Part 2: How anti-biotechnology activists came to embrace COVID vaccine hesitancy

Credit: Getty Images
Credit: Getty Images

Even as many progressives champion the various COVID vaccines, many Democrats in the US and leftists in other countries remain skeptical. The hesitancy is particularly pronounced among two groups: minorities—some such as American Blacks citing a questionable history of vaccine experimentation dating back to the Tuskegee experiments; and the organic-natural community.

British environmentalist George Monbiot, an influential columnist for the progressive Guardian newspaper in the UK, has attempted to explain why the left-liberal ‘progressive’ community has this notable anti-vaccine strain. Monbiot acknowledges that “there has long been an overlap between certain new age and far-right ideas” and that “for several years, anti-vax has straddled the Green Left and the far Right.” He is also open about the “shocking” and “uncomfortable” fact that so many of his fellow left-wingers are falling prey to lunatic ideas.

Every few days I hear of another acquaintance who has become seriously ill with Covid, after proudly proclaiming the benefits of “natural immunity”, denouncing vaccines and refusing to take the precautions that apply to lesser mortals. … I hear right-on people mouthing the claims of white supremacists, apparently in total ignorance of their origins. I encounter hippies who once sought to build communities sharing the memes of extreme individualism. Something has gone badly wrong in parts of the alternative scene.

Yet Monbiot is nothing if not a hypocrite on this issue. Like many on the Left, he has been consistently and deeply critical of agricultural biotechnology, often uncritically embracing the rejectionist tropes of the same groups now fanning suspicion of vaccines. Like many of the left-wing vaccine critics he abhors, Monbiot believes that biotech innovations are dangerous products peddled by corporations forcing GM food on reluctant populations and polluting the global food supply.

And while he is honest enough to acknowledge the far Left’s current slide into irrationality on this issue, he blames this development on the sinister machinations of conservatives. Naïve progressives, he claims, have been “lured to the far right by conspiracy theories” that accuse corporations of profiting from COVID and the booming vaccine market. George Santayana’s aphorism that “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it” may be a cliché, but here it is apropos. Monbiot, like many Green progressives, is watching the dismal consequences of his own anti-corporate fear-mongering playing out in real time.

[Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part series. Read Part one here: How much responsibility for COVID vaccine rejectionism rests with the progressive Left?]

The environmental bind

When advocating for action on climate change, environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace are fond of intoning that “We should listen to science.” But when it comes to biotechnology and genetic science, it has been a different story. Indeed, the Greens’ well-documented distortion and misrepresentation of biotechnology—for instance, the panic over genetically modified “Frankenfoods”—has laid the ideological groundwork for resistance to COVID vaccines among any group reflexively skeptical of “Big Corporations” or “Big Government.”

Vehement and longstanding opposition to genetic modification has left Green political parties in Europe and NGOs everywhere in a bind. They rely on the votes and donations of supporters conditioned to distrust biotechnology and biotech companies. Yet now, due to a global health disaster, they are presented with bioengineered vaccines, created by hated biotech corporations, that can provide for the wellbeing of billions. How can these parties justify the embrace of life-saving vaccines made by the very corporations they have persuaded millions of people to distrust?

Greenpeace’s conversion was slow. Even at the height of the pandemic, the organization was still arguing that GE techniques “could effectively turn both nature and ourselves … into a gigantic genetic engineering experiment with unknown, potentially irrevocable outcomes.” Other NGOs employed a particularly cynical strategy: they fell silent on the GE nature of the COVID vaccines for fear it would legitimize other uses of biotechnology (such as developing disease-resistant and nutrition-enhanced crops and food) while spin-doctoring support for mass immunization as a social justice cause. And here Green organizations have turned to a familiar anti-capitalist script, dodging the science while raising doubts about the nefarious intentions of profit-making corporations.

Vandana Shiva.

Search Green organizations’ websites for information on COVID vaccines and there’s nothing about the science behind the miracle of bioengineering, which they have spent decades denigrating as unsafe and paternalistic; there is, though, plenty that equates the COVID crisis with genetically modified crops. Vandana Shiva, an Indian environmental activist and food sovereignty advocate, known as the “rock star” of the anti-GMO movement, is one of many anti-crop biotech campaigners who has floated the conspiracy theory that “We are feeding all our animals GMO soya and it could so easily be that this horizontal gene transfer is happening and the animals are developing super-viruses which are then jumping from animals to humans.”

