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Robert Kennedy, Jr. On Suing Monsanto and The Dangers of Round-Up

8 minutes 43 seconds

🇬🇧 English

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Speaker 1

00:00

The Jerogan Experience. When we sued Monsanto, there's many, many diseases that are linked to glyphosate exposure, including non-alcoholic fatty liver cancers are very, very closely linked, a lot of kidney diseases, and then severe damage to the microbiome because it's designed to kill plants. And there are structures in your gut biome that are critical structures in your gut biome, which have plant-like metabolisms which are destroyed by glyphosate. And so, you know, what happened is glyphosate was originally developed as a tank scalant.

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Speaker 1

01:07

So to scale the calcium and other deposits, metal deposits, rust deposits from the inside of underground tanks. And in 1973, Monsanto had to stop producing DDT because we passed the laws at that time and that was its flagship product. It needed another product. And it figured out that glyphosate, somebody at some point apparently threw some glyphosate on that you know out in the back in the yard and everything green died where they touched it where it touched the glyphosate.

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Speaker 1

01:46

And so somebody said oh this will be a good herbicide because it kills all plants. Originally Monsanto developed it as a as a as a herbicide but the way that it was applied initially from 1973 to 1993 was in backpack sprayers. So guys would walk down the cornfield, corn rows, early in the season when the corn was competing with nearby weeds for sunlight and they would shoot the individual weeds. And then in 93, somebody figured out a way that glyphosate, there were certain bacteria that glyphosate would not kill.

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Speaker 1

02:28

And they said we could take a gene out of that bacteria and put it into a corn seed and develop a corn that cannot be killed by glyphosate. So they developed Roundup Ready corn. And that corn, you can pour glyphosate all over it, and it will do nothing to it. So now you could fire all of those workers who were expensive and you hire 1 airplane and they fly over the fields, they saturate the entire landscape with glyphosate, everything dies except the Roundup Ready corn.

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Speaker 1

03:01

And within a couple of years, Roundup Ready corn was now 90% of the corn, 95% of the corn in the United States is now Roundup Ready corn. And so, but it was still being...and Then they developed it for soybean and for barley, for sorghum, for a lot of other plants. But it was still being applied early in the season. And then in 2000, around 2006, They discovered that if you sprayed it on wheat late in the season, it would desiccate the wheat.

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Speaker 1

03:35

In other words, it would dry it out. 1 of the big losses for farmers is wheat is if it rains during the harvest season, You can't harvest it because it gets moldy. And so if you can spray a desiccant on it and dries it out and kills it, you can harvest it right away and it won't get moldy. So all the wheat in our country started being sprayed that year in 2006 with glyphosate.

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Speaker 1

03:59

And that's the year you saw this explosion of celiac diseases and gluten allergies and all of this stuff that people, you may have noticed around then. But they also did. The first time they were, excuse me, the first time they're spraying it directly on food Because it used to be they were spraying it early in the season, and it would wash off, and the corn would get higher than the weeds, and you wouldn't have to do it. But now they're spraying it directly on our food.

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Speaker 1

04:29

Sorry, Joe.

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Speaker 2

04:29

No, it's OK. So when they started doing this, there's a direct result? Like you can see the increase in celiac disease?

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Speaker 2

04:42

You can see, is this like documented?

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Speaker 1

04:44

Well no, these are, no that's not documented. But these are, there are, there's a whole range of diseases that are now – that people are – that different levels of science have linked to glyphosate exposure. Here's the thing.

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Speaker 1

05:02

When you litigate, when you're suing somebody for a chemical exposure, you have to go through a threshold called the Daubert hearing. And the Daubert hearing is a hearing that says, is there sufficient science that it's now considered kind of mainstream that we can show this to a jury? And the judge has to make that decision because the judge doesn't want people saying, you know, coming in and saying, you know, a loud noise has made me crazy. There has to be before...and then a good attorney might be able to convince a jury that, yeah, my client got crazy because he heard a loud noise.

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Speaker 1

05:50

So the judge needs to make a threshold decision about whether there's sufficient science to show a jury and that is a very high threshold. Of All of the diseases that are probably caused, almost certainly caused by glyphosate, the only 1 to pass that threshold was the case that we bought for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. So At that point, we had enough rat studies, enough human studies, we had about 10 of each, and we were able to go to the judge and say, we got enough science on this now to show that non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is being caused by glyphosate. So those were the only cases we brought.

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Speaker 1

06:34

The other thing, but there are a lot of really interesting studies that show links between injuries to children and the amount of glyphosate in a woman's urine and the mother's urine, including sexual development. It's an endocrine disruptor.

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Speaker 2

07:00

Similar to phthalates? Phthalates are

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Speaker 1

07:03

an endocrine disruptor. Probably the most disturbing endocrine disruptor, and this is something we should all be looking at is atrazine Yeah, because atrazine which is now ubiquitous is everywhere But you can take atrazine and there, you know, this is you. What is his name?

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Speaker 1

07:20

Jamie. Jamie. Young Jamie. You can look up.

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Speaker 1

07:25

You can look up this study. I think the guy, the scientist's name is Tyler, I think. And that might be his first or second name. But they took atrazine and they put it in a tank with 40 frogs for 3 years.

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Speaker 1

07:41

They put it below the exposure levels that EPA considers acceptable to humans. And 30 of those frogs, they were all male frogs, and they were double Z male frogs, so they were super males. And 30 of those frogs were chemically castrated. 4 of them turned into females and produced fertile eggs.

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Speaker 1

08:03

So they took male frogs, gave them atrazine, 10% of them turned into female and produced fertile eggs. And we're subjecting our children to exposure to that every day.

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Speaker 2

08:17

What is atrazine?

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Speaker 1

08:17

It's in the water. It's a pesticide.

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Speaker 2

08:22

Here it is. Report toxic herbicide found in many Texans drinking water. That's it.

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Speaker 2

08:27

That's from 2018, November 20th.

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Speaker 1

08:30

Yeah and what you know what does this do to sexual development in children? Nobody knows. We know what it does to frogs.