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offit, paul acsh

ROTOVIRUS VAX W FAUCI GLADWELL

1220 just showed up on some legit src? KPFA 2/9/22 FLOGGING BOOK

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-february-9-2022/

rare bit of non assholery? no $ to be made?

vax 4700 word Rolling stone

also in Salon, retracted

pbs 10 25

https://video.kqed.org/video/the-rise-of-rfk-jr-ulnu0y/

The Rise of RFK Jr.

an 7 23

no lnx

hours after anti-vax Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified before the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Thursday afternoon, one of the nation's foremost experts on vaccinations reminded PBS News Hour's audience that Kennedy was at least partially responsible for a 2018 measles outbreak in American Samoa that left two infants dead.

Host Geoff Bennet kicked off the segment by introducing his guest — Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee — and giving a brief synopsis of Kennedy's fringe beliefs.

"So RFK Jr. is widely known as an anti-vaccine activist. He has a much larger platform now as he runs for president, he says that many of his views are misunderstood; they're taken out of context. Help us understand what he's been promoting and what the science tells us about it," Bennet began.

READ MORE: 'He vaccinated all his children': House Democrat blows a hole in RFK Jr.’s anti-vax arguments

Offit elaborated on why Kennedy's contrarianism is so dangerous.

"Well, he's been promoting false information about vaccines," Offit replied. "He's been promoting the notion that vaccines cause autism, which is clearly not true, or cause a variety of other chronic diseases like diabetes or multiple sclerosis, or attention deficit disorder, and that's all not true. So what he does is by putting misinformation out there, he causes people to make bad decisions that put themselves and their their family at risk."

Bennet asked, "You also point to one episode where he spoke out against the measles vaccine. What was the impact of that?"

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Offit recalled, "In Samoa, there were two children that died immediately following receipt of a measles vaccine. And the way it works in Samoa is they have an MMR vaccine in powdered form. It needs to be diluted in water. Two nurses made a mistake instead of diluting it in water, they diluted it in a muscle relaxant. Those children stopped breathing and died immediately. Now, very quickly, within two weeks, it was realized what that mistake was."

READ MORE: RFK Jr. while speaking in televised public congressional hearing claims 'I am being censored here'

Offit then highlighted how Kennedy's conspiracy theories led to a precipitous plummet in the percentage of the Samoan population receiving inoculations to the highly contagious virus.

"It was a nursing error, but nonetheless, RFK Jr. seized on that. He flooded Facebook with the information that the measles vaccine is killing children in Samoa.He went to Samoa. He met with anti-vaccine activists. He met with senior officials in Samoa and kept the drumbeat alive that the measles vaccine was killing children in Samoa as a consequence," Offit continued. "Vaccination rates fell from 70% to 30%, and between September and December of 2019, there was a massive measles epidemic in this island nation of 200,000 people. There were 57,000 cases of measles and 83 deaths. Most of those deaths were in children less than four years of age. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had everything to do with that. And that shows you how disinformation can kill."

Kennedy's connection to the Samoan measles crisis was previously chronicled in a 2019 by The Washington Post:

[Kennedy] visited the country in June, appearing next to officials at Samoan independence celebrations. His visit was 'for a program that is not government-related,' an official in the prime minister’s department told Samoan news media at the time.

Kennedy has asserted that vaccines cause autism, a claim disproved by extensive research. Members of the Kennedy family have publicly criticized him for helping 'spread dangerous misinformation.'

The World Health Organization estimated that in 2018, only 31 percent of infants in Samoa received the measles vaccine, a drop from 60 to 70 percent in previous years. The WHO attributed the extremely low rate in part to a public health scandal: Last year, two infants in Samoa died within hours of receiving the MMR vaccine. The country temporarily halted its vaccine program, but the vaccine did not cause the deaths. Two nurses improperly mixed the vaccines with a liquid muscle relaxant instead of water. The pair were sentenced to five years in prison for manslaughter.

