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“Defend or be damned” – How a US company uses government funds to suppress pesticide opposition around the world
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The New Lede
Posted: June 25th, 2025
https://www.thenewlede.org/2024/09/defend-or-be-damned-a-loo...
Financed partly with US taxpayers dollars, [a] firm in Missouri called v-Fluence [was] founded by former Monsanto executive Jay Byrne. [v-Fluence] established a “private social network” to counter resistance to pesticides and genetically modified (GM) crops. A profile of former New York Times food writer Mark Bittman ... includes a description of where he lives, details of two marriages and personal hobbies, and an extensive Criticisms section. Bittman said that it was a “terrible thing,” for taxpayer dollars to be used to help a PR agency “work against sincere, legitimate, and scientific efforts to do agriculture better.” Syngenta signed a contract with v-Fluence in 2002 to help the company deal with negative information coming to light about its paraquat herbicides. v-Fluence went on to help Syngenta create false or misleading online content that was “Paraquat-friendly,” used search engine optimization to suppress negative information about paraquat in Internet searches and investigated the social media pages of victims who reported injuries to Syngenta’s crisis hotline. Syngenta’s internal research found adverse effects of paraquat on brain tissue decades ago but the company withheld that information from regulators, instead working to discredit independent science linking the chemical to brain disease and developing a “SWAT team” to counter critics. In its response to those stories, Syngenta asserted that no “peer-reviewed scientific publication has established a causal connection between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease.”
Note: Read more about how v-Fluence was used to censor the web and silence dissenting voices. “Trust the science” sounds noble—until you realize that even top editors of world-renowned journals have warned that much of published medical research is unreliable, distorted by fraud, corporate influence, and conflicts of interest.
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