DDT, the tobacco industry and vaccine skepticism

Since I first reported that the Los Angeles coast used to be a DDT waste dump, I’ve found myself reexamining this infamous pesticide that still haunts our world today.

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane was banned in the United States 50 years ago, but startling amounts of this forever chemical are still accumulating in California’s sea lions, dolphins, and even the critically endangered condor.

Another study based in Oakland found that DDT’s hormone-disrupting effects are emerging in a new generation of women — passed down from mothers to daughters, and now granddaughters.

So when I heard there was a new book on DDT by Elena Conis, a historian of science and medicine at UC Berkeley, I dove right in.

“How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT” deepened my understanding of this chemical in unexpected ways.

Conis uncovered court records and little-known pieces of history, adding complexity to a story that we think we already know. (Spoiler alert: The “bad guys” weren’t always on the wrong side of history, and the “good guys” certainly weren’t perfect.) It’s a gripping examination of corporate influence over science — and how this tried-andtrue playbook continues to manipulate public opinion today.

At a time when industries are challenging climate science, and petrochemical companies are under scrutiny for their role in perpetuating all the plastic polluting our planet, Conis has a prescient way of framing the past so as to inform our future.

Her reasons for writing this book are many, but one point she shared with me stood out: While doing research for her first book, “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship With Immunization,” Conis was intrigued by something that kept popping up in the anti-vaccine movement’s earliest days.

“They were really interested in finding arguments that justified their fear of vaccines,” she said, “and one of their favorite arguments was DDT — that we were told that DDT was safe, and then in the 1960s, we were told that it was bad.… So given that scientists and officials were so wrong about DDT, why should we trust them on vaccines?”

Conis and I have talked for hours about DDT. Here is a snapshot of our conversations:

Let’s discuss the chapters that surprised me. When West Nile hit the U.S. in the late 1990s, for example, prominent people — seemingly out of nowhere — started talking about bringing back DDT. What did you uncover?

What was happening in the background is important here: There had been increasing concern about the growing number of cases of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, and malaria scientists had been saying, “Maybe we need to bring back DDT.” One of the reasons they were saying that was because, as Western countries had banned the chemical, it became harder for non-Western countries, especially those dealing with malaria, to get the chemical.… Part of why DDT became so controversial was that it was so clearly effective at protecting public health. During the early years of its use, it protected loads of people from malaria, it stopped typhus outbreaks, and it completely wiped out bedbugs.

So there was this minidebate brewing in this subfield of global public health. And in the late 1990s, this debate came to the attention of a handful of conservatives, who saw in it a potential way to spread a message to the public that liberal policies should not always be trusted.

Oh boy, what exactly was this message?

They said, “Hold on a second, we have a chemical that has been banned thanks to U.S. environmentalists, who supposedly are liberals who care about the health and well-being of everybody. But their ban really only protected the birds and has left millions of children in Africa and elsewhere at risk of one of the worst killers of humankind, malaria.”

So these conservative think tanks approached the tobacco industry with this narrative and said, “We propose publicizing this idea, because we think it’s a way to do a couple of things: one, popularize the idea that Western nations shouldn’t be trusted to set global health agendas; two, that environmentalists don’t necessarily have humanitarian ideals in mind. And three, it’ll pit environmentalists and public health folks against each other — and will therefore be a way to divide liberals amongst themselves.”

Why the tobacco industry? What’s in it for them?

The end goal of all of this was to undermine public support for regulation generally.

The tobacco industry was facing two changes to global treaties at the time that would have regulated tobacco more strictly than it had ever been regulated before at a global level. So the tobacco industry decided to fund this campaign, and this idea really took off.

In the context of West Nile spreading through the U.S., that disease was used as a hook for spreading the argument that not only should DDT be brought back, but that it never should have been banned in the first place — and that its ban meant that liberals and environmentalists should never be trusted to set policy.

This makes me think of all the disinformation campaigns that we see today.

One of the most obvious parallels is with the fossil fuel industry, and how that industry, as we know very well now, really manipulated public understanding of climate change by promoting its own experts, promoting experts whose research was favorable to their industry, and by casting doubt on any sort of scientific finding that was not in their favor.

But one of the really complicated things that the DDT story shows is that these industries are all working together.

The tobacco industry really didn’t need DDT to be brought back — it just needed the case for regulation to be weakened, and that was why the DDT story mattered to them. What that means for the public is that it’s so incredibly hard to know what to trust, and it’s even harder to know who to trust.

Exactly. What struck me about your book is that even though it’s about DDT, it also speaks to so much more than this one chemical.

DDT is a scapegoat for thinking that we have solved the problem ... but DDT was one of thousands of new chemicals introduced during the chemical revolution of the mid-20th century. So many of these chemicals are still with us, but more importantly, we’ve added thousands more to the list since then.

And if we’re still trying to understand this chemical, this many years later — this chemical that we’ve studied probably better than almost any other chemical ever developed — then what hope do we have for understanding the full effects of all the new chemicals that we’re bringing into our environment and our food supply and our bodies today? to