My problem with anti-regulation [read: GOP]

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The Republican Street Fight Over Transparency in Government

Several in the GOP want to stop a request for scientists to disclose financial conflicts in their research. What good reason could they possibly have?

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No one better understands the dangers in conflicted science than the chief administrator of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, David Michaels. Michaels is an epidemiologist and a professor (on leave) from George Washington University. In 2008, he published a terrifyingly depressing account of the consequences of conflicted science, Doubt is Their Product. That title was drawn from the famous 1969 Brown & Williamson memo declaring “doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ [linking smoking with cancer] that exists in the mind of the general public.” The strategy of the tobacco industry was to use “science” to attack science, so as to generate skepticism about whether smoking cigarettes caused cancer.

Yet while the history of the abuse of tobacco research is well known, too many seem to think that the corruption it manifested was, or is, limited to tobacco. Michaels’ book showed it was not: that the same strategies perfected by the tobacco industry both predate and postdate the tobacco controversy. Indeed, the very same firms hire themselves out to a string of industries threatened with regulation because of the safety threats alleged to be caused by their products. From lead (in 1965, the American Petroleum Institute stated that “all ‘accepted medical evidence . . .proves conclusively’ that lead in the environment presents no threat to public health”) to chromium-6 (in 1976, OSHA determined a “comprehensive occupational health standard is urgently needed”; 30 years later, the regulation was completed, with the delay caused in part by studies “funded in part by” the industry regulated), to countless other other examples, regulators have repeatedly faced mountains of “data” produced by “scientists” hired by industries threatened with regulation. That barrage slowed the government’s response to problems we all now concede were actually problems, while earning the threatened industries years of additional blood profit.

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The public interest is clear. We all rely on the advice of doctors, and leading researchers influence the practice of medicine. Taxpayers spend billions of dollars each year on prescription drugs and devices through Medicare and Medicaid. The National Institutes of Health distributes $24 billion annually in federal research grants. So the public has a right to know about financial relationships between doctors and drug companies.

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