What happened in Samoa was not a unique occurrence, either. A measles outbreak there in April 2023 forced Governor Lemanu PS Maug to issue an emergency declaration that lasted through the end of May of that year.

ABC News reported at the time that more than thirty-two people had been infected. The outlet referenced the events of 2019, when "in American Samoa, there were 12 measles cases and no deaths reported. However, in the nation of Samoa, there were more than 5,700 cases and 83 deaths reported, most occurring in children under 5 years old."

MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan also dedicated a segment of one of his shows in June to this very topic.

Watch Offit's remarks below via Decoding Fox News or at this link.

READ MORE: Voters’ distaste for 'dangerous,' 'nutjob' RFK Jr. is growing: report

The Washington Post's full exposé is available here (subscription required). ABC News' article can be found here.

From Your Site Articles

Tucker Carlson rewrites history with claim Big Pharma 'PR campaign' silenced RFK Jr.’s anti-vax lies ›

Facebook and Instagram remove RFK Jr.’s anti-vax nonprofit for promoting misinformation: report ›

Anti-Vax Propaganda Helps Measles - Once Eradicated - Spread Across the Twin Cities ›

Related Articles Around the Web

How Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Distorted Vaccine Science - Scientific ... ›

Anti-vaccine activists are building a legal network : NPR ›

The Anti-Vaccine Movement's New Frontier - The New York Times ›

Group Tied to Dr Oz Critics Has Critics Too

Robert Lowes

April 22, 2015

UPDATED April 23, 2015 // When 10 physicians recently sent a letter to Columbia University urging it to fire faculty member andTV personality Mehmet Oz, MD, for what they call his unscientific opposition to genetically modified food and promotion of "quack treatments," they inadvertently put someone else on the hot seat.

Four of the 10 signatories are past or present officials of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), a nonprofit group created in 1978, as it says, "to add reason and balance to debates about public health issues. " In op-ed pieces, studies, media interviews, and Congressional testimony, members of the ACSH and its members have supported genetically modified foods, fracking, and e-cigarettes, all in the cause of battling "junk science

To continue reading this article ...

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/health-experts-warn-about-political-interference-in-vaccines-as-trump-urges-warp-speed/

no lnx twt

Julia Conley / Common Dreams August 3, 2020

Public health experts on Monday raised alarm over the White House’s aggressive push to rush a Covid-19 vaccine into production, an effort which critics say has been apparent since the first weeks of the pandemic.

According to a New York Times report, researchers working on Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership established to find a vaccine that could be given to the public within the next few months, are “under constant pressure from a White House anxious for good news.”

When the task force was first assembled in April, weeks after the pandemic began and when President Donald Trump was insisting to the public that the coronavirus would likely disappear on its own, the Health and Human Services Department shared a presentation with the White House saying October 2020 should be a firm “deadline” for developing a vaccine and giving “broad access to the public.”

The Trump administration has since begun promoting late 2020 or early 2021 as the timeframe for a Covid-19 vaccine, but public health officials are concerned that the president’s desire to win re-election may interfere with scientists’ efforts to ensure a vaccine is safe and effective before it is approved for use by the public.

With Trump campaign officials reportedly calling a potential pre-election vaccine “the holy grail,” experts told the Times of their concern that Trump will pressure the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve whichever vaccine is furthest along in the clinical trial process in the weeks before the general election on November 3.

“There are a lot of people on the inside of this process who are very nervous about whether the administration is going to reach their hand into the Warp Speed bucket, pull out one or two or three vaccines, and say, ‘We’ve tested it on a few thousand people, it looks safe, and now we are going to roll it out,'” Dr. Paul A. Offit of the University of Pennsylvania, who serves on the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, told the Times.

Presidential adviser Jared Kushner, who is helping to lead Trump’s reelection campaign and influenced the decision to name Dr. Moncef Slaoui as chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, is reportedly in regular contact with public health officials to speed up the development of a vaccine.

