especially at a time when America is mandating this type of reform, when they're showing interest in taking greater responsibility.
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C
And at the federal level, you're saying that there are pieces of this that they're trying to get into policy, maybe not necessarily law, or are they tucking things into law proposals as well?
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Mm.
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So there are ways that, you know, they have put liability shield language to say that the EPA sanctioned label satisfies the duty to warn in different. The EATS act had some of this in it. The Farm bill had some of this in it. But then most recently, there's a piece of this agenda in the appropriations bill that's being considered by the House right now. And what that says is that no government funds can be used on any guidance label, any government activity, regulatory activity, unless it agrees with the latest human health assessment. And the reason that's a problem is because the latest human health assessment, there's 15 years between those. And a lot happens in 15 years. I mean, if you look back in 2006, 2009, when these products like glyphosate and glyphosate containing products started being outlawed in other countries. Now here we are still in the US reassessing this issue in 2024 with great industry resistance. And it's just too slow of a process to say that we can't speak out or inform the public or modify a label unless there's a full human health assessment done. Which, to be fair, they would say, well, that cuts costs at the government level. If you say we can only refer to this one thing then. It's efficiency, it's streamlined. But when it comes to the health of the American public and our children, who are the unwilling participants in all of this chemical experimentation, we need more transparency, not less.
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C
Who does the human health assessment?
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Well, the EPA is the one that signs off on them, and it's sanctioned by that agency for the pesticide industry.
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Was there anything to stop Congress or the EPA from or HHS ordering those or doing those every year? I know you said, you know, there's expense and so on, but when we're having these chronic health epidemics, maybe there's some thought to doing that more often.
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They've been asking for glyphosate to be reviewed for year after year. I mean, it's been. When Barry Monsanto started being sued, they initiated a reevaluation. And that, too, is contested in court. Right now, it's at the Supreme Court level still looking at what's going to happen with these lawsuits, what's going to happen with the human health assessment. And the industry can really hold those things up and slow them down. There's a lot of influence and power there, and we haven't seen a lot of progress, which is why we thought the appropriations provisions were extremely alarming, because basically it would be codifying what barrier Monsanto and the EPA are doing right now in holding up new guidance running all the way through the court system before the American public can be updated.
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C
So as of now, there is no provision that says the label's enough to warn what's on the label is enough. They're trying to get that at the federal level.
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Matter of fact, the federal law says that the label cannot be used to shield a company for misbranding. And misbranding means failure to warn, didn't tell the public things that they should have known or did know. And so the current federal law says that the label cannot be used to shield. And we've informed a lot of state lawmakers of that very issue. And that's one of the things that helps them understand and see that it's a lie, that we can rely upon an EPA label for all of our protection. And when we've talked to the epa, they've even said that, you know what, we look at these lawsuits to help us trigger new reviews and to help us update our understanding, to update our labeling. And so if the EPA themselves, they're relying on these lawsuits as a mechanism for feedback, as a mechanism for updating information on the dosing of, let's Just call it what it is, the poisons. And so for that, for that reason, we believe that it's a huge misstep to pass these types of laws at the state level and ignore what the federal law has already acknowledged, that an EPA label is not enough.
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C
With some farmers understandably wanting to preserve their use of these chemicals, do you see some tension developing, if it hasn't already, between the Agriculture Department and EPA versus perhaps Health and Human Services,
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tension between where they want to go and they currently are? I mean, there's.
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It's.
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C
Well, perhaps the EPA or the Ag Department for farmers might be advocating for one thing at the federal level in support of the farmers, whereas HHS might be advocating for the opposite.
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A
And I think that's exactly why we're seeing the appropriations provision is to say that we cannot have a single agency or a single administration, I should say, putting out conflicting advice. And I think that in the middle of this reform that there are some things that even the heads of these agencies would do differently. It's just we're living through a time when this bureaucracy has gotten so big that reform takes time. It takes time to catch up. It takes time to do things differently. And passing these laws would be a huge misstep to shield the chemical companies, because we're right in the middle of what could be a huge breakthrough with doing things differently in America.
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C
If people want to know what they can do if they feel strongly about this issue, what are you all doing? And what can other people do?
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Yes, it's super important that people know and understand that there is a fight to squash food reform in America because the only people that can do something about it, it's you and I, because the industry is already telling their story to the state lawmakers to Congress to, To maintain their industry dominance. And if you and I don't say something that we care about these issues, that we want transparency and accountability, then the only story heard is the industry story, which means that at the end of the day, the laws will pass. Because even in states like Montana where you think, oh, they're freedom loving, they, you know, close to nature. The law was very close to passing in Montana. It was narrowly defeated by a single vote on the floor. And the people's voice does make a difference. We saw it make a huge difference in Tennessee when it stopped the measure. Multiple committee hearings in. We saw it make a huge difference in Florida. After flying through one committee, we were able to educate the next committee and get it completely tabled. And so we've seen the people's voice make a difference. We try to make it super easy for people to say they care about these things and contact the right person at the right time through Stand for Health Freedom. So you can send an email and make a phone call. If you don't know who your state lawmaker is or your congressional representative, then you can find that out at Sanford Health Freedom and you can call and we encourage everyone to make sure they make that phone call, that they send an email and say that we want the greatest transparency and accountability with any chemicals in our food supply, including the pesticides, and that we know that the EPA labels are not sufficient and that the EPA label laws are not what you're being told they are. That it's un American to stop right to trial by jury and it's un American to prop up an industry that is being sued over and over again for the same harm.
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More on this topic on my TV program April 19th. To find a station near you, go to Cheryl Atkison.com and click the Full Measure tab for a list of stations and times. Or you can catch the program if it's easier for you on the Internet at Fullmeasure News. Or on Sunday we post the TV show around 11:30, definitely by noon Eastern time at FullMeasure News. And if you happen to be listening to this after April 19th, don't worry. You can go to FullMeasure News and watch it. Or better yet, I think it plays better on our unadvertised YouTube channel, full measure with Cheryl Atkison. You can catch this latest program and all of our shows for the last 11 years, many of them more relevant than ever at the Full Measure with Cheryl Akkeson YouTube channel. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast and that you will consider leaving us a review, sharing it with your friends and subscribing. And check out my other podcast, the Cheryl atkison Podcast. Do your own research, make up your own mind. Think for yourself. Sa.