Scientists are criticizing a proposed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule that would ban the use of studies that use data that has not been made public or been independently reproduced to set EPA-issued regulations.
The proposal was announced April 24, 2018 by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.
One study that could be deemed unreliable under the proposal is Harvard’s Six Cities Study of 1993, which showed a strong link between long-term exposure to air pollution and higher risk of early death, and which has influenced government pollution standards. That study relied in part on confidential patient health data.
Douglas Dockery, John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Research Professor of Environmental Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and lead author of the Six Cities Study, called the EPA proposal “a direct assault on epidemiology” in an April 28, 2018 New Yorker article.
Dockery and co-author C. Arden Pope of Brigham Young University told the Washington Post that scores of studies in many countries have affirmed the study’s findings. “You always wonder when you have a new finding like that whether it’s true or not, and whether it will stand up to scrutiny,” said Dockery in an April 25 article. “And it has over these—where are we now?—25 years. It’s been tested and retested.”
Dockery was also quoted in Popular Science, along with Gina McCarthy, director of Harvard Chan School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment and former EPA director.
Read the New Yorker article: Scott Pruitt’s crusade against “secret science” could be disastrous for public health
Read the Washington Post article: Scientists denounce Pruitt’s effort to block ‘secret science’ at EPA
Read the Popular Science article: The EPA is jeopardizing scientific research and privacy in the name of ‘transparency’