“Researchers are fearful of political intervention in the coming months and are struggling to ensure that the government maintains the right balance between speed and rigorous regulation,” the Times reported.

The pressure campaign from the White House has led companies researching vaccines to begin manufacturing millions of doses of the immunization, “essentially on spec so that they can be distributed quickly if they secure approval.”

The newspaper’s report came a day after Dr. Steven Salzberg, a biomedical engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University, suggested in a Forbes op-ed that vaccines which have entered Phase 3 of their clinical trials, the final step in pharmaceutical testing before approval, should be offered more widely to the public at a faster pace:

We already have two vaccines in phase 3 trials in the U.S. and Europe; each of these trials which will vaccinate many thousands of people, and then wait to see how many get infected… But we don’t have to wait. Both of these vaccines (from Moderna and Oxford University/Astra Zeneca) have already been shown, in phase 1 trials, to be safe and probably effective. That’s why the companies are moving ahead and giving each vaccine to 30,000 more people: they are fairly confident that the vaccines are safe…So why not start administering millions of doses right now?

Others in the science and public health communities were distraught over Salzberg’s suggestion, taking to social media on Sunday to explain why rushing to administer vaccines to millions of people before clinical trials have been completed is, as one science journalist tweeted, “a horrifically bad idea.”

“Drug trials exist for a reason. So many things can go wrong,” wrote Erin Biba. “If you skip the checks and balances the amount of damage that can be done is astronomical.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Laurie Garrett derided Salzberg’s piece as an “utterly bonkers, insane, irresponsible article,” while University of Florida biostatistics professor Natalie Dean laid out the dangers of offering a vaccine to the public before its efficacy and safety is proven via the painstaking process of completed clinical trials.

In an op-ed at the Times on Monday, Dean questioned the very notion of developing a vaccine for a newly-discovered virus at “warp speed.”

Dean noted that in a survey taken by AP-NORC in May, 31% of respondents said they were unsure whether they would get a coronavirus vaccine once one is made available, in a display of the “vaccine hesitancy” which the World Health Organization says could jeopardize the global community’s ability to combat the pandemic.

“This hesitancy isn’t surprising. Why should we expect Americans to agree to a vaccine before one is even available?” wrote Dean. “I’m a vaccine researcher, and even I would place myself in the ‘not sure’ bucket… The evidence that would convince me to get a Covid-19 vaccine, or to recommend that my loved ones get vaccinated, does not yet exist.”

That data can only be gathered through a complete Phase 3 trial of a vaccine, Dean wrote, showing that a vaccine either provides immunity to Covid-19 or, like the flu vaccine, keeps patients from developing severe symptoms of the illness if they contract it.

Although the public’s desperation for a Covid-19 vaccine is understandable, Dean wrote, “a weak vaccine might be worse than no vaccine at all. We do not want people who are only slightly protected to behave as if they are invulnerable, which could exacerbate transmission.”

“It is also costly to roll out a vaccine, diverting attention away from other efforts that we know work, like mask-wearing, and from testing better vaccines,” she added.

Following the backlash against his article, Salzberg on Monday wrote an update to the Forbes piece, titled “I Was Wrong: We Can’t Skip Phase 3 Vaccine Trials.”

“If we expand the distribution of vaccines too quickly, and then the vaccine doesn’t work, we may seriously undermine the public’s trust in any eventual vaccine that really does work,” Salzberg wrote. “That in turn will reduce the number of people willing to be vaccinated, which could cause serious harm to public health.”

The Trump administration, the researchers who are under pressure from the White House, and the public must “resist the desire” to push for a rushed vaccine by the election, early 2021, or any specific date, Dean suggested.

