Last week it seemed like hit pieces were popping up everywhere on Rachel Carson.  Deltoid has been doing a yeoman’s job of documenting the atrocities.  He can add this little screed by Margaret Wente to the pile.   Why now?, I wondered as I counted the errors in Wente’s piece.  Now I know of course that her 100th birthday just passed and this seems to have provoked a predictable round of calumnies form the denialist industry about her supposed  responsibility for malarial deaths arising from restricted use of DDT.  I can’t add much to the light shed on the issue by Deltoid.  I lived in Indonesia for a number of years and they regularly sprayed DDT to suppress malaria. I had always understood that the bans on DDT were for agricultural use only, not for combatting insect-borne illness.  Deltoid also rightly points out that banning agricultural use of DDT likely delayed the evolution of DDT-resistant mosquitoes, thereby saving lives.

Today Kevin Drum covers it as well:

Is DDT a banned substance? Answer: for widespread
agricultural use, which produces increased resistance in many insect
populations, yes. For vector control (primarily to contain
mosquito-borne malaria), no.

For the last decade or so, however, a group of right-wing "sound
science" advocates has been implying that the agricultural ban on DDT
is really a blanket ban and that millions of poor Africans have died as
a result. Why? DDT isn’t patented and is only minimally profitable, so
it’s not as if the DDT industry is bothering to push this. So who is?

Short answer: the tobacco industry. Surprise! Turns out that the DDT
disinformation campaign was really an effort to discredit the World
Health Organization, which was planning a major anti-smoking initiative
back in 1998. Discredit WHO on malaria, and you discredit WHO on its
anti-smoking activism. And all the while you get to look like you’re
standing up for millions of impoversished black Africans. Neat, eh?

In my view this is also about discrediting the scientific consensus on climate change.  The argument being that we listened to the crazy environmentalists about DDT and millions died, and now they are leading us down the same path with the climate change "myth".