I spent almost two hours writing a comment on Lee’s article. The commonalities between the plight of the honeybee and the plight of our children were too similar not to.

Coincidentally, Bayer Corporation was also involved in helping market DuPont’s product, Ceresan, the seed preservative and sister-product of Thimerosal.

By Julie Obradovic Kelly

In the early 1990’s, a group of beekeepers in France began to notice something alarming. Their bees were suddenly unable to gather food for their colonies. They were also weak, vulnerable, and trembling. Many were dying.

Having never seen the condition before, it became known as “Mad Bee Disease”. By 2006, it was called “Colony Collapse Disorder”.

French beekeepers held demonstrations and demanded answers. Something new and strange was happening to their bees, and it just so happened to coincide with the recent adoption of a new pesticide application created by Bayer Corporation at their location in Japan. Neonics, as they are commonly referred, officially called neonicotinoids - synthetic neurotoxic insecticides - were developed there.

In the 1980’s, the race was on to create a product that could be applied to the root or seed of a crop and last a lifetime. But more importantly, it needed to be precise. The right form, given the right way, in the right amount would ideally target the bad (the insects killing or eating the crops) while not harming the good (the bees needed to pollinate them).

They called it a “surgical strike” against pests. It was celebrated widely as a tremendous achievement and quickly turned Bayer into a global player in the industry. By 2009, it had generated over $2 billion in sales.

The whole story, laid out in exhaustive detail, was recently shared on a Substack I follow written by journalist, Lee Fang. Lee has written extensively about corruption and corporate capture and the impact it has on society. I have enjoyed his analysis and investigative work for the last few years.

Last week, he reposted his expose entitled, This Pesticide Rapidly Eradicating Insect Life May Also Harm Humans. At about a 45 minute read, it is lengthy, but extremely worthwhile. (The entirety is behind a paywall.)

Reading it was an emotional and enlightening experience. I was left feeling a mix of anger, sadness, and disgust. It confirmed beyond any doubt that the industry playbook for not only avoiding accountability, but for also turning themselves into the real victim or hero of a problem they created, is well-rehearsed and easily deployable.

Absolutely everything that has happened regarding the bee controversy could be identified in the autism one. The similarities are astounding, frequently leaving me gasping aloud, or even laughing in dismay, as I could easily substitute the names of the agencies, people, and activities with those of our own issue and tell almost the exact same story. (No joke, Ian Lipkin is even mentioned.)

Methods of controlling the bee health and insecticide narrative have included (many listed verbatim from the article):

Minimizing a negative association. Reaching out to universities reliant upon their funding (or interested in securing it) for support. Challenging the details of the initial government studies suggesting a problem. Shifting public discourse. Producing a documentary to show on PBS.

Portraying the issue as a mystery. Playing dumb. Blaming other things - many possible contributing factors. Hiding spokesperson’s conflicts of interest. Positioning themselves as the real leaders of protecting bee health.

Doing a roadshow around the country. Awarding money to local beekeepers and students. Hosting a fancy website promoting themselves as the only true and reliable experts.

Financing online advertisements. Portraying those who fear these products as deranged conspiracy theorists. Exerting covert influence online. Manipulating search engine results.

Reframing the debate to focus only on a natural cause (a parasite). Financing research to support that theory. Hyping the natural cause as the most likely explanation here and abroad.

Saying the dose makes the poison. Doubling down efforts to discredit dissenters. Calling opposing studies “junk science”. Manipulating statics by leaving out context or important details. Pointing exclusively to their own safety studies.

Appointing friendly researchers to industry and university chair positions. Downplaying an internal government memo saying their science stinks and fails to meet basic guidelines. Dismissing emerging science showing the toxin isn’t a “surgical strike” after all. It strays…far…getting into waterways and wreaking havoc.

Creating public-private partnerships to investigate themselves. Holding biased hearings. Propping up experts of the natural cause theory. Getting the government to sponsor legislation to expedite approval of pesticides for the mites.

Going after the jobs and reputations of independent beekeepers or scientists who dissented. Forcing dissenters to prove harm instead of producers proving safety. Creating a revolving door between industry and government regulators.

Defunding scientists who won’t back down. Launching smear campaigns. Maintaining a list of stakeholders to help message and support articles disputing safety claims. Hosting summits pretending to be impartial.

I refer to this kind of pathological behavior as the “Menu of Manipulation” in my own life.

When I spot anyone trying to talk me out of my own reality, making something complicated that isn’t complicated, refusing to take accountability, turning themselves into the victim or the hero of a problem they created, or circling the wagons to gang up on a target (among many other things), I know immediately something isn’t right.

These behaviors listed above can be included on that menu. Vested interests have seemingly perfected the art of creating and sustaining the narrative that serves them. And serving us from that menu appears to be how they have done it.

I spent almost two hours writing a comment on Lee’s article. The commonalities between the plight of the honeybee and the plight of our children were too similar not to.

Coincidentally, Bayer Corporation was also involved in helping market DuPont’s product, Ceresan, the seed preservative and sister-product of Thimerosal. (If you’re a regular reader here, you already know why that’s significant. If not, read all about it in our own Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill’s book, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic.)

Eerily similar to this “surgical strike”, they called those ethyl-mercury fungicides “targeted toxins”. That same theory, that the right form, given the right way, in the right amount would kill the bad without harming the good, is exactly what happened there.

Likewise, Fang even recognizes, like Dan and Mark, that there could be an interplay between the toxin and nature resulting in a new condition. He calls it, “one poison, one pathogen”. They called it, “one metal, one microbe” and proposed that this may be at the root of today’s modern plagues.

I knew it was a risk to comment though, as even though far more people are waking up to the lengths industry and government appear to go when working in concert to save themselves and their profits, far too many are not prepared to accept that they would go this far.

So I wrote it.

Losing our bees is bad, no doubt. Now imagine how far they might go if they were hurting our babies.

Julie Obradovic Kelly is a Contributing Editor to Age of Autism and the author of “An Unfortunate Coincidence: A mother’s life inside the autism controversy” (Skyhorse).