EPA’s Review of PM2.5 as Scientific Fraud – Would You Stand Out for It?

From JunkScience.com

By Steve Milloy

Below is my testimony at today’s public meeting of the EPA’s CASAC PM sub panel regarding EPA updated review of science PM2.5. No wonder the EPA air pollution mafia turned down my challenge to point out where I went wrong… because I wasn’t. Please support JunkScience.com!

Good afternoon. I’m Steve Milloy. I publish JunkScience.com.

The EPA review of PM2.5 science is a case study of science fraud.

First, PM epidemiology is not science – it’s just statistics and dishonest statistics.

Statistical associations are not science in and of themselves.

The EPA admitted in federal court to me that PM epidemiology alone is not sufficient to determine causality.

That is no surprise.

That’s basic epidemiology – not PM epidemiology worth starting with.

In fact, the data used in PM epidemiology is mostly junk.

Exposure data are poorly evaluated and are often dwarfed by other PM exposures, particularly smoking, occupational exposures and indoor air.

PM health endpoints such as mortality are common and multifactorial, and thus have not been properly studied through epidemiology.

Unsurprisingly, the EPA allows grantees to hide their data from public scrutiny.

Even so, all PM epidemiologists report essentially no correlation.

Honest epidemiologists know that epidemiology is only useful for studying high rates of rare diseases – not low rates of common health criteria like mortality.

And let’s not forget that EPA staff essentially continue to ignore all PM epidemiology that explicitly reports that there is no association between PM and mortality  as the 2017 study by Young, Smith, and Lopiano looked at. Each of these deaths, two million of them, occurred in California between 2000-2012 and reported no association between PM and deaths.

Let us consider how PM toxicology can shed light on whether there is any biological plausibility to the view that PM kills.

None of the laboratory animal experiments resulted in death in animals – despite intense PM exposure.

No human clinical trials have produced health effects – let alone death – despite intense PM exposure to the elderly and the sick.

None of this is surprising as there are no real examples where PM has killed anyone.

However, EPA staff dishonestly assessed this document as supporting the false claim that PM caused the deaths.

Please EPA, show us the body of someone who was killed by PM. Just one please. Are you no longer curious about yourself? There are 8 million deaths worldwide due to PM2.5. And you can’t find a single body?

Studies show that smokers who quit at age 40 inhale thousands of times more PM than non-smokers – yet both groups have the same life expectancy.

PM levels in Chinese and Indian cities may be 100 times or more than US outdoor air – but there are no reports of actual deaths from inhaling Chinese air or India.

The historic incidents of deadly air pollution in the 20th century were caused by acidic gases concentrated in the air by weather phenomena.

They are not caused by PM2.5.

Coal miners and diesel workers have relatively high levels of PM exposure – but they have a longer life expectancy than workers who are not occupationally exposed to PM.

And guess what, when PM levels go down, deaths don’t.

However, EPA employees ignore this real-world data, disregarding secret science and fraud, and claim that PM2.5 is more dangerous than ever.

It’s a shameless scam. And it is getting worse.

EPA staff now assert that the cleaner the air, the more dangerous it is.

EPA staff stated that when it comes to cardiovascular mortality, the dose-response curve goes up at low doses.

Of course that means tightening the PM2.5 NAAQS will actually kill people.

There is no known toxic substance to science that works on the principle that less exposure is much worse. Not a single one.

All of the foregoing is indisputable. At least I haven’t seen anyone dispute it.

So, how did all this fraud play out in the first place?

Since 1996 – CASAC told EPA for the first time that there is no evidence PM2.5 kills – EPA staff have spent at least $600 million on university researchers willing to cheat science to invent and perpetuating the lie that PM kills.

Following the 1996 CASAC incident, EPA employees found that future CASAC review boards were staffed and controlled by the same researchers funded to commit PM science fraud .

And that is what happened until CASAC was reformed in the last administration.

We now go back to the good old days when EPA CASAC agents did the bidding of EPA staff and stamped out their deceptive interpretations of PM2.5 facts and documents.

If I’m wrong about anything I just said. I would love to hear about it.

But I know you wouldn’t dare.

You will only hide behind concluding statements in unreadable thousands of page summaries, byzantine processes, paid academics, and a media as stupid as the EPA is dishonest.

Thanks for your attention.