It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Washington — Vice President Kamala Harris surprised many when she revealed Tuesday night that she is a gun owner as she rebuffed former President Trump's claim during the presidential debate that her administration would confiscate Americans' firearms.
"This business about taking everyone's guns away, Tim Walz and I are both gun owners," Harris said during the debate hosted by ABC News. "We're not taking anybody's guns away."
Walz has spoken publicly about being an avid hunter and gun owner. He even earned "A" ratings from the National Rifle Association from 2010 to 2016, though his grade fell to an "F" in 2018 after the Minnesota governor backed stricter gun laws after the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.
But Harris' quip about having a gun raised eyebrows, even though it's not the first time the vice president has spoken about it publicly.
In 2019, while running in the Democratic presidential primary, Harris told reporters that she is a gun owner, according to a CNN report at the time.
Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, debates Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. president Donald Trump, for the first time during the presidential election campaign.
WIN MCNAMEE / GETTY IMAGES
"I own a gun for probably the reason a lot of people do — for personal safety," she said. "I was a career prosecutor."
A Harris campaign aide told CNN in 2019 that she has a handgun that was purchased years ago.
She also said at a policy forum during her first presidential campaign that she supports a mandatory buyback program for assault-syle weapons.
"There are 5 million at least, some estimate as many as 10 million," Harris said of the guns. "And we're going to have to have smart public policy that's about taking those off the streets, but doing it the right way."
Harris campaign officials told The New York Times in July that she will not push for a mandatory buyback of certain guns as president, but supports tightening gun restrictions.
Following Tuesday's debate, a Harris campaign official again confirmed the Democratic presidential nominee owns a handgun, and it's the same firearm she mentioned five years ago.
Harris has called for more stringent gun laws, including universal background checks and red-flag laws, which allow people to petition the courts to temporarily take away a person's gun if they are deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. She also supports a ban on assault-style weapons and increased funding for mental health care.
But the vice president has said on the campaign trail that she supports the Second Amendment.
"It is a false choice to say you're either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone's guns away," she said during a campaign event in New Hampshire last week. "I'm in favor of the Second Amendment, and I know we need reasonable gun safety laws in our country."
The debate between Harris and Trump was their first face-to-face meeting and may be the only matchup between the two presidential hopefuls before the November election.
ASSASSINATED BY ZIONIST SNIPER
‘No one should be shot for a protest’: US’ Blinken warns Israel after ‘unprovoked and unjustified’ killing of American activist
WAGGING HIS FINGER FIERCELY
Palestinian security forces carry the body of slain Turkish-American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, covered with a chequerred keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag, during a memorial service starting from the Rafidia hospital in Nablus. — AFP pic Join us on our WhatsApp Channel, follow us on Instagram, and receive browser alerts for the latest news you need to know.
Wednesday, 11 Sep 2024
LONDON, Sept 11 — US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday urged Israel to make “fundamental changes” in its operations in the occupied West Bank after the military acknowledged its fire likely killed a US citizen activist there.
US President Joe Biden later said he thought the killing of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was an “accident”, but Blinken called it “unprovoked and unjustified”.
After an initially measured response to Eygi’s death on Friday, pending a fact-finding exercise, Blinken said the United States would raise it at senior levels with its key ally.
The investigation, and eyewitness accounts, make clear “that her killing was both unprovoked and unjustified”, Blinken told reporters on a visit to London.
“No one should be shot and killed for attending a protest,” he said.
“In our judgement, Israeli security forces need to make some fundamental changes in the way that they operate in the West Bank, including changes to their rules of engagement.
“We have the second American citizen killed at the hands of Israeli security forces. It’s not acceptable. It has to change.”
Biden told reporters hours later however that the killing appeared to have been an accident.
“Apparently it was an accident — it ricocheted off the ground, and she got hit by accident,” Biden said, without elaborating.
Ceasefire push
Eygi, who was 26 and also held Turkish citizenship, was killed as she attended the site of weekly demonstrations against Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law but supported by right-wing members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
The Israeli military said it had found that it was “highly likely that she was hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF (Israeli army) fire”.
It added that the fire “was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of the riot”.
Palestinians and international activists lift portraits of slain Turkish-American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi as they arrive for her final farewell at the Rafidia hospital morgue in Nablus in the occupied West Bank on September 8, 2024. — AFP pic
It said Eygi was killed “during a violent riot in which dozens of Palestinian suspects burned tyres and hurled rocks towards security forces at the Beita Junction”.
But Eygi’s family rejected the military’s version of events and called its preliminary inquiry “wholly inadequate”.
“She was taking shelter in an olive grove when she was shot in the head and killed by a bullet from an Israeli soldier,” they said in a statement.
“This cannot be misconstrued as anything other except a deliberate, targeted and precise attack by the military against an unarmed civilian.”
‘Peaceful’ demonstration
Eygi was a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a pro-Palestinian organisation.
On Saturday it dismissed claims that ISM activists threw rocks at Israeli forces as “false” and said the demonstration was peaceful.
The United Nations’ rights office had earlier said Israeli forces killed Eygi with a “shot in the head”.
The mayor of Beita, the Palestinian official news agency Wafa and her family also reported that Israeli soldiers killed her.
Turkey said she was killed by “Israeli occupation soldiers”, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — a fierce critic of Israel despite his country’s ties with the country — condemning Israel as “barbaric”.
The United States is the crucial supporter of Israel, providing billions of dollars in weapons and diplomatic support.
It has maintained its support despite concern over the deaths of several US citizens.
Blinken also has been at the forefront of efforts to seek a ceasefire in the 11-month war.
He acknowledged that “very hard” differences remained, but said that all sides would benefit from a deal that would “turn down the temperature” in Gaza.
“It’s clearly in Israel’s interest,” he said.
Speaking next to Blinken, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy voiced outrage at a different Israeli strike on Tuesday in a designated safe zone that officials in Hamas-run Gaza said killed 40 people.
Israel said it targeted a Hamas command centre.
“We’re meeting at a critical moment — a critical moment for securing a ceasefire in Gaza, with the shocking deaths in Khan Yunis this morning only reinforcing how desperately needed that ceasefire is,” Lammy said. — AFP
Thursday, September 05, 2024
The war on Palestine within U.S. education isn’t just happening in colleges, but in K-12 schools as well
K-12 educators around the U.S. who show support for Palestine have been targeted with false charges of antisemitism and have faced a clear pattern of punishment without due process based on disturbing double standards.
Artwork created in solidarity with Palestine by Oakland High students posted in school hallways in the spring of 2024. (Photo: Oakland Education Association for Palestine Group via Rethinking Schools)
In a May 2024 congressional hearing, the Committee on Education and the Workforce questioned leaders of three public school districts: New York City; the Washington, DC suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland; and Berkeley, California. Similar to earlier hearings that cross-examined the presidents of Harvard, Penn, MIT, and Columbia, the event was premised on “pervasive antisemitism” in U.S. education and a demand for accountability from its leaders.
