NAS President to JunkScience: Drop dead

And here’s JunkScience.com’s response to National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt’s next-day denial of JunkScience’s request for an investigation into the EPA-corrupted NAS review of EPA’s illegal human experiments.

First, here is JunkScience’s original request for investigation filed with McNutt on April 11.

Here is McNutt’s April 12 response:

Here is my response sent April 13.

Dear Dr. McNutt,

Thank you for a quick response. But your point-blank and unsupported refusal to conduct even the slightest inquiry reflects poorly upon yourself and, ultimately the National Academy of Sciences.

If you had even taken a moment to review my testimony to the NAS committee in question, you would have noticed that it is entirely based on official EPA documents and statements from EPA officials.

But according to you, the NAS committee was right to ignore these official documents because they were not “peer reviewed.” What does it even mean to “peer review” official EPA documents?

You have similarly dismissed the evidence presented of clear and present conflicts of interest between EPA and the NAS board (BEST) that sponsored and organized the review. What does it mean to have evidence of conflicts of interest “peer reviewed”?

Is it a “violation of [NAS] policy” to consider official EPA documents and other documented evidence of potential NAS/EPA wrongdoing in a review of a controversy borne out of acknowledged EPA wrongdoing?

The other chief witnesses (Drs. John Dunn & Stan Young) at the August 24, 2016 public hearing (which was held for the specific purpose of taking our testimony) cited specific EPA documents and peer-reviewed literature in their testimony.

The other two commenters at the hearing (Dr. James Enstrom and Albert Donnay) also cited peer-reviewed literature.

But the NAS committee inexplicably ignored everything we presented. And now you have as well.

Although the NAS has a conflict of interest policy. you have not even bothered to consider my request in the context of this policy. So why have the policy if it will not be applied?

Ironically, the day I filed my complaint with you, the NAS issued a report titled, “Fostering Scientific Integrity.” Here’s an apropos quote from the report:

Your automatic rejection of my complaint has clearly failed the NAS’ own standard.

I am requesting that you reconsider your decision and conduct a bona fide investigation as requested in my complaint.

Otherwise the high-minded words of NAS reports like “Fostering Integrity in Research” are meaningless superficialities akin to lipstick on a pig.

FYI, I have cc’d the committee that authored “Fostering Integrity in Research.” I am wondering just how many scientists are willing to defend the sort of rank hypocrisy and corruption evidenced by the sordid saga of EPA’s illegal human experiments.

Sincerely,

/s/

Steve Milloy
Publisher, JunkScience.com

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Dr. Stan Young also sent the following response to McNutt on April 12:

Dear Dr. McNutt:

I did testify before the NAS committee. I attach my presentation, Young-2016. I provided the committee with my slides several days before the presentation. In that presentation, I point to peer reviewed literature. In particular, Chay et al. 2003 report on a natural experiment. The EPA mandated that air pollution be reduce. It was. Mortality did not improve, a direct contradiction of the EPA position that air pollution is a killer. Greven et al. 2011, slide 5, studied 814 US counties. Within locations they found no association of PM2.5 and mortality, again in direct contradiction of the EPA position that air pollution is a killer. A major paper appeared in 2014, slide 6, noting there was no support for the presumed EPA etiology. There is more (see slide 9).

A word on peer review. As you are well aware, there is a crisis in science in that well over half of the claims made in peer reviewed literature fail to replicate.

I go beyond peer review. I obtained a data set of all deaths in California for the years 2000-2012. Air quality data was obtained and matched to the corresponding air basin. I found no association of air quality and acute mortality. I made the data public. Anyone can check it out. The data was posted in 2015. See Slides 14-22. It is possible that the EPA or researchers funded by them have indeed looked at the data set. I don’t know that they have. I’ve not received any comment on the data set or my analysis of the data set. So I think much better than peer review is access to the data. We also provide our analysis code. We did a sensitivity analysis of our work that computed over 78k statistical models.

The members of the committee have good credentials. I do too. So what? In science it should come down to data and methods. I provide my data and my analysis code. The EPA funded researchers do not provide their data. I’ve asked for data used in environmental epidemiology. Just recently I asked for data used in ~30 papers and received no data sets. I attach a very recent paper, Young2017, that looks at 8 papers that appeared in Environmental Health Perspectives, the highest impact journal in the environmental epidemiology area. All of the papers were peer reviewed. All of the papers are statistically flawed. None of the authors would provide their data sets.

You well know that once a scientific paradigm is agreed upon it is very difficult to overturn. I provided peer reviewed literature, data and analysis against the EPA paradigm. The committee essentially asked no questions. They cited none of my work in their report. I think there is a problem with the committee.

Sincerely,

S. Stanley Young, PhD, FASA, FAAAS

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The August 24, 2016 testimony of Milloy, Dunn, Young, Enstrom and Donnay to the National Academy of Sciences can be read/listened to here.