One of the largest mergers in history is taking place between Monsanto and Bayer and the media is silent on the fact that Bayer knowingly gave tens of thousands of hemophiliacs HIV.
The Big Pharma giant Bayer has just won approval from the US Justice Department for the $62.5 billion dollar takeover of the agrichemical behemoth Monsanto. The deal, which was solidified on Tuesday, has many people on edge knowing that Bayer, a company with a sordid history of corruption is merging with Monsanto, the company who has made an empire with its pesticide, herbicide, and genetically-engineered seed empire.
As part of Bayer’s agreement with US antitrust enforcers, the German firm will be required to divest some $9 billion in assets. Regulators said they directed Bayer to sell off its entire cotton, canola, soybean and vegetable seeds businesses, as well as its digital farming business. It will also sell its Liberty herbicide, which competes directly with Monsanto’s product RoundUp.
Prior to this sell off of assets, government regulators voiced their fears that the merger of these two companies would hamper competition and be a detriment to both farmers and consumers. Although Bayer’s asset sales were the largest divestiture ever required by the United States, some concerns over this monopoly are still alive, and rightfully so.
Though Bayer established its reputation for the invention of aspirin, a more nefarious incident involving an HIV-contaminated drug to be administered to children suffering from hemophilia proved the corporation’s practices aren’t as noble as it would have the public believe.
In 1984, Bayer’s Factor VIII, used in the treatment of hemophilia, became contaminated with HIV — which the company became alerted to after a number of children became infected. In full awareness its medicine was tainted — and unable to sell Factor VIII in its compromised state inside the U.S. — Bayer asked for and received permission from federal regulators to sell the affected batch to Argentina, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore after February 1984.
According to documents obtained by the New York Times, Bayer unit Cutter Biologic continued selling the tainted medicine despite knowing the potentially life-threatening risks to the children who would receive it. Cutter maintained in a written statement to the Times it had “behaved responsibly, ethically and humanely.”
The result of this sale of HIV tainted medication infected tens of thousands and killed thousands. Thousands of innocent children and adults have died at the hand of this corporation and no punitive action has ever been taken against them. On the contrary, the health department leaders who accepted the tainted drugs in Argentina, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore were all imprisoned, while the FDA continues down its hellish path.
When asked about the sale of the tainted Factor VIII years later, Bayer responded, ”Decisions made nearly two decades ago were based on the best scientific information of the time and were consistent with the regulations in place.”
With the revolving door that is the FDA, the government was complicit in this conspiracy which is why no one was held accountable, in spite of all the deaths.
“These are the most incriminating internal pharmaceutical industry documents I have ever seen,” said Dr. Sidney M. Wolf, director of the Public Citizen Research Group.
On the other side of this mega deal is Monsanto, who is responsible for poisoning the world’s waterways and ecosystems with a known probable human carcinogen, glyphosate — the hallmark ingredient in its herbicide, RoundUp.
Internal company documents revealed in 2015, that Monsanto had tested RoundUp for potential toxicity for years but used the guise of proprietary information to force the Environmental Protection Agency into sealing those records. They knew it was dangerous but deliberately covered up their findings and brought the product to market anyway.
Independent research scientist, Anthony Samsel, obtained the documents through his senator’s office after having his Freedom of Information Act requests successfully thwarted for years. As he described from information found in those documents, “Monsanto misrepresented the data and deliberately covered up data to bring [glyphosate] to the market.”
Indeed, it has been Monsanto’s own skewed and faulty research on glyphosate that has allowed its approval for use on food crops by the FDA and EPA.
Monsanto’s body of falsified research and its willful poisoning of the human population on the altar of profit are tantamount to crimes against humanity. Given Bayer’s equally corrupt and deadly history, the idea of these two companies merging their power and influence is chilling, to say the least.
