In the wake of Tuesday’s EPA secret science announcement, the ever-hopeful Steve Milloy gave 30-minute (at least) interview to New Yorker writer Carolyn Kormann, challenging her to go to Harvard’s Dog Dockery (no slight to biological canines intended) and Brigham Young’s Clive Arden Pope, III to get actually responses to my charges of fraud against them and their PM2.5 research. But Kormann failed miserably. Here’s what Dockery said, or at least what she reported, with my in-line comments.
The entire New Yorker article is available here.
The Dockery sections are below with my in-line comments in [bold brackets].
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… The E.P.A. administrator and his political allies have been making noise about what they call “secret science” for years. Representative Lamar Smith, the Republican chair of the House Science Committee, has twice introduced legislation to address the issue. (Both efforts stalled in the Senate.) Yet there are many cases in which it would be legally complicated or outright unethical for researchers to make their data fully transparent. Some state governments, along with the National Death Index, which tracks mortality statistics across the country, will not grant scientists access to sensitive records unless they first sign a confidentiality agreement. These sorts of records are crucial to the E.P.A.’s efforts to track how pollution and chemical exposure affect public health—efforts that Doug Dockery, a professor of environmental epidemiology at Harvard University, told me that Pruitt’s rule could undermine. As he put it, “This is a direct assault on epidemiology.” [Really? Asking scientists for their data for purposes of independent replication is an “assault on epidemiology”? That’s like saying requiring evidence in a courtroom is an “assault on justice.”]
Dockery’s work is behind some of the E.P.A.’s earliest clean-air regulations. [Uh, no. EPA didn’t regulate PM2.5 until 1997, 27 years into its reign of regulatory terror. The actual reason that EPA began regulating PM2.5 was that it had run out of larger particulate matter to regulate — i.e., the air was already clean. EPA used PM2.5 to extend and expand its regulatory power. After all, PM2.5 was such a public health threat that no one had ever noticed. That is until, Dockery came along with his Six-City fakery.] His most influential study dates back to 1974, when he and other Harvard researchers began examining the effects of soot on public health. Over roughly fifteen years, they tracked eight thousand adults and fourteen thousand children across six cities, reporting their discoveries in more than a hundred papers. [“Tracking” people is really embellishing what Dockery did. He “tracked” them so much that he has no idea how much PM2.5 any of the study subjects inhaled and he has no idea what anyone died of.] In 1993, after more than a year of rigorous peer review, [“Rigorous peer review or just pal review? After all, the epidemiology is totally lousy — poor quality data run through a fake statistical analysis. Dockery is from Harvard. There is much overlap between New England Journal of Medicine and Harvard staff.] the New England Journal of Medicine published the team’s most significant finding: people living in dirty cities were dying two years earlier, on average, than people living in clean cities. [Uh, except that Dockery’s study COULD NOT and DID NOT establish a causal connection between PM2.5 and premature death. Other than that…] “The effect was huge,” Dockery said. “We were surprised by that, because all of these cities were meeting the national standards that were supposed to protect public health.” [“The effect was huge?” Really? This must be the new Harvard lie, as we recently heard the same falsehood from Harvard’s Joel Schwartz when he responded to Jim Enstrom last year in the New England Journal of Medicine.]
Before long, the E.P.A. came under increasing pressure to strengthen its air-quality standards. Representatives of the coal, chemical, and steel industries panicked. They launched campaigns to question the research, focussing on the fact that the raw data had not been published. To address these attacks, the Harvard researchers turned to the Health Effects Institute, an organization co-funded by the E.P.A. and the automobile industry. “We told them, ‘We’ll give you all our data, provided you go through the same hoops to access it that we did,’ ” Dockery said. While the H.E.I. investigation was under way, the E.P.A. enacted new clean-air regulations. Later that year, when Dockery was called to testify on Capitol Hill, he told me, “there were guys dressed in lab coats handing out leaflets that said, ‘Harvard, show us the data!’ ” When the H.E.I. concluded its report, in 2000, it found no flaws in Dockery’s data or in his original conclusions. [HEI is not an independent group. It is half-funded by EPA and it is entirely staffed and run by cronies of Dockery and Pope. It was pal review that ignored every standard of epidemiology.]…
A twenty-seven-page draft of the policy is currently circulating online. For a document about “strengthening transparency,” it is exquisitely opaque, favoring phrases such as “parametric concentration-response models” and “spatial heterogeneity.” Dockery said that what concerned him most about the rule was its implications for chemical exposure. [Dockery is a lousy if not fake epidemiologist and has no known expertise in toxicology.] “The way we regulate new chemicals is that they are assumed to be safe until it’s proven that they have a deleterious effect,” he said. [So Dockery is now advocating the anti-technology precautionary principle.] In Europe, by contrast, new chemicals are subject to stricter regulations. Companies “have to show that a chemical is not harmful before putting it into the marketplace,” Dockery said. [What chemicals in the marketplace have been shown to cause harm? Please be specific, Dog.] But many of those European studies rely on non-public data, meaning that, under the new rule, they would be excluded from the E.P.A.’s consideration. [More Dockery ignorance/dishonesty. The proposed EPA rule makes all data, including industry-produced data available.] The agency is seeking public comment about the new rule for thirty days. Dockery expects it to be approved [The first truthful thing he said.] …