“Creating vaccines is hard, and we should be prepared for the reality that some promising ones will not meet the F.D.A.’s criteria,” she continued. “Researchers and the government should also commit to transparency so that people can see the results for themselves to understand the regulatory decisions. Waiting for a better vaccine to come along may feel like torture, but it is the right move. With so many potential shots on goal, scientists are optimistic that a safe and effective vaccine is out there. We can’t afford to jeopardize the public’s health and hard-earned trust by approving anything short of that.”

wiki

Wakefield's study and his claim that the MMR vaccine might cause autism led to a decline in vaccination rates in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, and a corresponding rise in measles and mumps infections, resulting in serious illness and deaths. His continued claims that the vaccine is harmful have contributed to a climate of distrust of all vaccines and the reemergence of other previously-controlled diseases.[119][67][36]

The Associated Press said:

Immunization rates in Britain dropped from 92 percent to 73 percent, and were as low as 50 percent in some parts of London. The effect was not nearly as dramatic in the United States, but researchers have estimated that as many as 125,000 US children born in the late 1990s did not get the MMR vaccine because of the Wakefield splash.[117]

ABC News Channel WWAY3 said:

Since Dr. Andrew Wakefield's study was released in 1998, many parents have been convinced the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine could lead to autism. But that study may have done more harm than good. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States, more cases of measles were reported in 2008 than any year since 1997. More than 90 percent of those infected had not been vaccinated, or their vaccination status was not known.[115]

Paul Hébert, editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) said:

There has been a huge impact from the Wakefield fiasco ... This spawned a whole anti-vaccine movement. Great Britain has seen measles outbreaks. It probably resulted in a lot of deaths.[23]

A profile in a New York Times Magazine article commented:

Andrew Wakefield has become one of the most reviled doctors of his generation, blamed directly and indirectly, depending on the accuser, for irresponsibly starting a panic with tragic repercussions: vaccination rates so low that childhood diseases once all but eradicated here—whooping cough and measles, among them—have re-emerged, endangering young lives.[98]

Journalist Brian Deer called for criminal charges against Wakefield.[100]

On 1 April 2011, the James Randi Educational Foundation awarded Wakefield the Pigasus Award for "refusal to face reality".[120]

A 2011 journal article described the vaccine-autism connection as "the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years".[121]

In 2011, Wakefield was at the top of the list of the worst doctors of 2011 in Medscape's list of "Physicians of the Year: Best and Worst".[122] In January 2012, Time magazine named Wakefield in a list of "Great Science Frauds".[123] In 2012 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement in Quackery award by the Good Thinking Society.[124]

A writer from The New York Times, who was covering a 2011 event in Tomball, Texas where Wakefield spoke, was threatened by its organizer, Michelle Guppy: "Be nice to him, or we will hurt you." Guppy is the coordinator of the Houston Autism Disability Network.[98]

In June 2012, a local court in Rimini, Italy, ruled that the MMR vaccination had caused autism in a 15-month-old boy. The court relied heavily on Wakefield's discredited Lancet paper and largely ignored the scientific evidence presented to it. The decision was appealed.[125] On 13 February 2015, the decision was overturned by a Court of Appeals in Bologna.[126]

In February 2015, Wakefield denied that he bore any responsibility for the measles epidemic that started at Disneyland. He also reaffirmed his discredited belief that "MMR contributes to the current autism epidemic".[127] By that time at least 166 measles cases had been reported. Paul Offit did not agree, saying that the outbreak was "directly related to Dr. Wakefield's theory".[128]

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headsup db  4/17/20

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-rachel-carson-cost-millions-of-people-their-lives

how Rachel Carson Cost Millions of People Their Lives

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Rachel Carson is, and should be, a revered environmental icon. But her crusade against one pesticide cost millions of people their lives.

Paul A. Offit

Updated Apr. 11, 2017 

On Jan. 24, 2017, PBS aired a two-hour special on Rachel Carson, the mother of the environmental movement. Although the program crossed the line from biography to hagiography, in Carson’s case, the unbridled praise was well deserved—with one exception.

