“Ask me some questions, I'll tell you some lies”: when ‘academic research’ becomes a commercial marketing strategy.

A case-study of BigChem and a New Zealand University

This week Propaganda in Focus published my article about how academia controls the narrative. And if I wanted to provide an example of how academia has been captured by corporate interests, I don’t think I could find a better one than this week’s Media Release from Ospri:

So experts claim that aerial poisoning operations apparently have a net benefit to some bird species over 10 years. Is this a credible claim from the evidence supplied? Let’s see. First….

Who are Ospri?

OSPRI is a one of numerous quangos, those products of New Zealand’s adoption of ‘developed democracies’ (as we used to call them) New Public Management. As a ‘partnership’, it is funded by Government (in this case, the NZ Ministry of Primary Industries), commercial interests (including those pesky ‘philanthropists’) and ‘fees’ from tax-payers who rely upon Government for various ‘regulatory’ services. In terms of these services, Ospri manages two national policies: ‘NAIT’ which is a food traceability technology and ‘TBFree’ (remember that name) which aims to ‘eradicate’ Bovine TB from New Zealand livestock through ‘pest’ control aimed mainly at possums (which according to Ospri, are the main carrier of bTB).  

By NZ standards, Ospri has a considerable budget. In the 2022 Annual Report it declared $38m in assets with a revenue of $71m p/a. Of the senior Ospri employees, 50 earn over $100k and 8 earn over $200k (and one at double that). Those individuals also declare a long list of conflicts of interest, symbolic of how the gravy train and revolving doors of these quasi-NGOs are maintained. Those researchers familiar with the BigPharma, BigChem regulatory capture and revolving doors won’t be surprised to see the same pattern in the NZ poison industry. The familiar names of directors, stakeholders and trustees always cross-contaminating with the senior roles at the same poison-promoting entities: Predator Free NZ 2050 Ltd, Dairy NZ, ZiP Ltd, TBFree and Beef and Lamb NZ etc. Ospri’s expenditure is interesting, with $35m spent on ‘pest control’ and only $1.8m on research. But this isn’t ‘research’ in the academic definition, free from interference from commercial interests. This is ‘stakeholder investment’ in Unspeak; a marketing strategy. Of which this Media Release is just another example, as I explain below.

A history of fraud

Seven years ago, in 2016, environmental author Bill Benfield (RIP) published a Press Release in which he presented evidence that questioned the legitimacy of Ospri and the tax-payer funded aerial 1080 poisoning operations. Parliamentary Hansard records responses to questions about Ospri’s operations: 9,830 possums were tested in 2015, with no positive bTB results. It also confirmed that Ospri had no epidemiological scientific evidence to prove the relationship between possums and bTB in cattle. And yet Ospri’s marketing continued to include claims that “nearly half of all bTB infections are caused by possums.”

A complaint by Benfield to the NZ Advertising Authority was upheld on Appeal, but because this Authority’s judgments are not maintained in NZ law, Ospri continues its unsupported claims about the objectives of the aerial poisoning operations. The data from this testing fiasco continues, with the latest figures shown below:

Testing of possums has reduced from 9,830 in 2015/16 to only 1,215 in 2021/22. Reducing the numbers of tests for bTB over time, including reducing testing across deer and cattle by 20% last year also helps Ospri to achieve its targets and prove ‘success’. Just as increasing numbers of tests, especially in asymptomatic individuals, inevitably leads to more cases detected if needed, less testing results in fewer cases... (Is this strategy of ratios in testing ringing any bells, dear reader?)

There is also the horribly familiar-sounding story of a Government-funded laboratory experiment deliberately releasing bTB-infected possums into the wild. After all, that may help to support more employment opportunities and funding…but let’s leave that topic for another day.

Continuing Poisoning Operations

It is difficult to understand how $35m p/a can justifiably be spent on ‘pest control’ when our economy is bankrupt, and our schools and hospitals are desperately in need of that funding. At least $14m p/a was spent on aerial poison operations which involves the lethal indiscriminate 1080 poison being dropped from helicopter hoppers over thousands of hectares of our forests and waterways, including our drinking water catchments. (Using taxpayers money to poison your own citizens, surely not?) Putting aside the unknown long-term risks to public health this toxic contamination of our environment causes, the negative impact on rare native birdlife, paradoxically the species that Government wants to protect, is undeniable. Could less than 17 positive tests, mainly from wild pigs and none from possums, really be the valid rationale for an ongoing $multi-million highly risky widespread aerial poisoning campaign aimed at killing … possums? (Likewise, could a single asymptomatic case of covid be the rationale for a lockdown of a whole country’s economy?)

