While EPA seems to be trying to invoke a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, Politico is trying to fill the agency’s deafening silence.
The tale of today’s two Politico articles on the EPA human testing scandal exposes a federal agency in dire circumstances.
PoliticoPro (subscription only) this morning first published “Suit casts spotlight on EPA’s human soot experiments,” an article which surprisingly began:
Opponents of EPA soot science are asking the agency to pick a side: evil or inept.
Because EPA failed to provide comments for the story, the article was largely limited to describing our claims that the EPA has conducted illegal human testing.
Someone (either at Politico or EPA) realized that the agency’s not responding was a bad idea. So Politico published a follow-up article, “EPA: Human studies follow ethical rules,” which seemed to promise a response from EPA.
As reported by Politico, the response was as follows:
… Milloy had previous raised his complaint in an April op-ed in the Washington Times titled “Did Obama’s EPA relaunch Tuskegee experiments?”
That prompted a response from EPA’s Director of the Environmental Public Health Division Wayne Cascio, who said the agency and its partners subject their human research to the oversight of an independent institutional review board, as required under the Common Rule, to ensure that any risks to study volunteers are minimized and justified.
“Precautions are taken throughout the volunteer’s participation to ensure his safety. In the case of the EPA’s research on particle pollution, scientists studied biological changes that carry no or minimal risk while providing evidence for the reasons that particle pollution can lead to serious health problems,” Cascio said.
Scientists from the EPA, U.S. universities and medical centers have published more than 50 clinical studies in the last decade involving human volunteers, he said.
The research into the pollutants was crucial, he said, because in the United States, a heart attack occurs every 34 seconds and more than 2,200 people die of cardiovascular disease each day.
“It is estimated that tens of thousands of premature deaths and nonfatal heart attacks are triggered by air pollution, and this emphasizes the importance of research in this field,” Cascio said.
Yes, that’s right. Today’s EPA response actually dates back to a May 1 letter to the editor of the Washington Times from Cascio, which we debunked at the time.
Moreover, our response to Cascio was developed before we obtained thousands of pages of documents detailing the illegal experiments and EPA’s lies to the study subjects and University of North Carolina institutional review board.
As Sen. Jim Inhofe stated in a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer on Friday, in words that no doubt gave Sen. Inhofe great pause before committing them to paper:
Indeed the EPA may be criminally liable for its conduct.
EPA, you have the right to remain silent…
What the EPA did was criminal and a charge of crimes against Humanity should be laid at the ICC
” “EPA parked a truck’s exhaust pipe directly beneath an intake pipe on the side of a building,” he revealed. “The exhaust was sucked into the pipe, mixed with some additional air and then piped directly into the lungs of the human subjects. EPA actually has pictures of this gas chamber, a clear plastic pipe stuck into the mouth of a subject, his lips sealing it to his face, diesel fumes inhaled straight into his lungs.”
“The 41 subjects who took part in the experiment included people who were elderly or suffering from asthma, hypertension or metabolic syndrome. One of them, an obese 58-year-old woman with a history of health problems and family history of heart disease, experienced an irregular heartbeat (atrial fibrillation) and had to be hospitalized as a result. Another subject developed an elevated heart rate. Both resumed normal respiratory and cardiac functions within two hours–according to an EPA report.”
CRIMINAL and a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY.
Public servants representing a government agency have no right to the fifth amendment unless they themselves are guilty of a crime. Any public afairs official are required to tell the truth to the public or be discharged from the government for a lack of integrety.
This is off topic. I’m watching the Documentary Channel 267 on Directv, the “Bag It” movie. Some buffoon is in the process of excoriating plastics and BPA, and his “scientists” are blaming it for everything from breast cancer to jock itch. I guess I won’t be watching this channel too.
Great work, Milloy. These bastards need to have their sails trimmed and their actions accounted for.
imho the only reason they let suck people dieselfumes is that they are fully aware that in itself poses no real risk. That their stance on microparticulates is politcal and not scientific but they needed some kind of published paper to refer to and say: See? That woman almost coughed her lungs out and in doing so triggered an existing heartcondition. See how dangerous it is?
ralph,
If that truly was the intent of the experiments – and nobody seems to be able to come up with any alternative explanation for why you have people suck on diesel truck tailpipes other than “let’s see what happens” – then they are guilty as charged, and should join Mengele at the gallows…..
“The research into the pollutants was crucial, he said, because in the United States, a heart attack occurs every 34 seconds and more than 2,200 people die of cardiovascular disease each day.”
So dumping 20 times the pollutants a normal person MIGHT get in a certain time period into their lungs will verify that it MIGHT cause heart attacks in minute amounts?
If the Republicans, Romney in particular, don’t make hay out of this they are negligent in their duty as elected servants of the people. Lisa Jackson needs to be called to task since this has taken place under her watch.