Rachel Carson was an American hero. In the early 1960s, she was the first to warn that a pesticide called DDTcould accumulate in the environment, the first to show that it could harm fish, birds, and other wildlife, the first to warn that its overuse would render it ineffective, and the first to predict that more natural means of pest control—like bacteria that killed mosquito larvae—should be used instead.

Unfortunately, the PBS documentary neglected to mention that in her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, Carson had made one critical mistake—and it cost millions of people their lives.

On Nov. 1, 1941, Rachel Carson published her first book, Under the Sea-Wind. Although written for adults, the book had a child-like sense of wonder. Under the Sea-Wind told the story of Silverbar, a sanderling that migrated from the Arctic Circle to Argentina; Scomber, a mackerel that traveled from New England to the Continental Shelf; and Anguilla, an American eel that journeyed to the Sargasso Sea to spawn. “There is poetry here,” wrote one reviewer.

On July 2, 1951, Carson published her second book, The Sea Around Us. Two months later, The Sea Around Us was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for 39 weeks: a record. When the dust settled, The Sea Around Us had sold more than 1.3 million copies, been translated into 32 languages, won the National Book Award, and been made into a movie. Editors of the country’s leading newspapers voted Rachel Carson “Woman of the Year.”

In October 1955, Carson published her third book, The Edge of the Sea, a tour guide for the casual adventurer. The New Yorker serialized it, critics praised it and the public loved it: more than 70,000 copies were sold as it rocketed to #4 on the New York Times bestseller list.

Today, most people under the age of 40 have probably never heard of Rachel Carson. But in the early 1960s, almost every American knew her name.

On Sept. 27, 1962, Rachel Carson changed her tone. Her next book, Silent Spring, which she called her “poison book,” was an angry, no-holds-barred polemic against pesticides: especially DDT.

The first chapter of Silent Spring, titled “A Fable for Tomorrow,” was almost biblical, appealing to our sense that we had sinned against our Creator. “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change… the cattle and sheep sickened and died… streams were lifeless… everywhere there was the shadow of death.” Birds, especially, had fallen victim to this strange evil. In a town that had once “throbbed with scores of bird voices there was now no sound, only silence.” A silent spring. Birds weren’t alone in their suffering. According to Carson, children suffered sudden death, aplastic anemia, birth defects, liver disease, chromosomal abnormalities, and leukemia—all caused by DDT. And women suffered infertility and uterine cancer.

Carson made it clear that she wasn’t talking about something that might happen—she was talking about something that had happened. Our war against nature had become a war against ourselves.

In May 1963, Rachel Carson appeared before the Department of Commerce and asked for a “Pesticide Commission” to regulate the untethered use of DDT. Ten years later, Carson’s “Pesticide Commission” became the Environmental Protection Agency, which immediately banned DDT. Following America’s lead, support for international use of DDT quickly dried up.

Although DDT soon became synonymous with poison, the pesticide was an effective weapon in the fight against an infection that has killed—and continues to kill—more people than any other: malaria. By 1960, due largely to DDT, malaria had been eliminated from eleven countries, including the United States. As malaria rates went down, life expectancies went up; as did crop production, land values, and relative wealth. Probably no country benefited from DDT more than Nepal, where spraying began in 1960. At the time, more than two million Nepalese, mostly children, suffered from malaria. By 1968, the number was reduced to 2,500; and life expectancy increased from 28 to 42 years.

After DDT was banned, malaria reemerged across the globe:

• In India, between 1952 and 1962, DDT caused a decrease in annual malaria cases from 100 million to 60,000. By the late 1970s, no longer able to use DDT, the number of cases increased to 6 million.• In Sri Lanka, before the use of DDT, 2.8 million people suffered from malaria. When the spraying stopped, only 17 people suffered from the disease. Then, no longer able to use DDT, Sri Lanka suffered a massive malaria epidemic: 1.5 million people were infected by the parasite.• In South Africa, after DDT became unavailable, the number of malaria cases increased from 8,500 to 42,000 and malaria deaths from 22 to 320.

