Check out Brigham Young University junk scientist Clive Arden Pope, III’s ridiculous comments on the recent EPA proposal that would ban his secret science.
As reported this morning by E & E News — [my in-line comments are in bold brackets]:
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Arden Pope, an economics professor at Brigham Young University and co-author of the study, said researchers can’t disclose all of their data when human subjects are involved. Institutions typically require researchers to agree to an Institutional Review Board, or IRB, that guarantees data privacy in any study with medical records, where blood is drawn and where sensitive health information is recorded. [Privacy is a red herring. No one wants or needs personal or medical information for replication of Pope’s work. ‘Where blood is drawn’? What is he talking about? Who cares about anyone’s blood work, much less where it was drawn? The only data needed is date of death, age at death, cause of death and zip code of residence. Blood? What a canard!]
“You have an ethical and institutional obligation to maintain the confidentiality of that data,” Pope said. “And then some people might say, ‘But ah, all you have to do is take off the names and de-identify it,’ but in most cases, your IRB won’t let you get away with this.” [Another canard. The State of California already makes this sort of data available to researchers. It’s how we did our California study.]
He said the research has been replicated already and that it has been public for years. [False. Pope’s study has never been replicated by any independent researcher. Former UCLA epidemiologist Jim Enstrom, who has much but not all of of Pope’s data, recently published this study which did not replicate Pope’s results.]
“Look at where we publish these results. They’re all getting published in very high-quality, peer-reviewed journals; it’s hardly secret,” Pope said. [This is an outrageous lie. No one said Pope’s study is secret. It’s the health data (i.e., date of death, age at death, cause of death, zip code of residence at time of death) used in the study that is secret. BTW, the mere fact of publication is not evidence that a study is any good. Also, as JunkScience.com readers know, there is demonstrable corruption at the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and other journals.]
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Keep talking, Arden. You are just digging a deeper grave for your reputation and “research.”