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Are your groceries dangerous? Facts from a Food Microbiologist

Published

5 years ago

10 minute read

Don Schaffner is a professor of food microbiology at Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.  He hosts two podcasts called Food Safety Talk and Risky or Not?  Here he refutes a widely seen video which urges everyone to go to great lengths to wash their groceries.

 

Unless you are living under a rock or have already perished from COVID-19, you’ve likely seen a YouTube video making the rounds where a medical doctor (wearing scrubs!) purports to give COVID-19 advice.

I’m not going link to the video, because if you haven’t seen it, consider yourself lucky. First of all, scrubs? Aren’t those meant for being around sick people? Why would you wear something like that in your house. It seems very irresponsible.

I’m a food microbiologist. Would you like me to give you advice on how to care for your sick kids? I don’t think so. Don’t take food safety or microbiology advice from MDs that don’t understand food, science or very much about microbiology.

There are a few things that he gets right, but I’m not going to focus on those. I’m going to spend my time here focusing on the things that he gets partly or completely wrong.

He completely misrepresented the 17 days figure from CDC. This was based on finding viral RNA, not infectious viral particles. The CDC report also does not give the methods used but cites personal communication… impossible to peer review.

Should I keep my groceries in the garage or on the porch for 3 days? This is patently ridiculous. Are you really going to keep your milk, your ice cream, your deli meats outside for three days?

This also has very important food safety implications. This sounds like a recipe for disaster, or at the very least spoiled food.

There is a tiny nugget of truth in this advice, because we know that the virus is slowly inactivated at room temperature, with a half-life of about eight hours.

But this advice presumes that all groceries are contaminated, and the simply touching the groceries will make you sick, neither of which are true.

Do I really need to disinfect all of the individual boxes & baggies everything came in? I also think that this is also advice that does not make scientific sense.

If you are concerned about the outside of food packages being contaminated, I suggest that you wash your hands and or sanitize your hands before you sit down to eat any food that you might’ve taken out of those containers.

And guess what, washing your hands before you eat is a best practice even when we’re not in a pandemic!

Do I really need to scrub all your fruits and veggies with soap before eating? This is the worst advice being given by this irresponsible MD. Soap should *absolutely* not be used to wash food. See my earlier comments: https://twitter.com/bugcounter/status/1242956925525995521…

Soap is not designed for food. As mentioned in the linked thread, soap can cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea if ingested. Current recommendations by scientific experts including the FDA, say to wash fresh fruits and vegetables in cold water.

 

He also seems to have a belief that I find surprisingly common (including among food safety professionals). That is the belief that I referred to as “handwashing is magic”.

Hand washing is not magic, nor does it “sterilize” your hands as claimed in the video. The only way to sterilize your hands would be to plunge them into boiling water, which I don’t recommend for obvious reasons.

We’ve done research on handwashing in my lab. You can count on a hand wash (depending upon your technique), to likely give you somewhere between a 90 a 99% reduction in transient microorganisms on your hands.

A microbiologist would call this a 1-2 logarithm reduction. Let’s contrast that with the sterilization process used for canned foods. That would give you a 99.9999999999 percent reduction. In case you’re counting, there’s 12 nines in that number.

Is washing your hands good? Of course it is. Is it going to sterilize your hands? Absolutely not. But it is a good risk reduction technique. As is the use of hand sanitizer. So do both of those things.

If your hands are getting dry from too much handwashing, be sure to use some moisturizer.

Also re: washing produce, people may wonder about “veggie wash” products. Many of these have not been evaluated for their effect on bacteria and none have been evaluated for their affect on SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent for COVID-19.

Many of veggie washes are likely no more effective than water. On the other hand, if it makes you feel better, and you don’t mind throwing money to the veggie wash company, I say go for it.

Some people are also asking about vinegar for washing fresh produce. Again the research says it’s not much better than plain water. Save the vinegar for oil and vinegar dressing on your salad.

Are reusable bags risky? Many people use reusable bags as a responsible choice. We do this in my family as well. It’s a best practice (even before the times of pandemic) to wash your reusable bags on a regular basis.

While it is theoretically possible that a reusable bag may pick up germs, including coronavirus while in the grocery store, the biggest threat that anyone faces is someone else in the store who has COVID-19.

I would suggest that you keep your grocery bags in the car, so you have them handy the next time you go shopping. If you’re concerned that your bags might have coronavirus on them you can wash them.

You should also wash your hands after you have finished putting all your groceries away. This was also a good advice even before pandemic.

But Dr. Don, what I can do to reduce risk when grocery shopping? Many grocery stores are offering hand sanitizers at the entrance, and are offering to sanitize grocery carts. Both great ideas, and customers should take advantage if available.