Since the mid 1970s, when DDT was eliminated from global eradication efforts, tens of millions of people have died from malaria unnecessarily: most have been children less than five years old. While it was reasonable to have banned DDT for agricultural use, it was unreasonable to have eliminated it from public health use.

Environmentalists have argued that when it came to DDT, it was pick your poison. If DDT was banned, more people would die from malaria. But if DDT wasn’t banned, people would suffer and die from a variety of other diseases, not the least of which was cancer. However, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed. Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented—far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place.

Carson’s supporters argued that, had she lived longer, she would never have promoted a ban on DDT for the control of malaria. Indeed, in Silent Spring, Carson wrote, “It is not my contention that chemical pesticides never be used.” But it was her contention that DDT caused leukemia, liver disease, birth defects, premature births, and a whole range of chronic illnesses. An influential author can’t, on the one hand, claim that DDT causes leukemia (which, in 1962, was a death sentence) and then, on the other hand, expect that anything less than that a total ban of the chemical would result.

In 2006, the World Health Organization reinstated DDT as part of its effort to eradicate malaria. But not before millions of people had died needlessly from the disease.

Paul A. Offit, MD is a professor of pediatrics and director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the author of the forthcoming book Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong (National Geographic, April 2017

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~ vaxxers gives him cover was cigs sis for Whelan?

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https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Council_on_Science_and_Health

on bd 2013-

Board

2015

As of April 2015:[130]

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cbs

For years some parents and scientists have raised concerns about vaccine safety, including a possible link to autism and ADD. Many independent experts have sided with government officials and other scientists who say there's no possible connection. But how "independent" are they? CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson shares here's what she found.

They're some of the most trusted voices in the defense of vaccine safety: the American Academy of Pediatrics, Every Child By Two, and pediatrician Dr. Paul Offit.

But CBS News has found these three have something more in common - strong financial ties to the industry whose products they promote and defend.

The vaccine industry gives millions to the Academy of Pediatricsfor conferences, grants, medical education classes and even helped build their headquarters. The totals are kept secret, but public documents reveal bits and pieces.

Every Child By Two, a group that promotes early immunization for all children, admits the group takes money from the vaccine industry, too - but wouldn't tell us how much.

A spokesman told CBS News: "There are simply no conflicts to be unearthed." But guess who's listed as the group's treasurers? Officials from Wyeth and a paid advisor to big pharmaceutical clients.

:{Then there's Paul Offit, perhaps the most widely-quoted defender of vaccine safety.

He's gone so far as to say babies can tolerate "10,000 vaccines at once."

This is how Offit described himself in a previous interview: "I'm thechief of infectious disease at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of pediatrics at Penn's medical school," he said.

Offit was not willing to be interviewed on this subject but like others in this}: CBS News investigation, he has strong industry ties. In fact, he's a vaccine industry insider.

Offit holds in a $1.5 million dollar research chair at Children's Hospital, funded by Merck. He holds the patent on an anti-diarrhea vaccine he developed with Merck, Rotateq, which has prevented thousands of hospitalizations.

And future royalties for the vaccine were just sold for $182 million cash. Dr. Offit's share of vaccine profits? Unknown.

  • * *

Read more about this story at Couric & Co. Blog

  • * *

There's nothing illegal about the financial relationships, but to critics, they pose a serious risk for conflicts of interest. As one member of Congress put it, money from the pharmaceutical industry can shape the practices of those who hold themselves out to be "independent."

The American Academy of Pediatrics, Every Child By Two and Dr. Offit would not agree to interviews, but all told us they're up front about the money they receive, and it doesn't sway their opinions.

Today's immunization schedule now calls for kids to get 55 doses of vaccines by age 6.

Ideally, it makes for a healthier society. But critics worry that industry ties could impact the advice given to the public about all those vaccines.