As NPR reported, the K-12 hearing did not net the “headline moments” that lawmakers enjoyed with the university presidents, which saw the leaders struggle to answer questions and which helped bring about the resignation of three of them. Yet despite the lower profile of K-12 education in the current controversy over pro-Palestine speech in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, teachers are being punished for expressing what the lawmakers maintain is antisemitic rhetoric that makes Jewish students and fellow teachers “unsafe.”
But are the teachers actually antisemitic, as the lawmakers would have us believe? And whose safety is in fact in question? A deeper look into the allegations demonstrates a problematic definition of antisemitism and a tendency to punish immediately, without due process, analysis, or care.
Aaron Bean (R-FL) kicked off the hearing’s questioning by asking the school officials a series of “yes or no” questions, including “Does Israel have the right to exist as a Jewish state?” and “Does the phrase, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ – is that antisemitic?” The officials replied in the affirmative. As such, the event immediately took as a given the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of antisemitism, which claims that it is antisemitic to “deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist behavior.”
The IHRA definition, which is at present legally nonbinding but under consideration as a bill in the Senate after being passed in the House, as well as touted by the U.S. State Department, has been criticized for being weaponized as a tool to suppress critics of the state of Israel by equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Even the lead drafter of the definition, Kenneth Stern, has decried this weaponized use of his work.
Several cases of teachers “teaching hate” were referenced during the hearing, and the school officials asked about actions taken to punish these employees. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), for instance, questioned Chancellor of New York City Public Schools David Banks about Mohammad Ahmad, a math teacher at Gotham Tech High School in Queens who on October 7 posted an image of a paraglider to his social media with the line, “I stand with Palestine.” Stefanik held up a copy of the image, proclaiming, “This is a Hamas paraglider who slaughtered Jews. We all have seen the horrific footage, who cooked babies! These are terrorists!”
It must first be noted that Stefanik’s reference to cooking babies is one of many regarding Hamas violence against women and children on October 7 that have been debunked. And while Ahmad may have posted the image to his personal social media, his superior did not defend his right to do so or question Stefanik’s one-dimensional interpretation.
“I think what that employee did was absolutely disgusting and we took action,” Chancellor David Banks replied.
Ahmad had posted the image to his private Facebook page after hearing about the armed resistance forces breaking out of Gaza. “We heard how many military bases they took, and we didn’t know anything else,” he told me. Though he subsequently took down the image, because it had been his “cover” photo, it remained in feeds. The New York Post, Fox News, and the Daily Mail published stories about it and other anti-Zionist opinions Ahmad posted.
“My family received death threats and phone calls in the middle of the night,” Ahmad says. He was doxed, and an employee from the right-wing outfit Accuracy in Media came to his home. A disciplinary letter from New York City Public Schools was put in his file. In contrast, a teacher at another Queens public high school posted an image of herself at a rally with the sign, “I stand with Israel.” When students at her school protested in the halls, calling for her to be fired, the school held a press conference in which students apologized. She was also given a union escort to accompany her to class.
“I post something and I receive a disciplinary letter, and a Zionist teacher called in sick to attend a rally, which is a breach of contract,” says Ahmad. “I’m not saying I want a press conference or an escort, but you see the difference in how we were treated.”
In November 2023 in Montgomery County, Maryland, middle school math teacher Hajur El-Haggan was put on administrative leave for having “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in her internal, staff-facing email signature. She has since been moved to another school.
A few days before El-Haggan found out she was being put on leave, her car was vandalized in the school parking lot. In October 2023 she had placed a Palestinian flag embroidered with “Free Palestine” on the windshield. “I walked out to my car ready to go home and I noticed that my flag was no longer on my car,” she says. “I saw that there were plastic remains of it on the top of my sunroof; someone had slashed it off my car. I felt very unsafe.”
El-Haggan notes that many fellow teachers have “Black Lives Matter” or text supporting LGBTQ+ rights in their internal email signatures. “If my signature was any other quote, this would not have happened to me,” she says, adding that the phrase must be understood as a call for equal rights for all. “It’s a call for freedom from one body of water to the other body of water in historic Palestine,” she explains. “It wants everyone in that land to be free.”
El-Haggan is filing a lawsuit against the Montgomery County Board of Education with two other teachers who have been punished for privately expressed pro-Palestinian views, including middle school English teacher Angela Wolf. Wolf was also put on leave and then moved to another school for posts on her personal Facebook page critical of Israel, such as condemnation of Israel’s bombing of al-Shifa Hospital. She was also attacked for a post from 2020 on a private teachers’ page in which she criticized Montgomery County billionaires for not doing enough to help students during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I was angry because teachers were running around like crazy using their own funds to try to help students and their families and here are five billionaires who live in the county,” she says. “I named them and I called them thieves.” Not all of the billionaires were Jewish, but Wolf was accused of using an antisemitic trope.
“It didn’t even register that some of them were Jewish,” Wolf says. “I could immediately see that the interest is not in rooting out actual antisemitism; this is political and there’s a real effort to make sure criticism of Israel is silenced.”
One need only listen to the beginning of the Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing and look into Committee lawmakers’ records to confirm Wolf’s opinion. Before questioning began, Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) recounted antisemitic statements by former president Donald Trump, including one in which he said that Hitler had “done some good things.”
“Despite these persistent examples of comments that others have called antisemitic, and continued relationships with well-known antisemites, I have not heard one word of concern from my colleagues across the aisle,” Bonamici said. “In fact, what we have seen is consolidation of support for the former president.” When Bonamici then asked the lawmakers present to condemn Trump’s previous comments, there was silence. “Let the record show that no one spoke up,” she said.
Moreover, analysts and officials have pointed to Elise Stefanik’s passionate support for Trump as well as her own proclivity to traffic in antisemitic tropes, such as the great replacement theory – the idea that Jewish and other elites are bringing immigrants to the country to change its demographic makeup.
As the Middle East Studies Association pointed out in response to the Committee’s questioning of the university presidents, “the framing and content of these hearings make it clear that many committee members are less concerned with combatting invidious discrimination than with suppressing and punishing pro-Palestine speech” as well as using the opportunity to further their own agenda of cracking down on progressive education more broadly. Aaron Bean’s voting record, for instance, shows his support for empowering (conservative) parents to have more of a say in school curricula and the books school libraries contain.
This craven weaponization of antisemitism in the Congressional hearings and beyond peddles the idea of “Jewish safety,” despite the fact that many Jewish students and teachers are anti-Zionist and have been extremely active in and even spearheading the protests on college campuses and elsewhere that have swept the United States over the past months. It is in fact Palestinians and their allies who are on the whole facing doxing, harassment, and being made to feel – and be – unsafe. Mohammed Ahmad and Hajur El-Haggan can attest to that. As Chris Godshall-Bennett, Legal Director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says, “Jewish students deserve to be safe, but not at the expense of someone else.”
