Demand Congress Investigate Collusion Between Monsanto and the EPA!
Ronnie Cummins- Organic Consumers Assoc.
The New York Times reported Tuesday (March 14) that a former high-level EPA official collaborated with Monsanto to bury the truth about Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller.
According to the Times, and other news outlets, Monsanto and the EPA official may have conducted a cover-up in order to protect Monsanto’s billion-dollar flagship product from being taken off the market.
After you send your email using this form, please call your members of Congress. And don't forget to tweet them!
According to recently unsealed court documents, former EPA official Jess Rowland conspired with Monsanto to ghostwrite toxicology reports that were to be used by government regulators to determine the safety of Roundup.
And then he bragged about it: “If I can kill this [investigation] I should get a medal,” Rowland reportedly told a Monsanto executive, who relayed his comments in an email.
Rowland oversaw an EPA’s cancer assessment for glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup. He was also a key author of a report finding glyphosate was not likely to be carcinogenic.
Rowland colluded with Monsanto, even though another former EPA official—a 30-year career EPA scientist—warned Rowland that he was putting the public at risk.
In her 2013 letter to Rowland, the dying Marion Copley (now deceased) accused Rowland of playing “your political conniving games with science” to favor pesticide-makers like Monsanto. In her letter, Copley, a toxicologist, wrote: “It is essentially certain that glyphosate causes cancer.”
Copley’s letter, and the newly unsealed court documents, have come to light as a result of a lawsuit against Monsanto, filed in California by people, or the families of people, diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma after being exposed to glyphosate.
For decades, the evidence has been mounting that Roundup causes cancer. Yet even after a panel of 17 scientists with the World Health Organization unanimously agreed that Roundup is a “probably carcinogenic,” Monsanto has refused to acknowledge the evidence.
Instead, the company continues to profit from sales of a product—a product sold both commercially and in retail stores—that is linked to cancer.
Thanks!
-Katherine for the OCA team