By Dr. Mercola

There are many dozens of industry front groups masquerading as independent information organizations. I've previously published information about several of them, including the International Food Additives Council (IFAC), the Coalition Against Costly Food Labeling Proposition, the Science Media Centre, and Alliance to Feed the Future.

Michele Simon, JD, MPH, policy consultant with Center for Food Safety has also published a report titled: "Best Public Relations Money Can Buy: A Guide to Food Industry Front Groups,"1whichreveals how the food and agricultural industry hide behind friendly-sounding organizations aimed at fooling the public, policymakers, and the media.

Institute for Science in Medicine2 is yet another example worth mentioning. Once you start to look at them more closely, you’ll find that most of these repetitive front groups “in the name of science” lead back to the same people... and the industry science they espouse is very much like a new religion—one that does not tolerate others beliefs.

Here, the focus will rest on the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). A previous Mother Jones3 article spilled the beans on who's actually funding this pro-industry science group, which defends everything from fracking to pesticides, the toxic plastic ingredient bisphenol-A (BPA), and genetically engineered foods—all in the name of quenching unwarranted fear mongering by those who don't understand the science.

The ACSH claims to be an independent research and advocacy organization consisting of "concerned scientists" who are devoted to debunking "junk science." But once you understand who this front group really serves, it becomes easy to see why the scientific basis for the ACSH's recommendations may be questionable at best. As reported by the featured article:

"[I]nternal financial documents (read them here)... show that ACSH depends heavily on funding from corporations that have a financial stake in the scientific debates it aims to shape...

According to the ACSH documents, from July 1, 2012, to December 20, 2012, 58 percent of donations to the council came from corporations and large private foundations. ACSH's donors and the potential backers the group has been targeting comprise a who's-who of energy, agriculture, cosmetics, food, soda, chemical, pharmaceutical, and tobacco corporations."

Funding Is FAR from Irrelevant to Scientific Investigation!

Despite everything we know about how the source of funding alters the outcome of any scientific investigation, the ACSH claims that "the sources of our support are irrelevant to our scientific investigations," and that this is why the group does not publicize its donors. However, the group didn't stop listing its donors until the public denounced it as a front group for manufacturers in the 1990s...

Its executive director, Dr. Gilbert Ross—who by the way served 23 months in jail after being convicted for defrauding the NY state's Medicaid program of about $8 million—told Mother Jones: "Only science-based facts hold sway in our publications, even if the outcome is not pleasing to our contributors."

Aside from the issue of Dr. Ross's questionable character, it is highly doubtful that this would be true, as numerous studies have documented the overwhelming influencefunding entities have over research outcomes. For example:

  • In 2010, three researchers from Harvard and Toronto identified all the published trials for five major classes of drugs, and then measured two key features: Were they positive, and were they funded by industry? Out of a total of 500 trials, 85 percent of the industry-funded studies were positive, compared to 50 percent of the government-funded trials
  • In 2007, researchers identified all published trials of cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins. A total of 192 trials were found in which either two statins were compared to each other, or a statin was compared against a different kind of treatment. Industry-funded studies were 20 times more likely to favor the test drug, compared to those with independent funding

Who's Paying for the ACSH's Research and 'Fact-Based Opinions'?

Scientific fraud and/or the misuse of science to further a preconceived commercial agenda is so rampant today that it can be quite tricky to determine what's what. One key factor,it turns out, is to determinewho paid for the research. Knowing that, let's take a look at who's shaping the "fact-based" opinions of the ACSH.

First, the ACSH Board of Trusteesoffers interesting clues. It's filled with people who have direct connections to biotech, pesticide, tobacco, vaccines, and junk food industry-related entities.

Many of them either have personally worked with genetically modified organisms, or support Monsanto/DuPont, etc., openly. Several of them also have key positions that would favor the GMO and vaccine industries. One of the most recognizable individuals on this list is Dr. Paul Offit.