My other advice is to make a list, and know what you want, and move quickly and efficiently through the store picking out the items on your list. Practice appropriate social distancing, trying your best to keep 6 feet away from other shoppers.

If there is hand sanitizer available, I also use it when I’m exiting the store, and then I’ll use it again at home once I finished putting all my groceries away and returning my reusable shopping bags to the car.

I’m going to ask you to share this tweet thread. As the video MD said it’s not about popularity. In my case it’s about combating harmful misinformation that overestimates risk, or recommends risky practices to mitigate an already very small risk.

This has been Dr. Don… now signing off. Remember as always, stay home if you can, wash your hands and use hand sanitizer, and take care of those who need it most.

PS, thank to everyone for the Twitter/Facebook love. I’ll do my best to answer questions you have, but right now my days are filled with talking with reporters, and trying to achieve a one log reduction on the concentration of email messages in my inbox.

Keep an eye out for the kids!

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After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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Alberta

Alberta announces citizens will have to pay for their COVID shots

Published on June 16, 2025

By

From LifeSite News

By Anthony Murdoch

The government said that it has decided to stop ‘waste’ by not making the shots free starting this fall.

Beginning this fall, COVID shots in the province will have to be pre-ordered at the full price, about $110, to receive them.  (This will roll out in four ‘phases’. In the first phases COVID shots will still be free for those with pre-existing medical conditions, people on social programs, and seniors.)

The UCP government in a press release late last week noted due to new “federal COVID-19 vaccine procurement” rules, which place provinces and territories as being responsible for purchasing the jabs for residents, it has decided to stop “waste” by not making the jab free anymore.

“Now that Alberta’s government is responsible for procuring vaccines, it’s important to better determine how many vaccines are needed to support efforts to minimize waste and control costs,” the government stated.

“This new approach will ensure Alberta’s government is able to better determine its overall COVID-19 vaccine needs in the coming years, preventing significant waste.”

The New Democratic Party (NDP) took issue with the move to stop giving out the COVID shots for free, claiming it was “cruel” and would place a “financial burden” on people wanting the shots.

NDP health critic Sarah Hoffman claimed the move by the UCP is health “privatization” and the government should promote the abortion-tainted shots instead.

The UCP said that in 2023-2024, about 54 percent of the COVID shots were wasted, with Health Minister Adriana LaGrange saying, “In previous years, we’ve seen significant vaccine wastage.”

“By shifting to a targeted approach and introducing pre-ordering, we aim to better align supply with demand – ensuring we remain fiscally responsible while continuing to protect those at highest risk,” she said.

The jabs will only be available through public health clinics, with pharmacies no longer giving them out.

The UCP also noted that is change in policy comes as a result of the Federal Drug Administration in the United States recommending the jabs be stopped for young children and pregnant women.

The opposite happened in Canada, with the nation’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) continuing to say that pregnant women should still regularly get COVID shots as part of their regular vaccine schedule.

The change in COVID jab policy is no surprise given Smith’s opposition to mandatory shots.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, early this year, Smith’s UCP government said it would consider halting COVID vaccines for healthy children.

Smith’s reasoning was in response to the Alberta COVID-19 Pandemic Data Review Task Force’s “COVID Pandemic Response” 269-page final report. The report was commissioned by Smith last year, giving the task force a sweeping mandate to investigate her predecessor’s COVID-era mandates and policies.

The task force’s final report recommended halting “the use of COVID-19 vaccines without full disclosure of their potential risks” as well as outright ending their use “for healthy children and teenagers as other jurisdictions have done,” mentioning countries like “Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the U.K.”

The mRNA shots have also been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children and all have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies.

Many Canadian doctors who spoke out against COVID mandates and the experimental mRNA injections were censured by their medical boards.

LifeSiteNews has published an extensive amount of research on the dangers of the experimental COVID mRNA jabs that include heart damage and blood clots.

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International

Pentagon agency to simulate lockdowns, mass vaccinations, public compliance messaging

Published on June 12, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

DARPA is getting into the business of simulating disease outbreaks, including modeling interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns, lockdowns, and communication strategies.

At the end of May, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out a Request for Information (RFI) seeking information regarding “state-of-the-art capabilities in the simulation of disease outbreaks.”

The Pentagon’s research and development funding arm wants to hear from academic, industry, commercial, and startup communities on how to develop “advanced capabilities that drive technical innovation and identify critical gaps in bio-surveillance, diagnostics, and medical countermeasures” in order to “improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.”

