Editor’s note: This commentary is by David Flemming, who is a policy analyst at the Ethan Allen Institute.
[L]ast fall, the Vermont Department of Health announced that it was considering adding new chemicals to Vermont’s Safe Product Act, giving Vermont the chance to make its list of banned chemicals more scientific. Unfortunately, activists continue to demand blanket chemical bans, essentially stigmatizing chemicals before their effects can be truly known.
Some Vermonters might not see the harm in being a bit overzealous regarding which chemicals are banned and which are legalized, for health and environmental reasons. After all, isn’t it better to be safe than sorry?
What follows is a cautionary tale regarding how the scientific method can be crushed by political power. In 1971, the Environmental Protection Agency spent seven months interviewing 125 expert witnesses regarding DDT’s toxicity. The National Academy of Sciences testified that spraying “DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria (from infected mosquitos) that would otherwise have been inevitable.”
Judge Edmund Sweeney pooled the testimonies to determine that “the uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. … DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man.” Judge Sweeney fairly ruled that DDT should remain a legal pesticide.
Unfortunately, head of the EPA William Ruckelshaus overrode Sweeney in 1972, despite not attending any of the investigative hearings or reading Sweeney’s report. Ruckelshaus was acting on orders from President Richard Nixon, who had already demanded that America should “phase out the use of DDT” back in 1970, a year before DDT’s guiltlessness was shown. The 1971 investigation was a just a front to satisfy a court requirement.
While malaria infection rates in the U.S. grew after the DDT ban, they exploded in Third World countries. In Ceylon/Sri Lanka, DDT spraying had sliced malaria cases from millions annually in the 1940s, down to just 17 by 1963. DDT was banned in 1964. Soon, those 17 infections climbed to half a million victims per year by 1969. Though malaria is not always fatal, pregnant women can have a mortality rate of 50%.
Thankfully in 2006, the World Health Organization reversed its three decade long warning against DDT, and approved it for indoor spraying.
Still, it is better to not to supplant science with politics in the first place. Vermont should emulate the scientific decision-making process mandated by Congress’ 2016 Toxic Substances Act. That bill passed 398-1 and received our own Rep. Peter Welch’s vote and President Obama’s signature of approval. Vermonters can create this separation of science and politics by requiring that a public health authority review all risks of a chemical before banning it.
If such a system was adopted, chemicals like D4 that are being considered for a ban by the Vermont Department of Health would likely pass with flying colors. D4 can be found in items like sportswear, sealants and spatulas. It has recently undergone lab tests in Washington state, Canada and Australia. Each government concluded that D4 is not entering the environment at high levels and does not pose a risk to human health.
Of course, banning chemicals in Vermont will not have the same catastrophic consequence as banning DDT. From the perspective of the scientific search for truth however, the consequences would be just as dire. While some Vermonters are less susceptible than most Americans in believing the decidedly unscientific views that vaccines cause autism or that climate change isn’t happening, we can all too easily fall under the sway of ideas that don’t pass scientific muster.
The only way we can ensure a truly scientific process for identifying toxic chemicals is to pass off such decisions to actual scientists who don’t have to look over their shoulder at politicians who are ill-equipped to make such decisions.
The chemical formulation of DDT was one of the greatest scientific and public health breakthroughs of the 19th century. The subsequent banning of DDT was one of the worst instances of politics triumphing over science in the 20th. While it may not be in Vermonters’ power to change the sad history of DDT, we can demand that all future chemicals be given a fair chance to prove their value to humankind.
Treating chemicals with respect instead of fear will encourage future chemists and biologists to develop health policy and environmental solutions that will give us a cleaner and safer world.