Such performative hand wringing about antisemitism serves to distract not only from actual antisemitism in the United States perpetuated by white supremacists and Christian nationalists but, crucially, what is occurring on the ground in Gaza, namely a genocide being live-streamed on our phones and funded by our tax dollars. K-12 education ended for Palestinian children on October 7 and, as of this writing, nearly 17,000 have been killed by Israeli bombs, starvation, and disease. The most unsafe place in the world is the Gaza Strip. This is what should concern us, and those who call attention to it should be heeded rather than punished.
Tuesday, September 03, 2024
Debunking Myths: The Real Iran Beyond U.S. and Israeli Narratives
Please tell Americans, that Iranians are kind and hospitable. Come and visit us. You are most welcome here.” This was a common refrain encountered in a recent trip to Iran.
At present the US military has mobilized a strike group of fighter jets and warships surrounding and awaiting the smallest retaliatory move by Iran after the Israeli assassination in Tehran on 31 July 2024, of Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian negotiator for a peace deal in Gaza.
US/Israel provocations and threats to Iran are reckless, extremely dangerous and based on false information.
Jews have lived in and made up Iranian society and civilization for thousands of years. The largest amount of Jews outside Israel in the entire Middle East live and practice their faith in Iran.
During the horrific genocide of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900’s when the world was slow to recognize it and help, it was Iran that opened its borders and welcomed the survivors.
Iran does not believe in the destruction of Israel as is repeated in the Israel/West’s narrative, rather it rejects the policies of Israeli apartheid.
Jewish people have always been part of Iran. A close ally in the cabinet of the late President Raisi was Jewish. Two current cabinet members are Christians, and one a woman. Zionist policies of apartheid, occupation, and genocide, are considered anti-semitic actions, and opposed to the tenets of the Jewish faith.
Recently Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to a standing ovation, actually told the US Congress that the protests outside the halls in the streets were most likely paid for and encouraged by Iran. He labelled those insulted by his presence as “Iran’s useful idiots.”
The bus I rode to DC to oppose Netanyahu’s being invited to speak was hired by and filled with Israelis for Ceasefire, and met up with other busloads of Rabbi’s For a Ceasefire, Jewish Voices for Peace, Veterans For Peace, groups of faith leaders, unions, among many others, not to mention our Palestinian American brothers and sisters, students and all those who call for stopping slaughter. We were nobodies “useful idiots.”
Powers that be have conflated all “terror” and Iran in our media, with ISIS, ISIL, and Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Iran was one of the first nations to offer to help our Administration during the World Trade Tower attacks on 9/11. Al Qaeda was Iran’s enemy long before us. The Bush administration rebuffed Iran’s offer.
Iran has had to deal directly with extremist ideologies and deadly attacks supported by US “ally” Saudi Arabia. The Houthi’s, and Yemen in general have long suffered from the blockades, the bombings, and the mass starvation of Yemeni children at the hands of Saudi Arabia. The US Congress only recently woke up to this and the relationship and talks with our “ally” began to ease these blockades and hostilities.
And then came Oct.7th and the massive Israeli response.
In the current actions at sea Houthi’s keep repeating, “stop the flow of armaments for genocide in Palestine, and we will stop.”
There are no orders from Iran for Houthi’s to stand up. There is, as there are in our own streets, support for the cause of peace and justice.
In a 2004 interview with me, Javad Zarif, the articulate former UN Ambassador of Iran spoke of Iran’s introducing and initiating the International Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations. That was just before 9/11.
Imagine. This was a task he believed in and looked forward to. It was eclipsed and forgotten by our Administration’s turn toward revenge, and was an agenda unbeknown to the American people. The best way to honor all those lost on 9/11 and in resultant wars would be to stop the killing and create in their name a better, safer and more cooperative world.
During the horrific genocide of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900’s when the world was slow to recognize it and help, it was Iran that opened its borders and welcomed the survivors.
According to the 2023 accounting of the UN’s Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Iran hosts the largest amount of refugee’s in the world. Far more than the United States, some 3.5 million, many related to our devastating invasions for “freedom and democracy” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is a tremendous added burden for Iran to educate these children, provide health care, shelter and food, especially with our insistence on continuing crippling sanctions on their country.
This week I called an Iranian friend who is walking today in Iraq, in the largest annual pilgrimage in the world – from Najaf to the sacred Shi’a shrine in Karbala. All along the way, all faiths, ages, nationalities are offered food and lodging freely by an extremely materially modest people. Do we not see these Iraqis, Iranians and others, walking as humans hand in hand?
Iranians, do not comprehend the US labelling them as a terrorist state, nor as “supporting terrorists.” They see themselves supporting peace in the region, an end to the policies of Israeli terror, oppression and apartheid.
An apartheid that not only the ICJ recognizes, but that President Carter, Middle East negotiator U.S. Senator Mitchell, Archbishop Tutu, President Mandela, and thousands of Jews in the USA are opposing.
Our CIA and the UK’s M16 admitted that we propagated lies in 1953 and then orchestrated the coup that put in a leader who would not threaten our control of the oil in Iran. The Shah was not kind or benevolent. He was brutal to many.
In 1979 when the US Embassy was taken over by the citizens of Iran, and the Shah fled, the image of crazed people screaming “Death to America” and the burning of the flag, remains to this day the constantly repeated narrative promoted by US politicians and lobbyists dedicated to taking this regime down.
Not one US Citizen was killed or tortured in that takeover.
Citizens of Iran 45 years old and younger were not yet born. They have no personal memory to this adversarial mindset. They want peace, and connection with the West, and an end to sanctions so they may travel, exchange, trade and study with us. They see one world. They want to focus on the urgent issue of Climate with others on this one small planet. The literacy rate in Iran is 89%, as apposed to our 79 %, and their professionals wish to use their skills to contribute to earths solutions.
The US has about 800 military bases overseas. We actively participate in numerous military conflicts around the globe with US boots on the ground, an ever-growing list of invasions, and lead large joint military/manoeuvres (war games) around the world.
Iran has not invaded one nation, nor does it maintain outside military bases.
The Iranian youth, similar to our own progressive college students, are leading by example.
As our press and politicians echo constantly “Iran backed” Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi’s, these groups see themselves as having formed to stand up to injustice in their own lands, apartheid, and now clearly, genocide. They would be fighting this fight anyway, without any influence or guidance or support from Iran.
The same with those here in the US standing up to Zionist terror.
Meanwhile, the US is actively supporting Israel’s occupation and apartheid forces, supplying the tools of genocide, gas-lighting Cease Fire talks, and magnifying Israel’s narrative that they are helping the United Stated fight it greatest enemy, Iran.
