Thousands of children could die after court backs campaign group over GM crop in Philippines, scientists warn
Scientists have warned that a court decision to block the growing of the genetically modified (GM) crop Golden Rice in the Philippines could have catastrophic consequences. Tens of thousands of children could die in the wake of the ruling, they argue.
The Philippines had become the first country – in 2021 – to approve the commercial cultivation of Golden Rice, which was developed to combat vitamin A deficiency, a major cause of disability and death among children in many parts of the world.
But campaigns by Greenpeace and local farmers last month persuaded the country’s court of appeal to overturn that approval and to revoke this. The groups had argued that Golden Rice had not been shown to be safe and the claim was backed by the court, a decision that was hailed as “a monumental win” by Greenpeace.
Many scientists, however, say there is no evidence that Golden Rice is in any way dangerous. More to the point, they argue that it is a lifesaver.
Has regular rice? What about standing in the sun has that been shown to be safe? Has breathing?
This was the same reaction I had when the Covid vaccines were rolling out. “They haven’t been proven to be 100% safe and effective!” OK. Sure, but you know what is guaranteed to be bad for you? Covid. There are two choices here, and there’s a clear mitigation of harm with one option over the other.
It’s shocking that we’d rather see children die of treatable vitamin deficiencies than the off-chance that the food ‘might be unsafe’.
I believe pfizer? and some other pharma companies have now admitted to the non-zero risk for blood-clots and fatally-low platelet counts due to the vaccine. We still do not understand the full long-term impact of the vaccines. We need to stop the vaccine rollout and study the long-term and wider population effects now so that if in 10 or 20 or 30 years down the line if we start seeing people developing abnormal long-term systemic chronic effects due to the vaccines, we now have a MASSIVE study-patient-base available.
Medicine has to be RESPONSIBLY applied and while vaccinations are necessary they still have to be studied to death to ensure their safety and efficacy.
Private corporations DO NOT GET A FREE PASS.
I agree that those studies should be done. Studies should ALSO be done on people with unvaccinated covid infections, but we can’t do that on a large number of people, because they’re dead. The vaccinated people might have a ‘non-zero risk for blood clots’, but they’re still alive in the meantime.
Yeah, your chances to get blood clots due to vaccination are orders of magnitude lower than your chance to just die from covid.
Cool. Now there’s the question.
Covid itself is known to fuck with the body in a wide range of ways, creating severe long-term consequences for many. We know it’s true, and we know covid has way more lasting side effects than vaccines do.
What is the guarantee it doesn’t cause something very bad to you down the road? Maybe even something we don’t know yet? COVID-19 is not perfectly studied, and what is studied tells us it absolutely can cause problems down the road.
It’s also not safer by the virtue of being “natural” - viruses are essentially pieces of randomly changing encapsulated code injected into our bodies and reprogramming our cells. It could be anything, and I mean that.
Pfizer vaccine (or pretty much any approved covid vaccine for that matter) has little known side effects and is not expected to cause much more going forward.
From all the data we have now, vaccinating is a better pick both right now AND against future consequences.
Also, due to the fast pace of viral mutations, the vaccine will probably be completely useless in the 30 years you suggest.
Breathing has a 100% death rate.
No human has ever died on Mars - only ever on Earth.
Conclusion: Mars is safer than Earth.
You don’t even realize how amazingly stupid your response/argument is, do you?
Do you have any concept of how many times in human history, that an argument has basically boiled down to “its safe, stupid. Stop being a baby and use it!”, Only to find out years or even decades down the road that Oopsy Daisy, it wasnt as safe as was claimed?
Tetraethyllead being an excellent example, which I bet you would have voraciously argued in favor of at the time.
To be more specific, my above comment was more or less saying “see! I can make meaningless arguments too!”. Golden rice saves lives. Lots of things that save lives arent proven safe.
It doesn’t absolve the need to study the Golden rice for health problems. If Monsanto/Bayer made this “healthy rice” I will be even MORE skeptical of this. Corporations have been well-known for greed and mutual-human-extinction.
I trust the rice that was humanly modified and grown over 20,000 years rather than the rice that was suddenly placed in the market by a greedy-corporation in less than a century.
…and you’re doing the same thing as the idiots wanting to ban golden rice. You have to understand things in context and the context here is they are clearly targeting just golden rice not all GMOs
It’s Greenpeace they’re 1000% trying for all GMOs they just won this time with golden rice.
Do you have any idea what genetically modified organisms actually are? We’re not talking about some chemical we’ve never heard of, we’re talking about rice (but with more vitamin a). This isn’t something that needs to be proven safe.
I love the downvotes from people who don’t understand what GMOs even are