But let’s not let common sense, sustainability or scientific facts get in the way of a good narrative (or profits).

Extract from poster explaining risks from 1080 to the unborn. Credit E. Frankish

Let’s now take a closer look at this Media Release from Ospri which tries to defend the claim from many (like myself) who have witnessed the death and eerily silent devastation that repeated aerial 1080 poison operations leave in their wake. That is the title of Dr Fiona McQueen’s excellent book, The Quiet Forest. And let’s use our own God-given, human, common-sense for moment – what would anyone expect to happen to living organisms within an ecosystem after tonnes of cereal pellet food-bait, sweetened with sugar and laced with one of the world’s most lethal poisons (sodium monofluoroacetate) had rained-down on it?

To learn more about the aerial poisoning with 1080 over New Zealand’s landscapes, click here. Or watch short documentaries here.

After 65+ years of this horrific policy, there are few places left in NZ which have NOT been subjected to aerial poisoning of some kind. Many areas are repeatedly poisoned every 5-7 years - some annually. Often the criteria for a poisoning is changed in the lead-up to a planned event that ensures a poisoning goes ahead, whatever the data shows. As an example, Mt Pirongia has been aerially poisoned with 1080 at least seven times in past decades, most recently in 2020.

The multiple Gov agencies like Ospri and DoC involved in these operations, the land ownership and agreements, the poisoning contractors and sub-contractors, all leads to complex supply chains and inevitable poor record-keeping. This means it is almost impossible to establish the historical accuracy of poisons applied to any specific area in NZ. Even requests through the Official Information Act can be drawn-out and results problematic. I should also mention how much land in NZ suffers from historic toxic contamination from other sources, like the timber trade.

Clean, Green, 100% Pure NZ maybe the biggest marketing fraud in history, or maybe it was…

It is this knowledge, accrued after living in New Zealand for ten years and researching these facts, including being on the Committee of the People’s Inquiry 2020 NZ, which alerted me to the claims in this Media Release from Ospri.

To make a legitimate scientific claim of a forest ‘not falling silent’ after a 1080 aerial poisoning operation, the researchers would obviously need to first find a valid ‘control group’ and study both areas over the ten years, at regular intervals. In this case, a control area of forest would need to have similar climate and location, without any recorded history of any poison being applied – ideally, aerially or otherwise. I was confused and intrigued – where was such a control to be found in NZ?

As is often the case in situations where the scientific claims are outlandish, the devil is in the detail. And as I have outlined in my published piece in Propaganda in Focus this week, one has only to read the actual research article, and investigate the author profiles, to see truth hidden in plain sight. I don’t have much statistical expertise, but even at layman’s level, it is clear how this kind of academic misinformation is created, presented, cited and perpetuated in order to keep the narrative going.

For starters, you’ll notice that the abstract is ambiguous. Whilst the content supports the headline claims, the authors also cover themselves by recommended ‘further research’ in this area too. There’s also no explicit mention of the ‘control group’ areas in the abstract. And before reading the text, we can skip to the ‘acknowledgements’ to get a handle on the inevitable conflicts of interest:

Remember TBFree is actually an arm of Ospri. And Victoria University, Wellington, also receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding annually from Ospri, Dept of Conservation and other pro-poison entities. So we know from the outset, this is unlikely to be an objective piece of ‘research’.

Reading the 2021 article itself, I’m confused as to why this is used to publish a Media Release this week (?) Especially when we discover that the longitudinal study claiming ’10 years of data’ only covers two distinct dates of poison operations: 2014 and 2017. So NOT the ‘regular intervals over ten years’. then. Inevitably there are also differences in the comparability between those two data sets - but I won’t go into that here. The writing itself is shallow, and regularly uses ‘Unspeak’ through words like ‘sowed’ - to attempt to conjure up positive images of sowing seeds that will grow, rather than the harsh realities of dropping inhumane, highly toxic poison. Likewise, the repeated use of the word ‘treatment’ of an area - as if the aerial poisoning operations had magical medicinal benefit that delivers a ‘cure’ for some kind of ‘illness’. The power of language manipulation has been a strategy of the NZ poison industry since it began, in 1956.

