NO Liability: First Vaccines, Now Pesticides?
If you aren't harming people, why would it be necessary to have a liability shield?
Vaccine companies have quite a gig. Not surprisingly, pesticide companies want to join them. It is interesting to revisit how vaccine companies managed to negotiate liability protection and speculate whether or not pesticide companies will get the same benefits.
By the middle of the 20th Century, vaccination was common and many states had enacted laws that required shots for school entry. As vaccine use increased, the number of injuries increased as well. The total number of liability suits against vaccine manufacturers rose from nine between 1978 and 1981 to more than 200 per year by the mid-1980s.
Policy experts believed vaccination was critical and the increased liability would drive vaccine manufacturers out of the market. As a result, Congress took action and passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) in 1986. This act established a special court program for vaccine injury claims that caps damages and allows for the injured people to be compensated without having to prove that the vaccine maker did anything wrong.
The law recognized that vaccines would harm some individuals, but the thinking at that time was those injuries would be acceptable for the broader public good. Because there was no real liability, pharmaceutical companies began to churn out vaccines. Today vaccine companies make over $60 billion in revenue each year. In 2024, Glaxo Smith Kline alone made almost $11 billion.
Each year adverse events are reported through the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). According to a Harvard Pilgrim Health Care study only about 1% of the injuries are reported. In 2024 VAERS showed 166,455 adverse events. If we assume only 1% of the injuries were reported, that means there were over 16,645,500 adverse events in 2024. Incredible!
Pesticide companies are facing the same liability issues the vaccine companies did before the NCVIA was passed. Bayer, the owner of the former Monsanto Co., is looking for a way to combat thousands of lawsuits filed by farmers and other people who blame Roundup for causing them to develop cancer. The litigation has cost Bayer billions of dollars in settlements and more cases are pending. The company says they need legislation, similar to NCVIA, to ensure they can stay in the pesticide business and farmers don’t lose access to Roundup.
Laws have been introduced in eight states and drafts are circulating in more than 20 others. As one might imagine, there is a lot of advertising (and lobbying) supporting the measures. Neighboring Iowa has the second-highest rate of new cancer cases in the U.S. and the fastest-growing cancer rate. Farmers in South Dakota use a lot of Roundup (glyphosate) too.
If liability protection, similar to NCVIA, is granted to pesticide companies, will the number of pesticides increase rapidly like the number of vaccines did? And will the number of undocumented injuries accelerate as well?
South Dakota Voices Response: Jeanette, thank you for joining the discussion. Very good points. Should it be outlawed or should we require testing? Are there other options?
Email comment from JS: "I thought Round UP was regulated for use in the US. Why the heck are the food companies allowed to put it in our foods, we have it in facial creams, lotions, in our water sources and almost every other part of our lives... Get rid of it."
Most water anywhere you go tastes like something is wrong with it. I farmed for many years as well as my dad and my grandparents in union county SD. In 1986 my dad died of kidney, lung and other areas cancer. I relate his death with chemicals, here’s why. When the new at the time product 2-4D came out very little was known about it, possibly not much for warnings of any kind on the can then, just a guess. He sprayed the pasture with it one day, breezy and it drifted on him several times to the point he got deathly sick, had to crawl to the house to get help and everything he vomited up smelled like that chemical. Through several years he did his own spraying of many different chemicals, Atrazine, roundup, Banvel, etc.! As i got into helping i too sprayed these toxic chemicals and worse than that i ran a floater for the Farmers COOP in Akron, Iowa spraying pre and then post with a rogator most of the summer. My biggest product i used was roundup and as careful as you want to be you still get it on you. I’ve been retired since the age of 62, now 67 but been fighting possible prostrate cancer since 2014. We moved to Madison, SD in 2022 and in 2023 again they said it looks like i have cancer. I believe in homeopathic/ natural ways of fighting things and i think things are working out fairly well, that’s an while another subject i could discuss with anyone. But what were spraying and fertilizing is killing us. What’s going in the water beneath us and its not only agriculture chemicals its everyday chemical that we use. We have no idea what all in the food we been eating for ages or drinking. I do know prostrate cancer is way more in the population than anyone one knows or lets on about. What other cancers are out there of other types no ones speaks about. The other thing is when they vaccinate you or shoot you with something do you ask the side effects, what’s in it? You wouldn’t want to know, its unbelievable. Then you go to the Doctor and and they give you chemo which is a sham, good honest doctors will tell you it only fixes 3% of those treated, but its big money to the doctors and supplier. Radiation is just that, will fry your insides and cause more cancers. Then there all the other things like hormone treatment which have unbelievable damage. The thing is there is no money in a cure, between big pharma and Doctors its all about the money over lives saved. I hope is RFK now will expose all the bad things going on in our day to day lives that’s killing us slowly and some cases very quickly.