"Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job."
– Phil Angell
Monsanto's director of corporate communications
New York Times, October 25, 1998
"The virus {West Nile} has for decades made its home in several U.S. research laboratories… including Rockefeller University in Manhattan and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.In fact, investigators there were the first to grow and study the WNV in the United States.The work began in the 1950s when unidentified viral samples from around the world arrived at Rockefeller University on a steady basis."
– New York Newsday
Sept. 29, 1999
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
– Benjamin Disraeli
"…the rough equivalent of 500 to 900 aircraft [each containing from 150-200 passengers] dropping from the sky. This translates to 2-4 [airline crashes] every week, week in and week out, for the past 5 years."
– Dr. David Graham, senior FDA drug researcher
in sworn testimony before the U.S. Senate described
Vioxx (drug) disaster estimated to have caused
between 88,000 and 138,000 serious heart events,
including heart attacks and strokes leading to death.
"During the eight years when I was an investigator… I had numerous occasions to work with the FDA on cases involving potential health fraud.I repeatedly saw cases against large corporations go unchallenged. Instead,the agency chose to pursue cases involving alternative health care providers."
– Marion Moss
former investigator
Texas Attorney General's Office
"The thing that bugs me is that the people think the FDA is protecting them. It isn't. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it's doing are as different as night and day."
– Dr. Herbert Ley
Former FDA Commissioner
"There is no such thing at this date in the world's history in America as an independent press. You know it and I know it. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before 24 hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it. And what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks. They pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
– John Swinton
Journalist
(1829-1901)
(from Economic Solutions by Peter Kershaw)
7