The example Down Under

New Zealand’s environmentalist lobby offers a revealing case study. It’s small but hugely influential—especially since the election of charismatic progressive Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, in 2017—and provides a microcosm of the attitudes emerging in other Western democracies. The country’s Green Party is an ally and former coalition partner of the current left-leaning government, and it has (like its fellow Greens the world over) consistently opposed genetic biotechnology while steadfastly supporting draconian GMO restrictions first drafted in the 1990s. 

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This has resulted in a staggering irony: biotech research that could help mitigate the climate impact of New Zealand’s agricultural industry and protect the country’s endangered native fauna from introduced predators is being stymied by the very party that claims to prioritise the natural environment. The NZ Greens’ official policy demands that “Public funding should focus on fundamental and applied scientific research”—so long, of course, as genetic engineering never leaves the lab. As an example of inconsistency and scientific incoherence, this is hard to beat.

This goes beyond mere irony. Given the confusion and fear encouraged by environmental activists, openly backing genetic technology is seen as a vote-loser by New Zealand’s two major political parties. Thus, neither party is willing to officially endorse biotech innovation despite its widely acknowledged sustainability benefits in lowering the use of harmful chemicals, reducing natural inputs such as water, curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, and increasing agricultural yields (which in turn limits the need to clear carbon-sucking, oxygen-generating forests).

The rationale offered by the right-leaning National Party’s “cautious approach” is revealing. “We need to be mindful of market perceptions as well as the science,” it said in 2017, arguing that it has to protect New Zealand’s global reputation as an exporter of non-GMO products. “We will continue to monitor global rules around the regulation of GMOs and adapt our system over time in line with international developments,” it claimed, even as almost every region in the world, outside of precautionary-obsessed Europe, embraced GMOs and in many cases enthusiastically encouraged CRISPR crop innovation. That puts political expediency over science.

New Zealand’s anti-biotechnology views are so entrenched that when COVID struck, vaccine proponents were forced to walk a political tightrope, fearful that bioengineered vaccines might fall foul of the country’s strict GMO legislation. In the end, the sheer magnitude of the crisis overwhelmed political correctness, at least in part, and key influencers downplayed the contradiction for fear of fueling latent anti-vaccination sentiment. Playing the anti-capitalism card, the environmentalist Left ignored the biotechnology angle altogether, and focussed instead on the need for a “People’s Vaccine” that, in the words of the New Zealand Green Party, “put[s] human lives before the interests of multi-billion dollar pharma companies.” This is boilerplate anti-GMO activist rhetoric.

This is farcical, and it highlights the selective absurdity of  restrictions targeting crops but not medicine. After all, if the process of bioengineering makes crops dangerous to our health—as Green propaganda claims—it should wreak havoc when used to craft treatments in which human life hangs in the balance?

Among those who conscientiously refused to make political capital from this tragic irony were members of The Opportunities Party (TOP), the country’s sole party with a coherent policy on genetic engineering. Its policy position is that GE is “designed to help New Zealander’s lead healthier lives, develop healthier crops, protect our precious environment, and benefit from leading international scientific developments.”

Sowing (GE-free) seeds

Like many high-profile anti-GMO activist organizations, Greenpeace has been adept at muddying the waters over the science of modern biotechnology. This is most blatant in its decades’ long opposition to Golden Rice, a strain of rice genetically modified to make beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A that was approved in the Philippines last summer. According to the World Health Organization, “250 000–500 000 children who are vitamin A-deficient become blind every year, and half of them die within 12 months of losing their sight”. Golden Rice has the potential to prevent millions of needless deaths and ensure improved health and well-being for many millions more. And yet, 20 years after being developed, this live-saving food is opposed by Greenpeace and many other leftist groups even after its approval.

