To: "Health Freedom, Codex Issues
Subject: EU Vitamin Directive Vote Postponed Til Feb 20th - Heated Discussion Today in Brussels
From: John Hammell jham@iahf.com
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 16:00:19 -0500

IAHF List:

This morning I called a contact in Brussels who reports that today the EU Parliament's 90 member Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy had a heated discussion about the EU Vitamin Directive. (See the list of committee members at http://wwwdb.europarl.eu.int/ep5/owa/p_meps.short_list?ilg=EN&iorig=committees&ipv=&ipos=&iukconst=&ipolgrp=&icom=C09&idel=&iothbody=&ictry=&ictry=&iukreg=&iaction=search

The discussion was punctuated by strong remarks in opposition to it by John Bowis from the UK who expressed the view that the proceedings that led up to the creation of the Directive had not been at all transparent. Bowe also brought up the quite legitimate concerns expressed by Matthias Rath, MD that this Vitamin Directive should not be hastily considered, because as it is now it would cause immense harm to the public health. He expressed the view that it was wrong to not properly consider the views of such experts as Dr.Rath, and that it was equally wrong to just ignore the views of the many thousands of consumers who had expressed concerns about the Vitamin Directive to the EU Parliament about this.

Mrs. Doyle and Mrs. McKenna from Ireland also expressed strong views against the Directive.

Hans Blockland from the Netherlands was against harmonization unless the Directive could be made more liberal, and said that the problem of unsafe pharmaceuticals should be a bigger issue.

Giuseppi Nistico (Italy) was very much for the Directive, and was angry that an amendment he'd recommended had been removed. His amendment would have required very rigid quality control standards (HACCP- Pharmaceutical standard quality control which is not necessary and would cost too much)

Minora Malliori of Greece was against the Directive, but not for any of our reasons, she is only against it because she doesn't think its restrictive ENOUGH!

We have to somehow get at least HALF of the members of the European Parliament to turn against the Directive. This will not be easy at all to do because there isn't a single lobbyist in Brussels to represent our views, while the pharmaceutical industry has a slew of lobbyists there as well as reps of fake consumer groups that pretend to speak in our behalf.

Although the odds may be against us, we must continue our efforts to try VERY HARD not only to stop the EU Directive, but also in America to awaken Congress to the very real threat posed by this situation to US domestic law because if the EU Directive is not stopped, it WILL impact us via Codex. The assertions made by NNFA that Codex will not impact our domestic vitamin laws are false. They will because of our membership in the WTO. The only way by which we can legally not harmonize our vitamin laws to the emerging very restrictive standard is to take a stand against them based on safety. We won't have this option though because Congress whitewashed the Codex Oversight hearing on March 20 by not taking a look at this, so the fix is in unless we can get Congress to take another look. If Congress had not whitewashed the hearing, it could have been seen that the FDA put a false definition of vitamin safety on the table at Codex, one that purportedly protects us, but which actually does not. More information can be found on this at http://www.iahf.com

What to do: Continue going to http://www.vitamins-for-all.org to sign the petitition, but also send personal letters to as many members of the aforementioned committee as you can. They should be apprised of the fact that an undesirable trade war could erupt in the future between the EU and US due to their actions on this vitamin issue now,and perhaps they should consider that and think about harmonizing in our direction, since it is not reasonable to expect us to ever willingly harmonize to theirs.

Please continue to try to educate members of the US Congress to the fact that Codex poses a real threat to force the harmonization of our vitamin laws to an emerging very restrictive Codex standard. Codex threatens to be heavily impacted by the EU. The deck may be stacked against us, but we mave a moral imperitive to never give up. IAHF will continue to expose the lies that have kept the truth from coming out on this issue, and will continue to keep you updated.

Anyone can sign onto the IAHF list at http://email.sparklist.com/scripts/lyris.pl?enter=IAHF See the IAHF website at http://www.iahf.com/" TARGET="_top">http://www.iahf.com Please send donations to assist with this work to: IAHF POB 625 Floyd VA 24091 USA or via paypal at http://www.iahf.com thank you