The movement to bring DDT back after its ban found a curious ally: Big Tobacco. But the endangered industry was after something bigger.
At the same time, however, other birds were dying: crows, least bitterns, black-capped chickadees, mourning doves, mallard ducks, Canada geese, broad-winged hawks, great blue herons, and more. When West Nile virus appeared—for the second time—in New York in the spring of 2001, it spread from there to 10 states, killing thousands of birds and infecting dozens of people. When human cases appeared for the first time in Texas, they triggered panic and pesticide spraying.
But most of that season’s op-ed writers had a connection to the chemical they didn’t disclose. The Washington writer was the executive director of TASSC, an organization devoted to “sound science”—and created by tobacco company Philip Morris and its PR firm several years earlier. The former FDA official was a TASSC partner. The Colorado journalist was executive director of a “journalism center” directly funded by Philip Morris.
In the midst of all of this, a British American Tobacco executive received a copy of a curious letter from two malaria scientists. The letter, which was circulating among delegates to a global convention on chemicals known as POPs , argued that no global regulation should affect DDT because it was so crucial for stopping the spread of malaria in poor countries. To the BAT executive, the letter seemed germane to one of the company’s new special projects.
Like TASSC’s other “sound science” campaigns of the late nineties and early 2000s, the DDT campaign drew on the expertise and media connections of a cadre of professional science deniers who had been denying and distracting from science unfavorable to industry for years. The tobacco companies funded a neoliberal economist who had previously written dismissively of secondhand smoking’s harms; now, he published a book that detailed how DDT had been wrongly banned.
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