As if masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates under the unscientific guise of slowing the spread and preventing the transmission of COVID weren’t harmful enough, the U.S. military wants to model the effects of these exact same countermeasures for future outbreaks.

The RFI also asks participants “Fatality Rate & Immune Status: How are fatality rates and varying levels of population immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) incorporated into your simulations?“

Does “natural or vaccine-induced” relate to “population immunity” or “fatality rates” or both?

Moving on, the RFI gets into modeling lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination campaigns, along with communication strategies:

Intervention Strategies: Detail the range of intervention strategies that can be modeled, including (but not limited to) vaccination campaigns, social distancing measures, quarantine protocols, treatments, and public health communication strategies. Specifically, describe the ability to model early intervention and its impact on outbreak trajectory.

The fact that DARPA wants to model these so-called intervention strategies just after the entire world experienced them suggests that these exact same measures will most likely be used again in the future:

“We are committed to developing advanced modeling capabilities to optimize response strategies and inform the next generation of (bio)technology innovations to protect the population from biological threats. We are particularly focused on understanding the complex interplay of factors that drive outbreak spread and evaluating the effectiveness of potential interventions.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

“Identification of optimal timelines and capabilities to detect, identify, attribute, and respond to disease outbreaks, including but not limited to biosensor density deployment achieving optimal detection timelines, are of interest.” ­— DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

For future innovation, the DARPA RFI asks applicants to: “Please describe any novel technical approaches – or applications of diverse technical fields (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, behavioral science) – that you believe would significantly enhance the state-of-the-art capabilities in this field or simulation of biological systems wholistically.”

Instead of putting a Dr. Fauci, a Dr. Birx, a replaceable CDC director, a TV doctor, a big pharma CEO, or a Cuomo brother out there to lie to your face about how they were all just following The ScienceTM, why not use AI and ML and combine them with behavioral sciences in order to concoct your “public health communications strategies?”

When you look at recently announced DARPA programs like Kallisti and MAGICS, which are aimed at creating an algorithmic Theory of Mind to model, predict, and influence collective human behavior, you start to get a sense of how all these programs can interweave:

“The MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behaviour.” — DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025

On April 8, DARPA issued an Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity for a new program called “Methodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex Systems (MAGICS)” that seeks “new methods and paradigms for modeling collective human behavior.”

Nowhere in the MAGICS description does it mention modeling or predicting the behavior of “adversaries,” as is DARPA’s custom.

Instead, it talks at length about “modeling human systems,” along with anticipating, predicting, understanding, and forecasting “collective human behavior” and “complex social phenomena” derived from “sociotechnical data sets.”

Could DARPA’s MAGICS program be applied to simulating collective human behavior when it comes to the next public health emergency, be it real or perceived?

“The goal of an upcoming program will be to develop an algorithmic theory of mind to model adversaries’ situational awareness and predict future behaviour.” — DARPA, Theory of Mind Special Notice, December 2024.

In December 2024, DARPA launched a similar program called Theory of Mind, which was renamed Kallisti a month later.

The goal of Theory of Mind is to develop “new capabilities to enable national security decisionmakers to optimize strategies for deterring or incentivizing actions by adversaries,” according to a very brief special announcement.

DARPA never mentions who those “adversaries” are. In the case of a public health emergency, an adversary could be anyone who questions authoritative messaging.

The Theory of Mind program will also:

… seek to combine algorithms with human expertise to explore, in a modeling and simulation environment, potential courses of action in national security scenarios with far greater breadth and efficiency than is currently possible.

This would provide decisionmakers with more options for incentive frameworks while preventing unwanted escalation.

We are interested in a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies for disease outbreak simulation, how simulation approaches could be extended beyond standard modeling methods, and to understand how diseases spread within and between individuals including population level dynamics.

They say that all the modeling and simulating across programs is for “national security,” but that is a very broad term.

DARPA is in the business of research and development for national security purposes, so why is the Pentagon modeling disease outbreaks and intervention strategies while simultaneously looking to predict and manipulate collective human behavior?

If and when the next outbreak occurs, the same draconian and Orwellian measures that governments and corporations deployed in the name of combating COVID are still on the table.

And AI, Machine Learning, and the military will play an even bigger role than the last time around.

From analyzing wastewater to learning about disease spread; from developing pharmaceuticals to measuring the effects of lockdowns and vaccine passports, from modeling and predicting human behavior to coming up with messaging strategies to keep everyone in compliance – “improving preparedness for future public health emergencies” is becoming more militaristically algorithmic by the day.

“We are exploring innovative solutions to enhance our understanding of outbreak dynamics and to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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