When last we discussed the tobacco industry’s plan to hamstring the government’s ability to regulate pollution, the Trump administration was defending its attempt to adopt it by invoking an obscure statute from 1874 that doesn’t actually even apply to the EPA. People who actually care about public health have consistently pointed out that the Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science rule is actually a tobacco industry plan to censor science by exploiting the ideal of “transparency” to prevent epidemiological studies, which use private patient information, from being used to make policy.
Now we have confirmation that this is, in fact, exactly how the Trump administration intends to use the policy. Though Steve Milloy was involved with the tobacco industry’s creation of this scheme, and then carried it through to his climate denial work, it’s actually not our climate or lungs that will be the first example of how this is a tool to pollute with impunity.
Instead, the first test subjects will be children, and specifically, their brains.
Lisa Friedman of the New York Times reported Wednesday that Trump’s EPA has “rejected scientific evidence linking the pesticide chlorpyrifos to serious health problems, directly contradicting federal scientists’ conclusions five years ago that it can stunt brain development in children.”
There is scientific evidence that prenatal exposure to this pesticide is linked to developmental disorders, evidence the Obama administration cited when it began the process to ban chlorpyrifos in 2015. But in 2017 Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt decided “nah”, and now, years later in response to legal challenges, the EPA is claiming transparency is why.
Because studies about the health impacts of pollution are subject to patient privacy protections, they don’t publish all the underlying data that could easily be used to identify specific people.
So all the studies that showed a link between poison and bad health outcomes were simply rejected by the Trump administration, supposedly because they didn’t have access to the raw data.
And Trump’s legal team even acknowledges that yes, this pesticide (a fancy word for poison) does have neurodevelopmental effects — but they dispute just how much is actually dangerous.
If they wanted, they could find out the answer in the studies they claim to reject on the grounds that they couldn’t analyze the raw data, however. Friedman reports, the “attorneys supporting a ban on chlorpyrifos said the Columbia University researchers were willing to show their data to agency officials in a secure location, but have not released the information publicly because of privacy concerns.”
Trump’s EPA could examine the data, if that’s what this was really about. After all, states like California and New York have already put controls on this pesticide. And it’s not even like there’s a big financial motive to keep it on shelves, as the biggest manufacturer of it has said that while they “stand by the safety of the product,” they’re going to stop making chlorpyrifos by the end of the year.
If they’ll poison children’s brains for no reason other than to keep a single obviously dangerous product on the shelves, imagine what they’ll deny to protect entire industries threatened by regulation.
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