Pick an issue where America has a bizarre take compared to other countries, like prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for healthy men, and you will find a US medical society holding a majority of the seats on government panels advocating for their cause. The concern is because they are overwhelmingly biased toward themselves.
That is why the American Academy of Pediatrics recently going rogue on agriculture is a concern. These are doctors who deal with kids, and reflexively no one wants to put kids at risk, so the AAP wraps themselves in that halo, but this is the same group who stoked the 'vaccines cause autism' paranoia among coastal progressives by advocating that preservatives be taken out of MMR vaccines. Who are the wealthiest clients of pediatricians? Coastal progressives.
They call themselves the American Academy of Pediatrics but judging by their acceptance of agricultural science, this should be their logo.
Only 3 percent of American kids meet basic activity level guidelines but the AAP told the public that kids should not walk to school until age 10. Or on Halloween at all. And diet soda is bad for kids, but juice is good, even though fruit juice is basically a vitamin-fortified Coca-Cola when it comes to calories. The CDC even recommended that infants be fed juice, no surprise given how much corporations that sell it donate to AAP - and that 75 percent of the advisory panel inside CDC consists of AAP members. To advocate for bans on guns, they raised the age of being a child to 24 so they could exaggerate how many kids died due to guns.
They have demonstrated a pattern of being unethical about public health in the last decade and given their recent inferences about agriculture - pesticides are harmful while organic food doesn't use them - it is impossible to keep pretending these educated people are simply misguided and that more outreach will help.
The AAP is lying, and it is intentional.
Maybe the $120 billion organic food industry have become big donors because AAP now only wants children to eat food manufactured using the "organic" process. Older, less efficient pesticides that require more applications and food created using Mutagenesis rather than more modern genetic techniques. Yet their opinion paper suggests organic pesticides don't exist and that genetic engineering began in the late 1990s. Both readily shown to be false, if the agenda is to inform the public and not scare people.
Copper sulfate, the default pesticide for the organic industry, is far more toxic than atrazine, glyphosate, and dicamba, all of which environmental groups who are funded by the organic industry oppose.
Their science basis for their claim about food is...nothing. Instead of being trusted guides for the public when it comes to kids, AAP is catering to wealthy elites. Their position statement is based on an opinion piece by a few of their members. The group is so ridiculous it overtly lies to readers by suggesting "organic" food uses no pesticides.
Sorry you're poor, make better choices next life, say 67,000 pediatricians.
In 2024 that isn't an 'I was not aware' issue in being wrong, it is a blatant lie. Not only does organic food use pesticides, they need to use far more than conventional food. In California, the only state that requires organic farmers to list all pesticides used - the state does not exempt organic - the usage per calorie was up to 600 percent higher for organic food. If we tried that en masse in America, we wouldn't just have the Sri Lanka disaster, the AAP would be complicit in genocide due to starvation as Lysenko in the USSR.
The optics of this capricious science denial are strange optics for AAP, who refused to disclose any donors except their largest. They certainly get their employees and members to donate to politicians who share their beliefs against science and for more government control of culture; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democratics PACs,anyone who is anti-gun and for socialized health care stands a chance. No Republicans received a donation but 0.4% of 'other' did, the 99.6% were all Democrats.
That's not diversity and it is not representative of the families they claim to care about. Their positions against science are just as far out of the mainstream.
The internal problem is that few members of AAP are willing to stand up to the organization even when they know the position is wrong. No one got into the business of treating kids to be yelled at by other doctors so hesitance to stand up for science, while understandable, it is doing a disservice to poor kids. Modern agriculture keeps food affordable even when recent federal policies have created a train wreck of high costs plus inflation. The last thing people need is to be told they are bad parents by AAP because they can't spend double on a strawberry, while wealthy doctors tell them to eat organic cake instead.
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