It's no surprise that Twitter is a hotbed of misinformation and disnformation about science. They have no barrier to entry whereas a journal article must survive peer review and if you want to promote your clients in The Guardian you at least have to cut them a check.

What is interesting is how these deniers for hire are using the public's newfound resolve to mitigate risk for people with preexisting conditions from coronavirus to advance their agenda against normal agriculture. This, they argue, is the "precautionary principle" in action and if it's right for infectious disease, why not use it against food sold by competitors to their clients and spiritual leaders? 

The tag on these Tweets are always a Who's Who of Organic Marketing, Huffington Post and discredited former journalist Paul Thacker, etc. but what they are advocating is not the precautionary principle. It is just denial of science.


The account above is not a paid activist for organic groups, it apparently isn't even a Russian bot, which we all assumed was the case for years. It is just someone misguided. And organic did not get to be $100 billion Big Food by paying people who will be "useful idiots" for free. "Joan" later goes on to suggest that her organic food will prevent disease where vaccines cannot. It is no shock to anyone that the organic and anti-vaccine crowd have a great deal of overlap, organic corporations and Wallace Genetic Foundation fund Organic Consumers Association to make sure Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can spread their conspiracy theories far and wide. Maybe she is just a terrible communicator and is not ironically an anti-vaccine nurse. Since she has also used racist hashtags on Twitter which she later claimed she didn't know were racist, she may just be out of her depth.

Because they don't know science, they invoke precaution - because that has worked in Europe to impede progress. Yet they don't want the precautionary principle at all, they want extinction for farmers they hate. 

In the precautionary principle, if I open the door of my garage and a tiger is sitting there, I close the garage door. Now, I live in a city. That tiger could not have ventured into my driveway from the wild, it is certain to be from a zoo and as tame as any tiger can be. I still close the garage door.

Yet I do not stay huddled in my house, trapped in the past like Miss Havisham after getting jilted at the altar, if that tiger is in a cage at the zoo. That is not the precautionary principle, it would be an irrational mental health problem, and that is what is evident in people who fear one safe pesticide over another simply because the latter had lobbyists give it a different label for marketing - which is how Certified Organic was created. Science can be a tiger but when it comes to food it has been proven to be a docile kitten, safe in literally billions of cases.

Organic trade groups still insist that tomorrow the tiger will escape and kill everyone. And a small cabal of useful idiots and media flunkies help.

But they don't have a mental health issue, they are mostly just ignorant about science. The rest are being paid to promote fear and doubt about food.