Logic would dictate that those who are opposed to using gene engineering (GE) in all its forms to grow crops would also be opposed to using it for medical purposes. But that is not the case.
There has been very little criticism from the anti-GMO community to using GE to develop vaccines for Ebola and HPV, and mostly recently to inoculate the global population against COVID-19. Most major anti-GMO groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have been silent about utilizing GE technologies to produce the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
[su_panel color=”#3A3A3A” border=”1px solid #3A3A3A” radius=”2″ text_align=”left”]This is the second part of a two-part series. Read part one here: The organic food industry’s rejection of modernity[/su_panel]
Only a relatively small number of diehards in the anti-GMO community are opposing the vaccine. Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumer Association (OCA), who is notoriously anti-vaccine, is one of them. He wrote an article on the OCA website that says:
The bottom line is that there is no valid scientific, ethical, or political reason (as opposed to greed, social control, and partisan politics) to be injecting children, students, recovered COVID victims, pregnant women, nursing mothers, and those in good health with experimental drugs.
Cummins has written a book with the prominent “alternative” medical practitioner Joe Mercola, who the New York Times described in an article as “the most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online,” entitled “The Truth About Covid-19”, which has a forward by another anti-vaccine advocate, Robert F Kennedy, Jr.
Although there are some unfounded concerns among those who oppose taking the COVID-19 shot that a GE vaccine will alter their DNA, opposition to the vaccine is mostly steeped in the belief that COVID is a hoax or is not dangerous, fear of serious side-effects, a misguided belief in the freedom to do as I please with my body, anti-government rhetoric and the strange belief that the vaccine contains a microchip designed to track your every movement. This last concern is a particularly strange belief as no microchip has been developed that is small enough to pass through a syringe.
Perhaps one of the reasons why GE foods are so controversial while GE for medicine is not especially divisive is that food is often an expression of personal preferences, values and identity in a way that medicine is not. For example, everyone has their favorite food or foods. This is not the case for medicine. No one has a favorite medicine. We take medicine not because we like to or because it gives us sensory pleasure as some foods do but because we have to in order to stabilize our health or to cure serious diseases.
We can choose what foods to eat based on personal preferences. We cannot choose which medications to take or not take if we have a serious ailment. If you have high cholesterol, you need to take a statin, if you have an infection, you need to take an antibiotic and if you have diabetes, you need to take insulin, much of which is produced in a GMO process.
The reality is that genetic engineering is merely a tool used in both medicine and food and feed production to produce superior results that cannot be produced through “conventional” medicine and plant breeding techniques. As a result, there are GE vaccines for Ebola, COVID-19 and HPV which could not be produced by any other means. We also have GE crops that are insect, herbicide, disease and drought resistant that could not be produced without the assistance of biotechnology.
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Science is not an a la carte menu. You cannot say I accept GE for medicine because it saves lives but I oppose GE for crops because of some unfounded fears they are dangerous to human health and the environment. Billions of people throughout the world have received the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 with only an infinitesimal number of serious side effects. Billions of people have eaten GE crops without one documented case of serious side effects. It is quite evident that the application of GE for both food and medicine have been proven to be safe.
We are at the dawn of a genetic revolution that will alter the way medicines and food are produced and profoundly change our collective lives for the better.
The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are a great leap forward in medicine. Before their development, scientists were not even certain a mRNA vaccine could be developed and once developed it was not certain it could be scaled up quickly to be used to fight a serious disease. But in record time for a vaccine production, both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna developed such a vaccine which will be responsible for saving countless millions of lives.
According to an October 13, 2021 article in the Financial Times:
Proponents of mRNA argue that combatting Covid-19 is just the start and that its wider application heralds a revolution in modern medicine. Cures for some forms of cancer are among several areas being explored. Pharmaceutical companies are turning their attention to the power of mRNA to tackle a range of illnesses from flu to heart disease and HIV. Very early vaccine trials are also underway for the Zika virus, yellow fever and rare diseases such as methylmalonic acidemia, where the body is unable to break down proteins.
Moderna is studying personalized cancer vaccines using mRNA…Ugur Sahin, chief executive of German biotechnology company BioNTech, “points to the prospect of gene therapy to help repair damaged tissues and organs as a possible frontier that mRNA can help cross in the decades to come, potentially opening the way to delivering new gene therapies such as Crispr. Organ repair will be an important topic for the future.
With regard to food, GE will produce crops that are tastier, have a longer shelf life, more nutritious, resistant to diseases that decimate output and cause billions of dollars in loses, resistant to browning and drought tolerant.
In an example of the health benefits that GE foods can provide, Japanese scientists have developed a GE tomato that has five times the normal amount of GABA, a neurotransmitter (and not, as the article states, an amino acid)linked to lower blood pressure. Other examples include:
- Calyxt, a US based agriculture biotechnology company has developed a gene-edited soybean oil that contains approximately 80 percent oleic acid and up to 20 percent less saturated fatty acids compared to commodity soybean oil as well as zero grams of trans fat per serving.
- The Philippines has approved the cultivation of GMO Golden Rice which will help to fight the scourge of Vitamin A deficiency that impacts about one in five children from the poorest areas of the country.
- Ugandan scientists have developed a GMO Vitamin A banana.
- Brazilian state company EMBRAPA has produced a GM lettuce that increases the folate content by 15-fold. As a result, two leaves could provide 100 percent of the daily requirement of folate for an adult. It has also produced in collaboration with a Mexican University, a GM bean with an 84-fold increase in folic acid.
The animosity of GE crop opponents to the use of GE to grow food but their acceptance of GE medicine highlights the hypocrisy that infects the movement and their resort to sophistry to promote anti-science views and beliefs. At a time when GE is helping to slay the dragon of the COVID-19 virus that has killed millions throughout the world, being used to treat cancer (immunotherapy), is creating vaccines to treat serious diseases (Ebola and HPV) and resulting in the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2020 being awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for the development of a method for genome editing, it is untenable and irresponsible for there to be any opposition to its use to grow crops. But unfortunately, the anti-GE opponents for crops are blind to their hypocrisy and they will never admit they are wrong.
Steven E. Cerier is an international economist and a frequent contributor to the Genetic Literacy Project.