And now, the newly elected Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian who campaigned on working toward better relations and ties with the United States of America, the West, and the world, was rewarded on Iran’s hopeful, bright Inauguration day with the horror of a missile attack in the heart, the capital, Tehran, an assassination of his invited guest, Ismail Haniyeh, the chief negotiator of peace talks with Palestine. This just days after our leaders met privately with Netanyahu. On top of this, Israel/US then swiftly warn and threaten Tehran not to respond militarily. We are at this moment pointing our gun barrels directly at them, and Israel is launching more strikes “on Iran backed terrorists”.
VP Harris, now a Presidential Nominee, has not voiced any deviation from our offensive posture presently nor in the past 4 years. The just released DNC platform reinforces all the dangerous stereotypes of Iran and ensuing threats to them. The Republican platform rhetoric is not better, just less specific.
Nuclear weapons? The US has been in clear violation of its obligations to the international law, the NPT (the Nuclear (Weapon) Non-proliferation Treaty) which President Johnson introduced at the United Nations in 1968. US Congress ratified it 54 years ago in 1970. The treaty’s Article Six allows other nations to pursue nuclear energy, as Iran has legally, openly done, with the promise that the US would “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament…”
Instead the U.S., without public or citizen discussion, is leading another fast-paced, extremely costly and dangerous nuclear weapon arms race, supported by both party’s platforms, spelled out most clearly in the DNC’s.
If we claim the absurd notion that these omnicidal nuclear weapons systems, capable of human error, malfunction and cyberattack, “ensure the safety and security of our nation”, why wouldn’t Iran and other nations deserve the same ensuring? It is we who need to follow the law and stop this madness of mutually assured destruction.
Israel’s leadership openly voiced last year a willingness to use their nuclear weapons to level Iran. This severely unhinged statement could lead in moments to the end of human life on earth as we know it.
Pope Francis who has an Iranian delegation and Ambassador within the Vatican, repeated while in Nagasaki the call for nuclear abolition, and that the “threat of the use” of nuclear weapons is immoral. Ayatollah Khamenei in 2003 issued a fatwa (official legal ruling) now being severely challenged by Israel and the Wests incursions, constant threats, and assassinations.
Those who witnessed the deliberations over months at the UN to bring into being the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW, 2017), also listened to the constructive arguments Iran’s diplomats added to stop the madness and irresponsibility of the nuclear arms race. Indeed Iran’s considerations represented the American public’s concerns much better than our own irresponsible statements and policies.
The Iranian youth, similar to our own progressive college students, are leading by example.
As Iran yearns for increasing cooperation, our Administrations recent foreign policy stance may be encapsulated in one small interaction I had during a recess at the UN with the US United Nation Alternate Representative Robert Wood.
I pointed to the Iranian diplomats less than 10 yards away sitting behind him and asked “Have you ever considered sitting down and speaking with the Iranian delegation?” With a condescending stare, he quipped, “Why would I ever do that!?” He turned and quickly walked away as I called out, “It might be a good idea.”
Anthony Donovan A political campaigner and activist from the age of 12, ending up in jail three times for Vietnam War nonviolent civil disobedience. Donovan is the producer of several documentaries, including: “Dialogues: A more effective path to deal with global terrorism” (2004), and “Good Thinking, Those Who’ve Tried To Halt Nuclear Weapons” (2015). His long time passion remains the abolition of nuclear weapons.
EPA Used Industry-Funded Scientists to Support Its Claim That a Long-Regulated Pesticide Is Not a Cancer Risk
The consultants, who worked for Dow, the pesticide’s manufacturer, help corporate interests defend their products against environmental and health regulations.
On a Southern California spring morning in 1973, a tanker truck driver jackknifed his rig and dumped the agricultural fumigant he was transporting onto a city street. A Los Angeles Fire Department emergency response team spent four hours cleaning up the chemical, 1,3-dichloropropene, or 1,3-D, a fumigant sold as Telone that farmers use to kill nematodes and other soil-dwelling organisms before planting.
Seven years after the spill, two emergency responders developed the same rare, aggressive blood cancer—histiocytic lymphoma—and died within two months of each other. In 1975, a farmer who’d accidentally exposed himself to 1,3-D repeatedly through a broken hose was diagnosed with another blood cancer, leukemia, and died the next year.
Within a decade of the men’s deaths, described as case studies in JAMA Internal Medicine, the National Toxicology Program, or NTP, reported “clear evidence” that 1,3-D causes cancer in both rats and mice. The finding led the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to classify the chemical as “likely to be carcinogenic to humans” the same year, 1985. So it wasn’t a surprise when researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles reported in 2003 that Californians who’d lived at least two decades in areas with the highest applications of 1,3-D faced a heightened risk of dying from pancreatic cancer.
Yet EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs’ Cancer Assessment Review Committee, or CARC, concluded in 2019 that 1,3-D—originally embraced by tobacco companies for its unparalleled ability to kill anything in soil that might harm their plants—isn’t likely to cause cancer after all.
In doing so, EPA, whose mission is to protect human health and the environment, rejected the human evidence, calling the UCLA study “low quality.” It also dismissed the authoritative NTP study and studies in lab animals that documented 1,3-D’s ability to damage DNA, a quintessential hallmark of cancer.
Instead, EPA’s CARC relied on studies provided by Dow AgroSciences (now called Corteva), the primary manufacturer of 1,3-D, and proposed a review of evidence linking the fumigant to cancer by SciPinion, a consulting firm hired by Dow, as an external peer review of its work. The decision to entrust external review to a Dow contractor has drawn repeated criticism, including from the agency’s watchdog, the Office of Inspector General, or OIG.
“During EPA’s search of the open literature, a comprehensive third-party peer review of the cancer weight-of-evidence assessment that considered toxicokinetics, genotoxicity and carcinogenicity data for 1,3-D was conducted and published in 2020 by SciPinion,” said agency spokesperson Timothy Carroll. EPA argued that the SciPinion review satisfied the criteria for an external review, Carroll said, and that another panel would have arrived at the same conclusion, given the specialized expertise required.
The OIG had recommended EPA conduct an external peer review of its 1,3-D cancer risk assessment in a 2022 report that outlined several problems with the agency’s process. An external review, the OIG said, requires “independence from the regulated business,” again noting the deficiency in a new report released in early August.
The scientists who run SciPinion have long consulted for manufacturers of harmful products, often publishing studies that deploy computer models to question the need for more protective health standards.
Inside Climate News reviewed 159 scientific articles published by one or both of the principal SciPinion scientists, Sean Hays and Christopher Kirman. Papers often re-evaluated evidence of health risks or advocated using alternative methods to “refine” risk estimates for dozens of toxic substances, most worth billions of dollars in sales a year, including toxic metals (like chromium, used to make stainless steel), solvents (likebenzene), pesticides, flame retardants and PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals.” Of the 130 papers with a funder listed, 82 percent were sponsored by corporate interests, either the producer of the substance under study or the producer’s trade group, including the American Chemistry Council, the Chlorine Chemistry Council and the American Petroleum Institute.