“In order to minimize and cancel out its adverse findings, Samsel explained that Monsanto had relied upon earlier historical animal control data, toxicological research with lab animals afflicted with cancer and organ failures, and completely unrelated to glyphosate. In some cases the control animals displayed kidney, liver and pancreatic diseases. Many of Monsanto’s own studies required the inclusion of extraneous studies in order to cancel out damaging results. This is not an uncommon industry habit, particularly in toxicological science. It enables corporations to mask undesirable outcomes and make claims that observable illnesses and disease are spontaneous occurrences without known causal factors. Frequently, Monsanto would have to rely on three external control studies to negate the adverse effects of a single one of its own. Samsel found other incidences in Monsanto’s data where 5, 7 and in one case 11 unrelated studies were necessary to diminish the severity of its own findings. In effect, glyphosate received licensure based upon a platform of junk tobacco science. By ignoring cause and effect relationships behind the onset of multiple cancers and other life-threatening diseases throughout many of its research trials, Monsanto engaged in a radical scientific denialism that has since raked in tens of billions of dollars.
In addition, Monsanto’s studies included doses from low to high range. Samsel observed that low glyphosate doses were equally if not more toxic than higher doses. The company later discontinued low dose trials, relying only on higher levels because it is customarily assumed to have greater toxicological risks. Samsel’s observation has recently been confirmed by a study published in the August issue of the Environmental Health Journal by scientists at Kings College London and the University of Caen in France. The two year study found that glyphosate administered at an ultra low dose of 0.1 ppb (the EU’s safety limit) in drinking water altered over 4000 gene clusters in the livers and kidneys of rats. These alterations, the study reports, “were consistent with fibrosis, necrosis, phospholipidosis, mitochondria membrane dysfunction and ischemia.”[14] Consequently low doses of Roundup are far more toxic than US EPA limits.
During its years investigating glyphosate’s bioactivity, Monsanto conducted hundreds of trials on mice, rats, beagle dogs, rabbits and other life. Among the many cancers and diseases Monsanto’s own research found associated with glyphosate are:
Adenoma cancer in the pituitary gland
Glioma tumors in the brain
Reticular cell sarcomas in the heart
Malignant tumors in the lungs
Salivary mandibular reticular cell carcinoma
Metastatic sarcomas of the lymph gland
Prostate carcinoma
Cancer of the bladder
Thyroid carcinoma
Adrenal reticulum cell sarcomas
Cortical adenomas
Basal cell squamous skin tumors
In female mammals there were cancers of the lung, liver, thymus, stomach, bladder adrenal glands, ovaries, colon, uterus, parathyroid and mammary glands.
Samsel and Seneff also noticed that Monsanto had conducted many long-term studies, as much as two years, on mice and rats. When Gilles-Eric Seralini and his French team reproduced and extended the length of Monsanto’s 3-month GMO maize rat-fed study for the life of the animals, they observed profuse cancer and tumor development started after the 4th month of the study. Monsanto continues to stand by its 3-month study as sufficient proof of GM maize’s safety. Yet the thoroughness and variety of Monsanto’s research operations should give strong reason to suspect that Monsanto has likewise conducted long term studies and knows all too well the deleterious effects of its pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified crops.
One of Monsanto’s claims is that glyphosate doesn’t bio-accumulate in tissues, rapidly bio-degrades and is excreted from the body readily. Contrary to this claim, Monsanto carried out meticulous studies to determine levels of accumulation and the organs, tissues and cells glyphosate reaches. Glyphosate was radio labeled with carbon 14 and given in 10 mg doses to seven groups of animals, male and female. After only 24 hours, the toxic chemical was found in the lungs and all body fluids: lymph, blood, urine and cerebral spinal fluid. Glyphosate also accumulated in the bone by 30 ppm and in the bone marrow by 4 ppm. Monsanto’s studies were comprehensive. It found an accumulation of the chemical in red cells, thyroid, uterus, colon, testes and ovaries, shoulder muscle, nasal mucosa, heart, lung, small intestine, abdominal muscle and the eyes.
Samsel and Seneff noted that the bioaccumuilation in the pancreas was not reported. Why would such meticulous efforts be made to measure radio labeled carbon 14 laced glyphosate levels in all the other organs, tissues and bodily fluids and then ignore the pancreas? The scientists believe this was deliberate.”