[V]ermont Attorney General TJ Donovan is once again joining a national fight. This time he is using the power of his office to inveigh against the pesticide chlorpyrifos, a substance he said is harmful to kids and their families.
Pesticide scientists with the Environmental Protection Agency first proposed a regulation that would ban chlorpyrifos for food crops in 2016. According to Vermont Department of Health toxicologist Sarah Vose, the science behind the EPA’s 2016 decision hasn’t changed — but in 2017, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt issued an order permitting the continued use of the pesticide.
“That 2016 risk assessment is still an EPA scientific risk assessment on chlorpyrifos,” Vose said. “Whoever is above the scientists, they’re the ones who are making those decisions to use the science or not use the science.”
When Pruitt first announced the rule reversal, Vermont joined six other states in filing administration objections to the rule. In July 2019, however, the EPA denied the states’ objections.
This week, Vermont joined California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and Washington in asking the court of appeals to review the decision.
“The science is clear: it’s harmful to proper development of the brain, and the EPA agreed with that a couple years ago,” Donovan said. “For the fact that they reversed course, we’re going to continue to fight for kids in this state, and to say simply that this pesticide should not be used on food.”
According to Vose, the pesticide poses the greatest risk to the brain development of children and unborn babies.
“Children had different developmental delays, decreases in IQ, decreases in working memory,” Vose said of studies on the pesticide. “There a lot of different ways to measure neurodevelopmental toxicity and brain development in children. But it seems like the most sensitive population is the unborn babies.”
Donovan said that for him, continuing the fight is “common sense.”
“This is something that I feel strongly about,” he said. “When the science is clear that this is harmful to kids, we need to stand up and fight against it and protect Vermont’s children.”