Industry players are hiring SciPinion to do risk assessments on their own products, said Tess Legg, an expert on the risks of corporate influence on science with the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath in England. “They’re what some would call a ‘product defense team.’”
Papers published by SciPinion scientists, who also provide expert witness testimony and “product stewardship” services through the consulting firm Summit Toxicology, rarely conclude that toxic chemicals, including known carcinogens, need stricter regulations. Instead, they often argue for safety thresholds that allow higher levels of exposure, repeating an argument made by fossil fuel and petrochemical companies since U.S. regulatory agencies were established in the 1970s.
“They are all industry consultants and will tell you, ‘Oh, no, we just follow the science,’” said Linda Birnbaum, a world-renowned toxicologist who spent nearly 20 years at EPA and until 2019 directed two of the government’s leading environmental health research agencies, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program. “But if they don’t say things that make industry happy, guess what? They’re not going to get hired to do the next job,” said Birnbaum, now a scholar in residence at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Ultimately, Birnbaum said, “we need unconflicted external peer review for regulatory decision-making.”
Growers applied more than 60 million pounds of 1,3-D to fields in 2018, according to the most recent data. In downgrading 1,3-D’s cancer status, EPA’s CARC sanctioned a 90-fold increase in the exposure level previously considered “an unreasonable risk.”
The decision will expose agricultural communities and farmworkers, who already live and work alongside the highest applications of 1,3-D and other dangerous pesticides, to even higher levels of a fumigant independent researchers have shown damages DNA in cells and lab animals, and linked to cancer and respiratory problems, including asthma, in humans. Even tiny, temporary spikes in 1,3-D concentrations increase the need for emergency asthma treatment, researchers have found.
SciPinion’s Hays and Kirman did not agree to an interview or respond to specific questions about Inside Climate News’ findings. “You seem unwilling to report the facts about how we produce trusted, independent science that upholds the highest standards of scientific integrity,” Hays said in a statement. “So here’s what we hope you’ll include for any readers of your story: We created SciPinion to be a voice for the scientific community, to provide a path for scientists to give their honest and uninfluenced opinions on the tough science matters and to renew trust in science. We fight back against biased and unfounded attacks on science experts. When experts fear retribution and attack by reporters and activists, they refuse to speak up on science issues. Attacks on scientists for their opinions is a disservice to science and civil discourse.”
When Inside Climate News first contacted Hays and Kirman, the firm’s growth executive, Tyler Carneal, replied, saying SciPinion strives to be a resource for journalists. He then pointed to EPA’s response to the 2022 OIG report as “the best resource.”
The OIG not only recommended EPA secure external peer review of the 1,3-D risk assessment but also charged the agency with failing to adhere to standard operating procedures and relying on scientific analysis techniques that lacked clear guidance. Such deficiencies, the OIG concluded in the report, “undermined scientific credibility and public confidence.” The OIG made nine recommendations for the agency to restore its credibility.
“EPA remains committed and continues its mission to protect human health and the environment, while maintaining scientific integrity, transparency to all stakeholders and decisions grounded in sound, high-quality science,” Michal Ilana Freedhoff, assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, wrote in response to the OIG report. She said the agency will be taking action “to further strengthen our continued efforts in these areas.”
Over the past two years, EPA proposed steps to comply with the OIG’s recommendations. EPA’s Carroll maintains that the agency is no longer relying on SciPinion’s review. Yet the new OIG report released August 7, flagged one recommendation as unresolved: the need for an independent external peer review of the 1,3-D cancer assessment.
Downplaying Risks
Carcinogens are traditionally regulated using a “no threshold” approach, which assumes there is no safe level of exposure. Substances that cause other health problems were assumed to have a level below which they do not cause harm, but scientists now realize even non-carcinogens may carry risks at low doses.
EPA’s re-classification “dangerously ignores science and downplays the risks individuals face when they are exposed to 1,3-D,” wrote the attorneys general of seven states and the District of Columbia in a 2020 letter to the Office of Pesticide Programs. Top law enforcement officers from New York to California charged agency officials with omitting studies linking 1,3-D to cancer in humans, and ultimately relying “entirely on industry-sponsored studies” and “crediting an unsupported Dow theory” to ignore cancer responses at certain doses. Dow did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The decision also triggered multiple complaints to the Office of Inspector General, which highlighted the attorneys’ general letter in its report.
In one complaint, Timothy Whitehouse, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, said misrepresentations and omissions by EPA officials “put applicators of the fumigant and the public at grave risk, given that 1,3-D is one of the nation’s most-used pesticides.”
Another complaint, submitted to the OIG hotline and obtained through a public records request, warned that chemical manufacturers are pressuring EPA to state that carcinogens have thresholds below which the chemicals are safe, “which is not protective of human health.”
PEER, which represents whistleblowers at public agencies, detailed several scientific flaws with EPA’s review in its complaint, including a search of the biomedical literature that didn’t use the chemical’s full name, 1,3-dichloropropene, and turned up just eight studies.
“EPA has recognized that there was an oversight in the original literature search for the CARC review, such that while the search terms used were correct, some synonyms for the chemical name were not included,” said EPA spokesperson Carroll.
Yet a document obtained through a public records request—and EPA’s 2019 draft human health risk assessment—shows that the original search terms did not include the chemical’s full name, which several scientists told Inside Climate News is “just a bad search.”
“These are not honest mistakes and carry the earmarks of deliberate malfeasance,” Whitehouse said in a press release about the complaint.
EPA failed to follow its own procedures for searching the scientific literature, the OIG report concluded. The watchdog suggested EPA conduct a new search to restore its scientific credibility.
A new search with the chemical’s full name returned 103 studies. But EPA concluded that none of the additional studies impacted 1,3-D’s cancer classification.
Yet independent scientists told Inside Climate News the expanded search included peer-reviewed papers that provide evidence 1,3-D should be assessed as a “no threshold” carcinogen because it harms DNA. In one study, 1,3-D damaged DNA in liver cells. In another, it “induced DNA damage in all of the organs studied.”
EPA gave these studies lower scores in the weight of evidence review because they revealed only initial damage to DNA, which may have initiated processes like DNA repair that minimize the harm, said Carroll on behalf of EPA’s pesticide office. To avoid underestimating risks, he said, EPA applied an uncertainty factor, or safety margin, of 100, which accounts for differences between rodents and people and within the population.
Experts in health and risk assessment have been arguing against this type of weight of evidence analysis for years because they don’t allow decision-makers to adopt a health protective approach, said Adam Finkel, clinical professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and former director of Health Standards Programs at the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration.
If you synthesize all of the evidence in a way that removes uncertainty around the findings, Finkel said, you’re not giving regulators who want to take a health protective approach the information they need.
The National Academies told EPA in 2014 that “weight of evidence” is far too vague to have any scientific value, said Nicholas Chartres, an expert on reducing bias in risk assessments at the University of Sydney. “When you see ‘weight of evidence,’” he said, “it’s a red flag.”