The ACSH also lists Stephen Barrett4 and Timothy N. Gorski of Quackbusters5 as members of its Scientific Board of Advisors for its 2009 report "Adult Immunization: The Need for Enhanced Utilization".6

This places Paul Offit in connection with Quackbusters, a group of self-proclaimed skeptics of any and all non-conventional or alternative healing modalities (regardless of the available evidence in the scientific literature). And that's in addition to his being on the board of trustees of this poorly disguised industry-front group—hardly a smart move for anyone interested in maintaining credibility at this point. Another individual on the ACSH board of trustees is pro-GMO advocate Henry Miller, who also founded the FDA Office of Biotechnology.7 His deceptive PR tactics during the California GMO labeling campaign have been discussed in previous articles.

Miller also supported the now defunct Advancement of Sound Science Coalition,8 which was formed to support the tobacco industry by discrediting claims that smoke is harmful. The group also advanced other industry-friendly positions on a wide range of topics, including global warming, phthalates, and pesticides. The US Department of Agriculture is also linked to ACSH through David Klurfeld,9 another of its scientific advisors on adult vaccinations, who also serves as the National Program Leader for Human Nutrition in the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of USDA.10 Then there are the donors, which include but are not limited to the following, reported by Mother Jones. (Another much longer list also shows up on TobaccoDocuments.org,11 where ACSH filed an annual report in 1984.)

| Chevron | Coca-Cola and Pepsi | Bristol Myers Squibb | Dr. Pepper/Snapple | Bayer Cropscience |

| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |

| Procter and Gamble | Syngenta | 3M | McDonald's | Altria (a tobacco conglomerate) |

| Phillip Morris | Monsanto | British American Tobacco | DowAgro | Exxon Mobil |

When Money Talks, Toxins Become 'Proven Safe'...

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http://paul-offit.com/about/

Paul A. Offit, MD is the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as well as the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and a Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a recipient of many awards including the J. Edmund Bradley Prize for Excellence in Pediatrics from the University of Maryland Medical School, the Young Investigator Award in Vaccine Development from the Infectious Disease Society of America, and a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Offit has published more than 150 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety. He is also the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq, recommended for universal use in infants by the CDC; for this achievement Dr. Offit received the Luigi Mastroianni and William Osler Awards from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, the Charles Mérieux Award from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases; and was honored by Bill and Melinda Gates during the launch of their Foundation’s Living Proof Project for global health.

In 2009, Dr. Offit received the President’s Certificate for Outstanding Service from the American Academy of Pediatrics. In 2011, Dr. Offit received the Humanitarian of the Year Award from the Biologics Industry Organization (BIO), the David E. Rogers Award from the American Association of Medical Colleges, the Odyssey Award from the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, and was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 2012, Dr. Offit received the Distinguished Medical Achievement Award from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Drexel Medicine Prize in Translational Medicine from the Drexel University College of Medicine.

In 2013, Dr. Offit received the Maxwell Finland award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, the Distinguished Alumnus award from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and the Innovators in Health Award from the Group Health Foundation.

In 2015, Dr. Offit won the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching from the University of Pennsylvania and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr Offit was a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is a founding advisory board member of the Autism Science Foundation and the Foundation for Vaccine Research.

He is also the author of six medical narratives: The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to Today’s Growing Vaccine Crisis (Yale University Press, 2005), Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases (HarperCollins, 2007), for which he won an award from the American Medical Writers Association, Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure (Columbia University Press, 2008), Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All (Basic Books, 2011), which was selected by Kirkus Reviews and Booklist as one of the best non-fiction books of the year, Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine (HarperCollins, 2013), which won the Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking from the Center for Skeptical Inquiry and was selected by National Public Radio as one of the best books of 2013, and Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine (Basic Books, 2015), selected by the New York Times Book Review as an “Editor’s Choice” book in April 2015.