The article is also framed in a way that uses unsupported assumptions about the safety and efficacy of the use of aerial poisons on our environment. For instance, cited in the article are texts that are really journalistic propaganda that lack any academic integrity (eg Hansford D 2016. Protecting paradise - 1080 and the fight to save New Zealand’s wildlife. Nelson, Potton & Burton). Alongside these are academic texts that were also funded by the poisoning entities, with conclusions that support the political agenda. Note the absence of any meaningful discussion about the toxicity of the poison, its mechanism of action or the potential long-term impacts of the poison, such as a reduction in longevity or fertility rates in some species. All these complexities are deliberately omitted from this article and accompanying Media Release.

Perhaps the most insightful extract from the 2021 article’s methodology was this:

“During the course of this study, Tora Bush, the Tararua and the Northern Remutaka Ranges did not receive 1080 treatment, and were therefore used as experimental control sites for the afore-mentioned 1080 operations. Prior to monitoring commencing in 2014, Tora Bush had not received aerial 1080 treatment since at least 2009 (S. Burles, Department of Conservation, pers. comm.). The Tararua and Northern Remutaka Ranges last received treatment in 2010 and 2012 respectively (TBfree 2010; Uys & Crisp 2018).” (my emphasis)

So, the answer to my question about where these elusive ‘control sites’ for researchers actually are in New Zealand, is clear: there aren’t any. Or at least these (captured) authors did not seek to use any such areas. Instead, they used pseudo ‘control’ areas which were also aerially poisoned, just not specifically during the times of their data collection. Interestingly, in the absence of clear publicly-available data and historical records of poison operations, the authors relied upon personal communications from staff at the very entities which fund and carry out the poisoning operations, as well as funding the ‘research’ that supports their work. The mind boggles!

I queried some of these issues with one of the authors and the response included this statement:

…“the study specifically look[ed] for evidence of negative effects of 1080 poisoning, which, given the fast-acting and relatively non-persistent nature of 1080, would be expected to manifest within a week or two of the drop. Hence using experimental control areas that were not receiving 1080 in the same calendar year seemed liked an appropriate contrast…”(my emphasis again)

But this statement seems either uneducated or misleading. Neither claim, that 1080 poison is ‘fast-acting’ nor that is ‘relatively non-persistent’ (relative to what?) is substantiated in the science. Reasons for these gaps in knowledge are partly because of 1080’s high levels of toxicity and lack of any antidote. It is unethical to experiment with such a deadly chemical (well it was considered unethical, back when ethical research was taken seriously with legal consequences). In truth, despite lots of potential opportunities for even retrospective investigations into the impact of 1080 poison at population level, no-one knows what the long-term sublethal affects are on any species, including humans.

We could even look in the Government’s own ‘Reassessment’ of 1080 (2011), where it states:

“Despite efforts over the last decade to address data gaps in the toxicology database for 1080, deficiencies remain in the information” (pg 294 no 4)

The real shame of this situation is that underneath this façade of pseudo-science, there is some really valuable data - data that, if we had a valid ‘control site’, could offer some genuine insight into what exactly is going on in our environment, including populations of bird species. But without authentic curiosity, critical thinking skills and independent funds, all we are left with is ‘plausible deniability’, another device of the Corporate Playbook. And in this strange land where litigation and group action don’t exist, accountability seems just a faraway dream.

That is why the work of the People’s Inquiry into the Impacts and Effects of Toxic Chemicals and Poisons on our People, Wildlife and Environment is so important – in documenting the harms from these types of toxins.

There is one glimmer of hope, however. I spied in Ospri’s latest Annual Report, an Appendix which admitted in a good old-fashioned ‘SWOT’ analysis (those expensive MBAs are so valuable, eh?) that 1080 poison could be banned from use altogether partly as a result of that inconvenient ‘Threat’ from ‘social accountability’. After more than 65 years of this horror story, could the end of aerial poisoning in NZ truly be in sight?

But still the plans for poisoning with aerial 1080 continue:  https://www.ospri.co.nz/assets/Documents/National-Aerial-Operations-Plan-2024.pdf