Credit: Greenpeace

As with Green political parties, Greenpeace’s “especially persistent, vocal, and extreme” opposition to GM crops like Golden Rice (a former Greenpeace director now describes the groups opposition as “morally unacceptable…ideology”) has put it in an awkward spot with regards to bioengineered COVID vaccines. Unwilling to concede that its anti-biotechnology stance is ideological and unscientific, the NGO has (in keeping with other Greens) simply repositioned itself as supporting mass immunization for the sake of the world’s poor. This is egregious hypocrisy—where is the concern for the millions of the undernourished poor suffering from Vitamin A deficiency who could be helped by GM Golden Rice? Greenpeace and its allies in the affluent West are preventing the developing world from realizing the huge potential of biotechnology—except when the ideological opposition, as in the case of vaccines, is too obviously absurd.

Fear-mongering over GMOs and the technologies associate with it is a long-standing tactic indulged in by politicians in the wealthy developed world, Europe in particular. There is widespread adherence to the safety-first, risk-avoiding precautionary principle, which is conveniently invoked to block GE crops and many synthetic chemicals. Hypocritically, it’s ignored when applied to other technologies, such as the most popular, and dangerous, pesticide in use on the continent: organic sulfate, the most widely-used agricultural chemical in Europe, and a suspected human carcinogen known to smother beneficial insects. 

But biomedically-derived vaccines are getting a political get-out-of-jail free card. As COVID raged across Europe, politicians found themselves in the bind faced by liberal Greens worldwide—how to change tack with vaccines made using the same genetic technologies that they had demonized for decades. If they’d stuck to their principles, they would have openly opposed the new vaccines while applying the same unscientific regulatory approach used to block approvals of GE crops to indefinitely delay any potential COVID immunization, Instead, like the Greens and the environmentalist NGOs, they chose spin and hypocrisy, furiously obfuscating their existing anti-GE stance to fast-track vaccine approvals while reassuring the public that they were safe.

Assigning responsibility

Exaggerated safety concerns, suspicion of new technology and distrust of profit-making corporations have been features of leftist opposition to modern genetic and genomic technology for decades. Consequently, biotechnophobia has certainly played a part in the public’s sometimes ambivalent attitudes towards the new bioengineered COVID vaccines.

There is deadly precedent here. In the late 1990s, as the HIV/Aids epidemic raged through sub-Saharan Africa, then-President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, openly rejected the evidence-based battle against the disease. Influenced by ‘AIDS denialists’ and believing the disease “was brought about by the collapse of the immune system … not because of a virus”, Mbeki turned his back on modern pharmaceutical drugs, opting instead for ‘natural’ alternatives. As a result of Mbeki’s science-denying policies, more than a third of a million people are thought to have died. Those murderous beliefs and motivations match those of today’s anti-vaxxers; different disease, same life-threatening message.

The mass take-up of COVID vaccines in many parts of the world demonstrates ongoing trust in science and public health bodies—after all, vaccines do work and biotechnology is the reason. As a result, opposition to GE techniques will undoubtedly soften, if only incrementally. Nevertheless, the politicization of science has strengthened the core of anti-vax sentiment. The result is untold thousands of unnecessary deaths, and many more to come in what has been described as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

The finger of blame for this is most often pointed at the Right and its crackpot extremes—an accusation for which there is ample justification. But the progressive Left must shoulder its share of responsibility for enabling the anti-scientific hostility to biotechnology that sustains the anti-vaccination movement. The coronavirus pandemic has caused massive backtracking and spin-doctoring among progressive parties over bioengineered vaccines. It remains to be seen whether or not this expediency will produce a rethink about biotechnology and its benefits once the COVID crisis recedes.

Forget the hypocritical Green smokescreen about protecting the world’s poor from unnatural genetic engineering. In the words of exasperated leftist Alan Sokal, “rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality”, the hallmark of science, are the best means to achieve the progressive goal of greater social justice and equality; it’s also the only way to truly slay the beast of COVID-19.

Jon Entine is the founding executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, and winner of 19 major journalism awards. He has written extensively in the popular and academic press on agricultural and population genetics. You can follow him on Twitter @JonEntine

Patrick Whittle has a PhD in philosophy and is a New Zealand-based freelance writer with a particular interest in the social and political implications of biological science. You can find him at his website: patrickmichaelwhittle.com or follow him on Twitter @WhittlePM

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