CARC also dismissed the 1985 NTP study that formed the basis of the agency’s original decision to classify 1,3-D as a probable human carcinogen, accepting Dow’s argument that because the old Telone formulation included a stabilizer that mutates DNA, it was impossible to assess 1,3-D’s cancer effects in the rats and mice. Yet EPA had previously determined that even if the stabilizer had caused some of the tumors, its contribution would have been small.
SciPinion and Corteva (formerly Dow) scientists repeated the argument to dismiss studies with the stabilizer in separate weight of evidence reviews minimizing 1,3-D’s cancer risk published on the same day in 2021.
Finkel, one of the scientists on the SciPinion 1,3-D panel who does not consult for industry, said it was wrong to discount the NTP studies. It is simply improper to ignore 21 carcinomas of the bladder, which NTP called “clear evidence of carcinogenicity in female mice,” because of a trace amount of an impurity that has never been associated with any bladder carcinomas, Finkel believes.
The stabilizer is simply “too weak a carcinogen to cause the tumors,” Finkel told Inside Climate News. “It doesn’t add up.”
In 2021, two years after EPA’s CARC downgraded 1-3-D’s cancer status, the National Toxicology Program—the nation’s preeminent toxicology research arm—again said the chemical is “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.”
“We’re extremely concerned that EPA’s pesticide office is captured by industry, that its science is not trustworthy and that its staff are supposed to deliver for the industry, as opposed to protecting the public health,” Whitehouse, a former EPA enforcement attorney, told Inside Climate News.
“EPA rejects the inappropriate and unfounded notion that the agency’s career staff and pesticide registration decisions are influenced by external interests,” said Carroll. “Additionally, the underlying assertion suggesting that any errors by career staff are deliberate is a ridiculous and unfounded attack on scientists who have in most cases spent their entire careers as civil servants working to protect people.”
“We’re extremely concerned that EPA’s pesticide office is captured by industry, that its science is not trustworthy and that its staff are supposed to deliver for the industry, as opposed to protecting the public health.”
The agency has updated its procedures to avoid making errors in literature searches and has addressed other OIG recommendations to increase transparency in documentation and decision-making, he said.
Independent scientists also told Inside Climate News about other serious flaws in EPA’s assessment of 1,3-D.
Beate Ritz, an expert on occupational epidemiology and pesticide exposure at UCLA, led the California study linking 1,3-D to pancreatic cancer deaths that EPA dismissed as “low quality.” EPA rejected her study partly by arguing that living near pesticide applications doesn’t mean a person is exposed.
“But we know it does mean exposure,” Ritz said. “We have enough studies where we have done dust sampling or EPA itself has.”
Scientists working with pesticide regulators under California’s EPA office placed monitors on three elementary schools in a small Central Valley farming town. They collected hundreds of samples over the course of more than a year and found unsafe levels of several pesticides, including 1,3-D. When they compared their results with pesticide application records, Ritz said, “the overlap was amazing.”
What was sprayed on farms around the community could be measured on top of elementary schools, which means it got into households, too, Ritz said. Other researchers sampled dust in homes and urine in residents and showed that application records could predict what they found in dust and urine, she said. “So definitely, this stuff gets into the homes, it gets into dust, it gets into people and it comes out of people.”
Yet EPA is increasingly disregarding epidemiology data, Ritz said. With large farming populations chronically exposed at high levels to multiple agents, she said, clearly frustrated, “that’s a bad road to go down.”
Air pollution studies show that what monitors detect can be assumed to be reaching the population, Ritz said. “And we have been regulating air pollution forever based on these studies. Why not pesticides?”
EPA classifies a substance as “likely to be carcinogenic to humans” based on multiple criteria, including evidence of cancer effects in animal experiments in “more than one species, sex, strain, site or exposure route, with or without evidence of carcinogenicity in humans.”
EPA acknowledged that 1,3-D caused liver tumors in rats but dismissed the mouse lung tumors by accepting Dow’s theory that if tumors occur above a dose determined by a computer model, they’re not relevant to humans. SciPinion’s Hays co-authored a paper with Dow scientists promoting the approach for agrochemical risk assessment in 2016. That approach is not accepted by the broader scientific community, and independent researchers said there is no scientific basis for EPA to rely on it to discount evidence that 1,3-D causes lung tumors in mice.
They basically said the lung tumors don’t count as a second site of cancer because they happened above this inflection point in the exposure, said John Bucher, a leading toxicologist who recently retired from the National Toxicology Program after nearly four decades. They’re using that conclusion to downgrade the cancer status, but they’re just ignoring the fact that there’s a cancer response in the second animal, Bucher said.
“That’s a violation of scientific principles,” he said. “You can’t take away the fact that there was a cancer response just because it occurred at a dose that was not in the linear range. That’s just ridiculous.”
The OIG recommended that EPA conduct an external peer review—that is, by independent scientists without ties to the chemical’s manufacturer—of its cancer risk assessment to restore confidence in its scientific credibility.
EPA’s Carroll said the agency is working to “arrive at a mutually acceptable resolution” to the OIG’s request for an external peer review, is committed to transparency and scientific integrity and will continue to use sound science in the decision-making process.
But so far, EPA has not proposed a solution for an external review that the OIG has agreed to.
Conflict-Ridden Science
On its website, SciPinion tells prospective clients it will support their scientific claims, “quash unfounded criticisms” and manage the threat of regulatory action, litigation or public dissent that threatens a product’s acceptance. “SciPinion builds trust in the scientific process,” its website says, through a trademarked, certified peer-review process with a panel of global experts that will “validate your science.”
Among the examples of its ability to quickly assemble expert panels to serve clients’ needs, SciPinion includes the 1,3-D cancer reclassification along with two papers, funded by the American Chemistry Council, on PFAS, ubiquitous, highly persistent and toxic “forever chemicals.” One of the papers, a 2022 peer-reviewed weight of evidence review, discounts the immune toxicity of PFAS, rejecting evidence from several studies of children. A second peer-reviewed report, published last year, argues against regulating PFAS as a class. The American Chemistry Council promoted the study on its web site without mentioning it sponsored the research.
“One aspect of SciPinion that many find intriguing is our robust process and our triple-blinded approach to assure untainted expertise, delivering purity in scientific opinion,” said SciPinion’s Carneal, speaking on behalf of Hays and Kirman in a statement to Inside Climate News. “In part, this is why we are so widely trusted—obtaining objective scientific opinion is our core mission.”
EPA’s Carroll said agency staff decided SciPinion’s review process was similar enough to that of its scientific advisory panel, which provides independent advice to the pesticide office, to count as an external reviewer.
Yet their conclusions often clash with those of independent researchers.
More than 200 environmental and health scientists urged agencies to restrict all but essential uses of PFAS as a whole in 2015, citing evidence of numerous health effects, including tumors in multiple systems, liver toxicity, neurobehavioral problems and disruption of immune and endocrine systems among others. Many of the same scientists later called on governments and industry to treat the thousands of PFAS chemicals as a class to protect public health and the environment from toxic chemicals that never break down.
