Swamp Diving: The EPA's Secret Human Experiment Regime
By John Dunn and Steve Milloy
April 11, 2017
The authors have written numerous essays since 2010 for American Thinker on California's Environmental Protection Agency (Cal EPA)'s and the U.S. EPA's scientific misconduct related to air pollution human effects science, and more recently on the discovery that the U.S. EPA was sponsoring and paying for illegal and unethical experiments exposing human subjects, even children, to small particle air pollution at high levels. Small particles originate from natural and man-made sources, such as dust, smoke, and engine and industrial emissions.
The U.S. EPA claims that small particles are toxic and lethal and cause cancer.
The EPA position on small particle air pollution
The issue of small particle air pollution human effects was discussed in a House of Representatives hearing in September 2011 by the U.S. EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson. In a colloquy with Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Ms. Jackson stated, "Particulate matter causes premature death. It's directly causal to dying sooner than you should."
Markey asked, "How would you compare [the benefits of reducing airborne PM2.5] to the fight against cancer?"
Ms. Jackson replied, "Yeah, I was briefed not long ago. If we could reduce particulate matter to healthy levels, it would have the same impact as finding a cure for cancer in our country."
Markey: "Can you say that sentence one more time?"
Jackson: "Yes sir. If – um – we could reduce particulate matter to levels that are healthy, we could have identical impacts to finding a cure for cancer." (Author note: Cancer kills a half-million Americans a year – 25 percent of all deaths in the U.S. annually).
The claim stated above by Ms. Jackson is the basis for the EPA's war on coal, fossil fuels, and internal combustion engines. All other criteria air pollutants are minimal concerns for the EPA. Surely small particles are a very toxic and lethal thing, as bad as cancer. Right?
EPA is discovered doing human experiments
The same month as Ms. Jackson's testimony, Milloy discovered a report in Environmental Health Perspectives, a journal published online and in hard copy by the National Institutes of Health, that reported an experiment on a 57-year-old lady subjected to small particle air pollution much higher than the EPA says is safe, in a chamber at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine EPA laboratory for human research. A stunned Milloy showed the journal report to Dunn. So little had come of the decade of human experiments before that Milloy and Dunn had not known of the EPA human exposure experiments project that was at least illegal and unethical, possibly a crime against humanity. Humans are not guinea pigs.
The Nuremberg Code; the Helsinki Accords; the Belmont Report; and U.S. common law, statutes, and regulations, to include state laws and the Federal Code "Common Rule" and EPA rule 1000.17, all prohibit human experimentation that might cause harm to the subjects. Human risk can be considered only for the researchers themselves in circumstances where the research is essential and vital. The civil or criminal offense of human experimentation that risks harm to the subjects would be either exposure to harm or the fear of harm by infliction of mental distress if subjects found out that the public position of the EPA is that small particles are toxic and lethal and cause cancer. Which lie to believe? That is the twist – you can't make these things up.
In 2011 and 2012, Milloy and Dunn wrote letters to the EPA, the NIH journal editor who published the article, the EPA inspector general, and the federal Office for Scientific Integrity. They wrote to all the physicians in Congress, all the deans of the ten domestic medical schools doing human experiments, and state medical boards in North Carolina and Michigan, all attempting to stop the human experiments.
The authors have written about the EPA project of research that exposed human beings of all ages, even children, to that same small particle air pollution to see if they could cause some harm. EPA sponsorship of these studies at ten domestic and six foreign medical schools was admitted under oath by an EPA official, Wayne Cascio, M.D., and it is unethical and illegal. Senior EPA research scientist Robert Devlin, Ph.D. admitted in a sworn affidavit that the EPA epidemiology was unreliable, the reason for human experiments.
EPA hires the National Academy of Science
The EPA, in response to a congressional inquiry and negative inspector general report, engaged and paid the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) contract subdivision, the National Research Council (NRC), to provide a whitewash investigation. The NAS National Research Council Investigative Committee was convened in secret without notice and without contacting Milloy and Dunn, the complaining parties, or the congressional committee that had demanded an inspector general report that had gone badly for the EPA.
The closeted investigation continued with closed meetings attended only by NRC staff, committee members, and the EPA. The docket by a year, June of 2016, had 50 documents, all submitted by the EPA or its allies. In May of 2016, a congressional aide ran across information about the existence of the committee and informed Milloy. Milloy demanded a hearing and allowance for submissions in June of 2016, which was granted by NRC officials. Milloy found that 13 out of 19 members of the committee were significant grantees of EPA, amounting to tens of millions of dollars received, with the most extreme example being Charles Driscoll, discussed here.
On August 11, 2016, an internet audio conference of the National Research Council Panel on EPA-sponsored human exposure experiments titled "Assessing Toxicological Risks to Human Subjects Used in Controlled Exposure Studies of Environmental Pollutants" was held, with two hours of testimony heard and submissions critical of the EPA human exposure experimentation. After that, nothing was heard from the committee.
The committee published its news release and a 150-plus-page report on March 28, 2017, ignoring the testimony and submissions of witnesses Milloy, Dunn, Young, Enstrom, and Donnay. The report exonerated the EPA human experiments on the theory that small particles are not toxic or lethal or carcinogenic acutely – that is, they do not have any acute toxic effects, but rather just long-term deleterious effects. They said that, knowing that the EPA asserts short-term acute death effects and justifies its regulations on the basis of Ms. Jackson's claim – that small particles kill people and kill them acutely.
The problem for the NRC committee is that they are trying to create cover for the EPA by misstating the EPA position on toxicity and lethality of small particles. That is clear from this quote from the National Academy of Sciences Report press release:
To assess the level of safety provided by study protocols and the likelihood of participants experiencing any serious health effects with long-term consequences, the committee reviewed eight recent CHIE studies. The committee concluded that the societal benefits of CHIE studies are greater than the risks posed to the participants in the eight studies considered, which are unlikely to be large enough to be of concern. EPA applies a broad set of health-evaluation criteria when selecting participants to determine that there is no reason to believe that their participation in the study will lead to an adverse health response. The health status of subjects is monitored shortly before, during, and immediately after the exposure studies and usually again about 24 hours later.
The NAS report is self-destructive, obfuscatory, contradictory gobbledygook.
The NAS report is so filled with errors, omissions, misstatements, misdirection, and general dishonesty that it would take days if not weeks to fully critique. The NAS compromised its integrity to cover for the EPA, confirming Eisenhower's warning about the government-research complex that can produce science fraud and misconduct for a political agenda. Scaremongering is important for justifying government growth and overreach. After all, the aim of practical politics is to create scares so the populace will be anxious and clamor to be led to safety by government experts (paraphrasing H.L. Mencken).
If the EPA can continue to do these experiments, then it must not be true that any exposure to PM2.5 can kill within hours or days, or even weeks. It must have only a "chronic" long-term effect that the NRC committee fails to define. That destroys the basis for the EPA air pollution regulatory regime that has burdened society for three decades and more and is based on scientific misconduct.
Who will reimburse society for the costs and burdens of this scam? How about all those coal miners without jobs and the companies that had to spend millions to comply with regulations chasing a phantom small particle air pollution menace that was claimed to kill hundreds of thousands annually in the U.S.?
The movie Creature from the Black Lagoon, featuring the gill man, was scary, but corrupt researchers and politicians at the EPA-NAS-D.C. swamp are just despicable.
A comprehensive and informative narrative of the EPA wars and the EPA misconduct and what to do about it is found in Milloy's sixth and most recent book, Scare Pollution (Bench Press 2016).
