The Media Research Center is not done smearing Rachel Carson.
Liz Thatcher returns in a Sept. 27 MRC Business & Media Institute column to call Carson a killer of millions simply for writing a book. As she did in a previous column, Thatcher blames Carson’s book “Silent Spring” for killing people, asserting that the book “can be linked to a legacy of easily preventable deaths from malaria since the United States banned the use of DDT in 1972.”
But as we pointed out the last time Thatcher made these claims, Carson never advocated banning DDT, the U.S. ban on DDT didn’t apply to the rest of the world, and DDT had been so overused that mosquitos had developed a resistance to it. Thatcher never mentions these facts in her column.
Thatcher also obsesses over Carson’s suggestion that DDT is a cancer-causing carcinogen, a claim that has not yet been definitively proven; Thatcher cites right-wing activist Steven Milloy to claim that “while the link to cancer is based purely on hypothetical assumptions, that even if this link does exist, the risk might actually be worth it when the vast amount of deaths from malaria is considered.”
But Thatcher doesn’t mention DDT’s effects on the environment. Slate’s William Souder notes that “The threat of DDT to wildlife—as a deadly neurotoxin in many species and a destroyer of reproductive capabilities in others—has never been in doubt.”