Philippe Grandjean, a Danish professor of environmental medicine, led the studies of PFAS and immunotoxicity that the SciPinion panel rejected. Grandjean first reported in a 2012 study of hundreds of children in Denmark’s Faroe Islands that PFAS exposure reduced the immune response to tetanus and diphtheria vaccines below the level needed for long-term protection. He has had similarly troubling results in follow-up studies.
Grandjean said he doesn’t take the SciPinion conclusion seriously, “given that an authority like IARC has suggested that immunotoxicity could be the mechanism for PFAS carcinogenicity,” referring to evidence that the chemicals impair the body’s ability to fight cancer.
Such examples show why having expert panels with conflicts of interest is so problematic, said Chartres of the University of Sydney. Chartres recently reviewed another SciPinion expert panel evaluation of a solvent that was sponsored by a trade group.
“On the surface, it looks like they’re evaluating the science, it’s scientifically defensible and it’s rigorous,” Chartres said. But on closer inspection, it’s clear that they changed the way legitimate review tools work to rate and score studies, he said. “And so basically, they can throw out and cherry pick studies however they want to.”
Chartres’ assessment of SciPinion’s approach reflects what Finkel, the occupational and environmental health expert, experienced as part of the firm’s 1,3-D panel. Finkel thinks his input as part of a five-member subpanel evaluating the weight of evidence was marginalized in SciPinion’s published paper.
He feels the process did a good job of airing the controversies but also manipulated what reviewers saw and, more importantly, what they said. “To summarize the whole thing as saying everybody pretty much agreed is disingenuous,” Finkel said. “Not everybody did agree.”
For example, on the questions of whether 1,3-D should be assessed using a threshold model, three reviewers on his panel said yes but two said no, with a “fairly strongly disagree” response, he said. “That’s not consensus at all.”
Finkel was also puzzled by the lack of an option that NTP and IARC uses in their evaluations: possibly (or probably) carcinogenic to humans. “I would have chosen this option if available,” he told SciPinion.
Finkel appreciated the ability to engage in exhaustive discussions about the process, but added, “I left with a bad taste, because I don’t think they were honest about reporting the disagreements.”
In 2000, an EPA science advisory board considered analyses done by SciPinion scientists (then with other consulting firms) in reviewing the agency’s risk assessment for dioxin, a known human carcinogen. The SciPinion scientists’ analysis argued that dioxin, considered one of the most toxic synthetic substances ever identified, had a cancer risk threshold an order of magnitude above what most people are exposed to. But when academic scientists with no ties to the manufacturer reexamined the analysis, they found a flaw that, once corrected, revealed no safe threshold.
“We know empirically that when industry sponsors the study, or when you have authors with a conflict of interest, you get a systematic bias with the results being in favor of the sponsor’s product.”
Dow nevertheless relied on one of the SciPinion scientists to argue that dioxin, a by-product of pesticide manufacturing, should be regulated using a threshold approach in 2008.
Regardless of what evidence has been evaluated, Chartres said, “we know empirically that when industry sponsors the study, or when you have authors with a conflict of interest, you get a systematic bias with the results being in favor of the sponsor’s product.”
SciPinion’s Hays did not address how papers published by independent scientists and those by SciPinion scientists arrived at opposite conclusions, but said in a statement that the Inside Climate News email “seems to ask us to respond to false accusations from unnamed sources. It reads as a biased character attack and exactly the kind of engagement we created SciPinion to protect science experts from receiving.”
Marshaling Evidence of a Threshold
U.S. regulators have historically classified 1,3-D as likely to be carcinogenic to humans based on rodent studies conducted in the 1980s, SciPinion scientists wrote in their weight of the evidence assessment, referring to the NTP study. Contemporary studies, they explained, led them to conclude that 1,3-dichloropropene “is not mutagenic and not carcinogenic below certain doses, pointing to a threshold-based approach for cancer risk assessment.”
In the paper’s acknowledgements, SciPinion thanked the 14 “independent experts” for reviewing their analysis while noting that Dow AgroSciences had an opportunity to review the manuscript “to ensure clarity and completeness.” Hays said SciPinion used an “outside auditor who is a former FDA scientist and served in the Obama White House to help select the panel of experts.”
That SciPinion did a weight of evidence review of the cancer literature using a so-called expert panel rings alarm bells, said Legg of the University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group. The expert panel was chosen by the authors of the review who were funded by the manufacturer of the product. “So far, very conflicted,” she said.
They managed to get 14 experts, but it’s possible that many independent experts would have bowed out once they learned the review was funded by the product’s manufacturer, Legg said. Two-thirds of the panel SciPinion assembled have ties to regulated industries, including Dow and two other agrochemical giants, Monsanto and Syngenta, a review of their affiliations shows.
“The cancer classification subpanel was entirely comprised of former U.S. government scientists,” Hays told Inside Climate News.
Three of the five sub-panelists are former EPA scientists who consulted for the American Chemistry Council or pesticide companies after leaving the agency. “What we know from our science-for-profit model and from other evidence,” Legg said, “is that the best way to create reliable and trustworthy evidence on product harms is not to use science that is funded by the manufacturers of those products.”
In their 2021 paper “The Science for Profit Model—How and why corporations influence science and the use of science in policy and practice,” published in the journal PLOS ONE, Legg and her colleagues analyzed corporate attempts to influence science and policy across eight sectors, including the fossil fuel, tobacco and chemicals and manufacturing industries.
“What we found was that industries were funding science not to create science in the public interest,” she said, “but to maximize profits.”
Finkel said his initial SciPinion contract did not mention who sponsored the review. But he’s more troubled that Dow had the right to review the manuscript. “‘Clean’ contracts with a manufacturer or other interested firm should not allow advance notice or rights of review,” Finkel said.
“What we found was that industries were funding science not to create science in the public interest, but to maximize profits.”
The SciPinion panel reminds Legg of what happened when members of an expert panel who assessed the relative risks of tobacco products had conflicts of interest in a controversial 2014 paper. The Lancet, a highly regarded medical journal, criticized the paper’s “extraordinarily flimsy” evidence base and said conflicts of interest raised serious questions about the panel’s conclusion.
That’s “incredibly problematic,” Legg said, because the average person reading such a third-party post would have “absolutely no idea” the review was industry-funded.
SciPinion’s 1,3-D weight of evidence analysis cites a method for managing expert panels that “maximize expertise” and minimize bias.
That method, it turns out, is their own, presented in the 2019 paper, “Science peer review for the 21st century: Assessing scientific consensus for decision-making while managing conflict of interests, reviewer and process bias.” In the new model, developed for cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris International, SciPinion demonstrated how to “reduce sources of bias” in evaluating the company’s “modified risk” tobacco product. Philip Morris used the peer reviews as independent validation of the science underlying its claims of reduced harm submitted to regulators at the Food and Drug Administration.
