In our latest release “The Fall of the House of Biotechnology, I began by saying it was among the most important articles we have published. One subscriber wrote back saying “If it is so important why can’t you say it in one sentence?”. This was an interesting question, because I realised that we live in a one sentence age, where our leaders and multinational corporations entrap us with empty slogans like “safe and effective” which are entirely misleading. Massive social movements have been founded on slogans which have caused chaos across the globe.
“Death to America” intends to make us believe that an entire nation is to blame for all the world’s problems. In fact, as in every nation, America is a patchwork of light and dark. There are genius solutions almost side by side with destructive actions. We would be fools not to recognise the same seeds of the useful and useless in our own nation. Here at the Hatchard Report rather than slogans we seek to document a systematic approach to knowledge, whereby opinions and conclusions can be supported by personal experience, scientific evaluation and historical wisdom.
All around us, clever wordsmiths and hired shills are well rewarded if they can directly control our choices and spending, irrespective of whether any benefit or harm ensues. An article in the NY Times is entitled “6 Common Medications That May Lower Your Dementia Risk”. At first sight it appears to report that getting your flu shot, the shingles vaccine, taking statins and blood pressure medication, anti-inflammatory drugs and diabetes medication will lower your risk of dementia. Read the full article and it soon becomes apparent that any possible beneficial effect of these medications on dementia development is hotly contested in the scientific literature. More to the point, the recognised serious adverse effects of these drugs when combined are likely to kill you before you are old enough to get dementia.
Contrast the NYT article with one in the UK Telegraph entitled “Two thirds of UK teenagers to have mental health problems by 2030“. It reports that over 50% of UK teenagers currently suffer from mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, ADHD and other even more serious conditions. More concerning is the fact that this number is rapidly increasing, not just in Britain but around the world. From this it is clear that as the bard said “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. Why? As we have explained repeatedly, drugs which affect genetic expression have an adverse effect on our mental health. Hence the suspicion that the mental health crisis in the UK is not just rooted in modern lifestyles and social media pressures, but also in the foods we eat and the medicines that are routinely prescribed. Prescriptions of antidepressants for NZ teens jumped 53% in the five years leading up to 2023.
It is a truism that risks dismissed as small or manageable by regulators, politicians or scientists actually accumulate when taken together and become big risks affecting whole populations and generations. The pollution of our traditional foods with preservatives, pesticides, ultra processing aids, artificial flavours and colourings and now synthetic biotech ingredients adds up to an unhealthy food supply which inevitably degrades public health outcomes. An article in Stuff written by university researchers entitled “How unhealthy ultra-processed foods are designed and marketed to make us crave them” spills the beans.
The pollution of our environment includes poisonous construction and furnishing materials. Our water supply, the air we breathe, and the soil we stand on are all polluted with a myriad of chemicals and micro contaminants with thousands of new compounds being invented every year. Electromagnetic radiation surrounds us using frequencies that our brain relies on to relay information and support coherent thought. As with all these pollutants, their combined effects remain untested and therefore their true extent is unknown, yet individually they have been tied to cancers, respiratory illness, allergies, etc.
Polypharmacy, the over prescription of multiple pharmaceutical drugs, especially for the elderly, but now affecting all age groups, is known to involve damaging synergistic adverse effects on health. In 2018 University of Otago scientists completed a study in conjunction with scientists from six other overseas universities documenting the adverse impact of taking multiple medications on rates of fractures, noting that 20 to 30 percent of elderly die within a year of suffering a fracture. Sadly, most research focuses on creating new medications, synthetic food additives and materials without studying their possible effects when combined with other medications, foods or pollutants.
Risk has not been thought of collectively. Instead, individual chemicals, compounds, processes and products are tested in isolation and approved on the basis that their individual adverse effects are ‘probably’ tolerable. But the combined effect of the massive chemical onslaught endemic to modern life is overwhelming us. The gain of function research which led to the pandemic and the novel biotech vaccination response to it could be thought of as ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’, but perhaps a better way to describe it is ‘a bridge too far’. Neither expression does justice to the all pervasive destructive risks we now face.
An article in the New York Times is entitled “A.I. Bots told scientists how to make biological weapons. It explains how microbiologist and biosecurity expert at Stanford University, Dr. David Relman went cold at his laptop when an A.I. chatbot instructed him how to modify an infamous pathogen in a lab so that it would then resist known treatments. It went on to explain how to release it into a nearby mass public transit system, outlining a security lapse that could be exploited. The plan was designed to maximise casualties and minimise the chances of being caught. Dr. Relman is part of a small group of experts enlisted by A.I. companies to vet their products for catastrophic risks. Dozens of experts told The Times that A.I. is one of several recent technological advances that have meaningfully increased risks by expanding the pool of people who could cause harm by making and releasing deadly bacteria, viruses or toxins.
Yet all over the world, governments including in NZ are dialling back regulation of biotechnology, citing the ‘promise’ of new cures for disease. Promises that so far are not just largely empty, but when you rack up pandemic excess deaths and the adverse effects of medicines that alter genetic expression amount to a deadly cocktail affecting us all. Those sounding the alarm are not a marginalised group of whistleblowers. Anthropic’s chief executive, the trained biologist Dario Amodei, wrote in January about the risks he saw in A.I. saying:
“Biology is by far the area I’m most worried about, because of its very large potential for destruction and the difficulty of defending against it.”
Kevin Esvelt, a genetic engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shared conversations in which OpenAI’s ChatGPT explained how to use a weather balloon to spread biological payloads over a U.S. city. In another chat, Google’s Gemini ranked pathogens by how much they could damage the cattle or pork industries. Anthropic’s Claude produced a recipe for a novel toxin adapted from a cancer drug.
Yet by and large scientists and politicians mistakenly delude themselves that the potential upside for humanity easily outweighs the risks. Just sit back and reflect on the last six years—were 30 million excess deaths and a far greater number of more or less permanent vaccine injuries and botched treatments worth the risks of secret gain of function research in an insecure biolab followed by rushed vaccine development and sloppy manufacture? Is this the time to reduce biotech regulatory oversight and harness A.I. to speed up research? Governments think so, do you?
The NYT article reports on dozens of interviews with people working in the A.I. and biotech safety fields. Mostly they appear to have their fingers crossed behind their backs as they explain that it is either quite difficult to make a virus deadly enough to wipe out the planet or that A.I. models are constantly being refined to prevent them from answering questions with deadly implications. Tell that to the fairies. The NYT authors appear to agree with us that the deadly information and the consequent risks cannot be contained.
This has not been a one sentence article, but it should be a wake up call. If this worries you or even if it doesn’t, take the time to reconnect with nature. Find comfort foods that you can pick off a tree rather than take out of a packet. Nature is alive, it is calling out to be celebrated and enjoyed. All around the world universities and corporations are undertaking biotech research that should never be ventured. In a lab close to your home the drums of war are being sounded more loudly than ever before. We need to become a generation that says no to biotechnology experimentation.
