On November 30th, the same day the Food and Drug Administration was scheduled to issue a statement regarding the long-used plastics additive Bisphenol A (BPA), the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editors urged the agency with the headline “Get on with it!” They charged that “the agency blew its own self-imposed deadline for issuing a ruling on the safety of the ubiquitous chemical,” and went on to complain that “The FDA is taking more time to have its scientists analyze studies of the chemical’s effects.”
The Milwaukee newspaper, along with the Los Angeles Times health blog, called on Congress to ban the product. Then, on December 14, the examiner.com reported that Democrat Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand had proposed a bill outlawing the use of BPA in food container linings for infant and toddler food. Washington, with its Senate vote on Friday, is the latest among several states that are not waiting for federal bans.
But as reported here, in the fall, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) had announced the award of $30 million in research grants, $14 million of which represents Obama administration stimulus money, to study BPA further.
What might account for such odd behavior? There are enough peculiarities and strange connections to suggest that the media, the academy, and liberal political forces are working together to pursue an ideological agenda–with the help of stimulus funds.
The competing goals between normally cooperative anti-BPA forces in the environmental advocacy science community and a newspaper could stem from the fact that the newspaper invested much in a series that nonetheless earned them only the position of finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Yet, the same scientists that the newspaper relied on as authorities to make claims about BPA’s dangers find themselves recipients of government money to “study” the issue further. The newspaper could hardly be expected to drop the topic it had invested so much in–one that has produced attention-grabbing headlines for much of the mainstream media, and windfalls for producers of “BPA-free” products.
So, on December 29 the Journal-Sentinel again expressed dismay that the FDA would miss another self-imposed deadline, the third, by year’s end, to inform consumers about the safety of BPA. “The repeated delays have angered health advocates who consider the chemical a threat to human health,” Meg Kissinger, co-author of the original “investigative series” on BPA, wrote.
On January 5, the newspaper fired another salvo that claimed a desire to hear the FDA’s opinion, while proclaiming, “BPA is a hazard for both kids and adults. It’s time to act.” Quite obviously, the editors want to hear only one kind of opinion from the FDA, one that matches their own, which is based on questionable scientific research.
Such badgering seems to be having an effect on the agencies in the Obama administration. The Wall Street Journal on January 30 noted that the FDA is sending out mixed messages regarding BPA, telling the public that it does not pose a risk at low levels of human exposure, yet recommending ways to limit exposure.
The NIEHS seems to be sending a self-contradictory message, as well. Although grants had been awarded by the end of September on the presumption that BPA required further study, Linda Birnbaum, director of the NIEHS, on December 11, 2009, told the Journal Sentinel that people should avoid ingesting the chemical, which has been used for more than 50 years in such plastic products as eyeglasses and bottles.
But Birnbaum, along with NIEHS Scientific Program Administrator Jerrold Heindel, signed the Chapel Hill Bisphenol A Expert Panel Consensus Statement, which emerged from a meeting of anti-BPA scientists and environmental activists at Chapel Hill in 2006. (At the time Birnbaum was with the Environmental Protection Agency.) Of the ten awardees of the Recovery Act NIH Grand Opportunities grants focusing on BPA research six scientists were signatories to this Consensus Statement.
And as the final decisions about awardees were being made, seven of those who would receive the grants put their signatures on a September 21 letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Birnbaum expressing their concern about the “review process” and objecting to the allocation of $10 million to the FDA and National Toxicology Program for studies on BPA. Thirteen of the thirty-three signatories had been part of the Chapel Hill Consensus.
Christine Flowers, Director of Communications at NIEHS, stresses that, even though only six months had elapsed from the request for applications to the announcements of the awards, the agency’s usual rigor–thanks to extra hours put in by employees–was used in determining these stimulus funds grants.
Certainly, the fact that NIEHS officials and some awardees were at the same “consensus” meeting in 2006 raises questions about the review process.
One recipient of these stimulus funds and signatory of the September 21 letter, Frederick vom Saal, has been a long-time crusader against BPA. Along with signatories Patricia Hunt, Csaba Leranth, and Wade V. Welshons, he is cited frequently as an expert on the dangers of BPA in articles published by the Environmental Working Group, which receives support from George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
Pete Myers, a main signatory of the letter and member of the organizing committee of the Chapel Hill conference, however, serves on the Board of the Environmental Working Group. He also runs a lab that is a “sister organization” to the Advancing Green Chemistry organization, whose executive director came from the environmental and nuclear non-proliferation advocacy group, W. Alton Jones Foundation (which Myers himself previously had directed). Birnbaum was a speaker at a 2008 conference sponsored by Advancing Green Chemistry.
According to Human Events‘ Rowan Scarborough, The Environmental Working Group is a client of Fenton Communications, which “pitches for trial lawyers, collectively the largest contributors to the Democrat Party, as well as for the hard line environmental group Greenpeace; Venezuela’s socialist leader Hugo Chavez; anti-war demonstrator Cindy Sheehan; and gay and abortion advocates.” They also pitch for George Soros’s Open Society Institute and were behind the infamous MoveOn.org “General Betray Us” smear campaign and Obama’s Campaign to Rebuild and Renew America Now, and represent a manufacturer of “BPA-free” products.
Vom Saal was also the primary expert quoted in the Consumers Union article, which reinvigorated the scare about BPA last fall. Consumers Union has received support from Soros for its “Democratic Pluralism in Media Project” and supports other leftist causes like the Democrat-sponsored health care reform bill. It’s also significant that vom Saal’s lab conducted the experiments for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel for its series on BPA that won several environmental reporting prizes and finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting.
While vom Saal and signatories to the letter charged that industry-supported studies have a flawed “review process,” Trevor Butterworth at George Mason University’s STATS Center, claims that vom Saal himself is in disrepute among the international scientific community and calls the review process for the Journal-Sentinel series “incestuous.” The “outside expert” used to evaluate vom Saal’s lab work was Patricia Hunt whose work has been championed by vom Saal. She has also coauthored articles with vom Saal and signed the Chapel Hill Consensus statement and the letter to the FDA with vom Saal.
In a 2008 JAMA article, vom Saal and Myers charge that “The FDA and the European Food Safety Authority have chosen to ignore warnings from expert panels. . . .” Yet the only “expert panel” they cite in the footnoted reference is their own Chapel Hill “consensus” meeting.
In addition to the “incestuous” relationship among some scientists, there seems to be an “incestuous” relationship between newspapers and environmental activists claiming to be health experts. Consider that the “health advocates” quoted in the December 29 Journal-Sentinel article by almost-Pulitzer Prize winner Meg Kissinger are Janet Nudelman of the Breast Cancer Fund and Alex Formuzis.
The Breast Cancer Fund’s agenda, despite its name, is environmental issues. On December 14 the deceptively named News-Medical Net cited the organization for its claim that “immediate action” is needed “to protect the public while the [FDA] agency finalizes safety review [of BPA].” Alex Formuzis is with the Soros-supported Environmental Working Group.
Inquiring minds should be curious about these connections.
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