“We make our science publicly available and encourage any and all to scrutinize our work and arrive at their own conclusions, just as the FDA has done with respect to our modified risk tobacco product applications,” said Corey Henry, a Philip Morris International spokesperson.
That Philip Morris is funding research on how to do such a critical part of the scientific process as peer review—and enlisted SciPinion to do it for them—“should ring alarm bells,” said Legg. The tobacco industry has been working to manipulate science in its favor for decades, she said, for example, by trying to define what constitutes “sound” or “junk” science, ostensibly to boost scientific integrity when in reality it was trying to prevent regulations on secondhand smoke.
Since then, researchers have documented the disproportionate power of corporations to influence policy across sectors, as Legg showed in the science-for-profit model. “Not much has changed,” she said.
A Manufactured Controversy
The concept that carcinogens have no safe exposure level is based on evidence going back decades that susceptibility varies due to genetic, physiological and environmental factors and timing of exposure (for example, pregnancy, prenatal development and early childhood). Environmental health scientists have repeatedly shown that while it’s possible to design a model to show there’s a threshold below which a chemical exposure could be deemed safe, doing so may greatly underestimate risk if the computer model does not reflect real-world conditions.
The whole idea of looking for thresholds, or dividing the world into thresholds and non-thresholds, is a stupid idea, said Finkel. What matters, he said, is where an exposure becomes dangerous.
“There was this movement, in part promoted by the chemical industry, that we should be treating everything like we did with noncancer, that there’s a threshold value,” said Tracey Woodruff, a former EPA senior scientist who now directs the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco.
The only things they agreed could be treated as having no safe dose were cancer-promoting chemicals that damage DNA, otherwise everything had to have a threshold, Woodruff said. “And that has just simply not been proven.”
EPA’s Cancer Assessment Review Committee re-classified 1,3-D to “suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential” based on a weight of evidence evaluation of all available studies, which included studies identified in the open literature and updated data submitted by Dow, said agency spokesperson Carroll. The committee concluded that it didn’t need to estimate human cancer risks because a safety level set for all chronic health effects would also protect against cancer, he said.
But mounting evidence shows that even chemicals that don’t cause cancer may have no safe level of exposure in sensitive groups. That’s why the National Academy of Sciences, or NAS, an authoritative body of top scientists, recommended in a 2009 report that EPA should evaluate both noncancers and cancers using a no-threshold model, unless there’s clear evidence of a threshold above which a substance becomes hazardous, Woodruff said.
Finkel, who contributed to the NAS report, said it reflected the risk assessment field’s movement away from the paradigm of finding a number and dividing it by another number to say an exposure is safe. “They used to call that ‘divide by 100 and pray,’ because we had no idea whether the original level was safe to begin with, and whether the factor of 100 was enough to make it safe enough,” Finkel said.
But SciPinion panels keep pushing the exact opposite, he said. “They want to make cancer risk assessment look more like the simplistic old non-cancer risk assessment paradigm that was developed in the ’50s.”
Dow first lobbied EPA to reclassify 1,3-D using a threshold in 1998. That same year, in a newsletter read by policymakers, SciPinion scientists promoted PBPK modeling as a way to “improve the regulation of exposure to toxic compounds” and reduce uncertainty in estimating risks of exposure to carcinogens.
Then, in 2013, Dow formally asked EPA to reconsider 1,3-D’s cancer status using a threshold approach, arguing that a review by an independent expert concluded that the chemical does not directly damage DNA. Dow did not mention that its independent expert was a litigation consultant for Philip Morris who argued in a class-action suit against the tobacco giant that Marlboro lights reduced disease risk, contrary to the findings of a leading medical research body.
Dow did not respond to requests for comment.
More than 30 years ago, Dow, as part of a coalition of chemical and fossil fuel companies, sought to“improve” EPA’s risk assessment of another dangerous product, benzene—first linked to leukemia in people in the 1920s—by “refining the data and assumptions,” which showed up to 10 times less risk.
Benzene, a component of crude oil used to make motor fuels, pesticides and other products, was classified as a carcinogen by IARC in 1979.
The decision followed clear evidence benzene caused cancer in lab animals and a 1977 occupational health study establishing a link between benzene exposure and leukemia in people. The study, led by Peter Infante, an epidemiologist who worked for decades at federal research and regulatory agencies, including 24 years at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, showed that workers at an Ohio Goodyear plant exposed to benzene while making a rubberized food wrapping called Pliofilm had up to ten times higher risk of developing leukemia than the general population. OSHA issued an emergency standard to reduce workplace benzene standards from 10 parts per million, or ppm, to 1 ppm.
The American Petroleum Institute, or API, quickly challenged the lower standard in court and attacked regulators’ assumptions of no safe exposure levels for carcinogens as “opinion.” The API convened a task force that included a Dow executive and hired consultants to draft reports showing why thresholds are the most appropriate way to estimate risks from exposure to benzene, documents released through litigation show. A task force action item calls for finding a consultant to run a PBPK model to “rebut the studies showing genotoxic effects in mice in the low ppm range.”
“There are all kinds of studies showing all kinds of chromosomal breakage with benzene,” said Infante. “It’s a genotoxic carcinogen.”
It’s been clear for years that any level of carcinogens can potentially harm vulnerable people, Infante said. Yet, he added, “the literature keeps getting polluted with nonsense.”
SciPinion scientists also published studies, sponsored by the API and the American Chemistry Council, that minimize the risks of benzene exposure. One reviewed evidence of potential associations between childhood leukemia and benzene, and found no evidence that environmental levels pose an increased risk. A second found that children are not likely to be at elevated risk of a rare form of leukemia, called acute myelogenous leukemia, or AML, from benzene.
But studies by independent scientists show that children who live next to gasoline stations, which emit benzene, have an elevated risk of leukemia, Infante said. “And benzene causes AML in adults. Why the hell wouldn’t it cause it in children? Children are usually more susceptible. That makes no sense.”
Again, Hays did not address the disconnect between the work of independent researchers and his firm’s. “What we most hope your readers appreciate is that SciPinion exists for the scientific community and to see that we will not stand for activist-reporters attacking scientists’ credibility rather than informing science-based discourse,” he said in a statement.
More than 50 years ago, the head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences warned that even if an individual chemical has a threshold, it’s irrelevant when the world is increasingly awash in carcinogens that can interact to cause more harm than any one would alone.
Yet EPA stands by its decision that a chemical it considered a likely carcinogen for decades is not a cancer risk, while authoritative bodies at home and abroad continue to classify it as a probable human carcinogen. And though the agency insists it is no longer relying on SciPinion to justify its decision, it has yet to conduct a truly independent peer review.
The fact that a regulatory agency like the U.S. EPA leaned on a group that has so much industry money and support, said the University of Sydney’s Chartres, “well, that is egregious.”
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