Gary Null: The UN’s Mercury Treaty Favors Corporate Wealth Over Children’s Health

After almost four years of demanding negotiations, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) announced that 140 nations reached agreement to begin ratifying the Minamata Convention on Mercury. The Convention will be an international binding treaty to reduce and eventually eliminate mercury compounds altogether from polluting industries, such as gold mining and fossil fuel plants, and many common household products. Overall the treaty is an admirable triumph. In many developing countries, mercury pollution is destroying the environment and causing rampant human illness. However fervent applause should be withheld. One powerful alliance that portends to champion itself as the protector human health—the vaccine industrial complex—is resolved to assure that mercurial exposure continue through aggressive vaccination programs. To the delight all those corralled in the amphitheater of vaccine magic and wonder—the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the US CDC and FDA, the World Health Organization (WHO)—the treaty will exempt thimerosal (ethylmercury) containing vaccines (TCVs). So while sources of mercury pollution will lessen dramatically, hundreds of millions of child-bearing women, newborns and small children will be increasingly poisoned by TCVs.

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