Brigham Young University’s Arden Pope is simply a scoundrel — taking taxpayer money and then hiding his data from taxpayers as that data is used by EPA in pointless rules that cost taxpayers and consumers billions of dollars annually..
In response to the House Science Committee subpoena of EPA’s ‘secret science’, Pope claimed that the handing over the data cold violate individual privacy.
It’s extremely hard to give a data set that will allow you to replicate the results in these studies that doesn’t include information that then allows you—with an Internet search of obituaries—to quickly figure out who the people were.
This is nonsense. Zip code and date-of-death info is not private as researchers routinely get this data — JunkScience.com obtained similar data from the state of California.
Next, it’s doubtful that the subjects who were casually surveyed by the American Cancer Society have any legally recognizable privacy rights in the data.
Pope is tying is hardest to avoid being exposed to the world as a junk scientist of the higher order. If his research was any good, why would he be trying so hard to hide his data?
This is why our unelected bureaucracy is really running this country.This hides politically designed regulations from being exposed to the public, why dishonest EPA regs destroy businesses, send productive jobs overseas.
Having Congress approve every regulation would be a radical change. In general, laws are written with relatively broad strokes and the agencies those laws create have to work out the details of implementation. The courts often interpret the laws and force agencies to refine regulations. Congress could take a more active hand but that’s not been their practice in the past.
Seems like Congress could pass a law that the EPA may only issue a regulation after providing the relevant committee with the supporting data.
Even better, that agencies like EPA and OSHA would have to present any regulation to be enacted by Congress.
It must also be noted that HIPAA turned even good researches paranoid.
We had to scrap a lot of useful functionality in the system we built for our teaching hospital when after years of use they told us we could not record the date when a training case took place. There was nothing about the patient, just the names of the trainee and his attending and the case type. They claimed that information and the date made the patient identifiable. But that would only be true if one already had access to internal hospital records.
I think HIPAA is just as bad as anything that comes from a government. One wonders whether dodging subpoenas was one of its design goals. There is nothing in it for the patient and a lot of grief for health care workers (those who do real work).
Who cares who the blighter was if he is now dead?