The Safety Nazis
COHEN, BONNER R.
The Safety Nazis Precautionaries shrug off the burden of proof BY BONNER R. COHEN The European Union bans certain American beef, without proof of harm. The European Parliament slaps tough...
...Proponents of the precautionary principle are fond of referring to it as a "speed bump" to new technology...
...The Safety Nazis Precautionaries shrug off the burden of proof BY BONNER R. COHEN The European Union bans certain American beef, without proof of harm...
...HCWH could produce no case of this actually having occurred, but for precautionaries, the absence of fact is no bar to fear...
...Denying these hungry people the fruits of modern agricultural biotechnology, in the name of a doctrine based which just turns out to work better in whites than blacks...
...Building a power plant may introduce risk, however small and speculative...
...Fair enough...
...The failure of traffic lights, refrigerators, security systems and air conditioners could cost lives...
...Once the precautionary principle takes hold, regulators have no obvious place to draw the line between real and imaginary health risks...
...In the wrong place, speed bumps kill...
...The European Parliament slaps tough new regs on genetically modified food, despite the potential for cheaper, more nutritious crops...
...environmental movement seeks to ban lifesaving plastic blood bags, transfusion equipment and other medical devices.What gives...
...A strange new doctrine fundamentally at odds with science is making inroads in the most scientifically advanced countries in the world...
...Blackouts could lead to mass looting, stalled subways, vandalism, and "social unrest...
...The precautionary principle, she tells me, "is a brilliant idea which will provide protection from such exposures...
...In Europe, the precautionary principle first gained ground in the late '80s...
...Wingspread's grim visionaries took an array of maladies, from cancer to climate change, as proof that scientific proof is dispensable.As one of Wingspread's organizers, SEHN coordinator Carolyn Raffensperger, wrote with Joel Tickner, the "burden of scientific proof has posed a monumental barrier in the campaign to protect health and the environment...
...Koop elaborated in the Wall Street Journal, "Without DEHP, a wide range of life-saving medical devices-such as blood bags, catheters (cardiac and urinary), and a variety of surgical instruments and gadgets-would lack either the flexibility, transparency or shelf life to be of much use...
...Proponents of the precautionary principle are fond of referring to it as a "speed bump" to new technology...
...Today, EC regulators use the precautionary principle to crack down on foods made from gene-spliced plants...
...The plastics industry, in its defense, pointed to the widespread use of vinyl in medical devices, such as IV tubing...
...Pretty soon, they won't have that defense any more," proclaimed Gary Cohen, national coordinator for Health Care Without Harm, unleashing a national campaign against vinyl medical devices...
...A new Pataki administration report says even brief electricity interruptions in New York "will expose people to extreme temperatures, unyielding traffic congestion and even trap many people in elevators...
...Moreover, by raising "do no harm" to an absolute, precautionaries exclude from consideration the publichealth risks of failing to produce or innovate...
...Protectionism masquerading as consumer protection...
...In Massachusetts, for example, a coalition of environmental and breast cancer groups has launched the Massachusetts Precautionary Principle Project...
...If precautionaries can target lifesaving equipment used in hospitals for 40 years, no product is safe...
...A U.S...
...But by separating the alleged "threats of harm" from "cause-and-effect relationships," the precautionary principle replaces scientific standards with innuendo...
...Similar precautionary projects are underway in Minnesota and New Jersey...
...A November 1998 Greenpeace report, "Warning: Children at Risk, Toxic Chemicals Found in Vinyl Children's Products," provoked enough media frenzy to prompt manufacturers, including Toys "R" Us, to pledge to phase out some products...
...To the untrained ear, it sounds reassuring...
...Fair enough...
...It's a perversion of "Better safe than sorry;, notes Hugh Wise, a scientist in Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Water...
...Faced with an outbreak of mad cow disease, the EC banned imports of healthy U.S...
...The influential Science and Environment Health Network (SEHN) defined the principle this way: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically...
...Precautionaries would burden innovators with the impossible requirement to prove a negative, the absence of any possibility of harm...
...In the less-developed countries the precautionaries' threat to human health is massive, blocking new plant varieties that could feed malnourished millions...
...In February 1999, HCWH released a "Health Care Alert" in which it claimed that the phthalate (DEHP) in vinyl could leach from IV bags and tubing into blood or medications "being administered into a patient's veins...
...In June 1999, a blue-ribbon panel of 17 scientists and physicians chaired by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop concluded that "DEHP, as used in medical devices, is not harmful to humans even under chronic or higherthan-average exposure...
...Sharon Koshar, of the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition, worries about toxic triggers for breast cancer that "can't be quantified or qualified...
...In the wrong place, speed bumps kill...
...t the FDA's Office of Biotechnology, now with the Hoover Institution...
...and Canadian beef because hormone-fed cattle "may" cause endocrine disruption...
...The ban remains even though the World Trade Organization found the EC's arguments scientifically lacking...
...Pharmacogenomics allows doctors to separate people into different treatment not on science but on speculation, is utterly irresponsible," says Henry Miller, founding director of the FDA's Office of Biotechnology, now with the Hoover Institution...
...First, it fingered dioxin emissions when medical waste is incinerated...
...In tech-happy America, the precautionary principle has taken longer to gain a foothold...
...Cohen, however, cites an EU panel identifying DEHP as a hazardous substance, based not on the use of medical devices, but on experiments with rats fed enormous doses of DEHP...
...An essentially random regulatory standard creates an intolera16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 ble climate of uncertainty for producers, a regulatory world where public anxiety, fueled by faux science, could trigger intervention at any time...
...The precautionary principle institutionalizes the idea that the risks of doing nothing are always less than the risks of doing something, that change, growth and invention are inherently dangerous, while apathy and inertia are not...
...Relieving themselves of the burden of truth is the goal of the muscular new anti-science environmentalism energized by Wingspread...
...For over 20 years, Greenpeace has spearheaded efforts to ban polyvinyl chloride (PVC, or vinyl...
...Meanwhile, failing to build plants creates dangerous power failures...
...Advocates call it "the precautionary principle...
...A pending bill in the Massachusetts state legislature (sponsored by a Wingspread participant) codifies the precautionary principle, requiring state officials to "take action to prevent potential harm to health or the environment, even when the nature and magnitude of the harmful effects are not fully understood...
...The application ofjunk science to phantom risks to make them seem plausible...
...Plastics are one major target...
...Pharmacogenomics is the name of a new medical field that exploits such differences in the way individual networks of genes react to particular drugs...
...Then it sought to incite mothers' fears against phthalates (the chemicals used to make vinyl soft) in baby bottles and rubber duckies...
...For years, the industry has defended PVC by saying it's safe enough to use in medical products...
...The 1989 Nordic Council's International Conference on the Pollution of the Seas, for example, called for eliminating alleged pollutants "even where there is inadequate or inconclusive scientific evidence to prove a causal link between emissions and effects...
...Rebuffed so far at the federal level, precautionaries are taking aim at state legislatures, hoping to fly under the radar of more sophisticated national political and scientific scrutiny...
...Up to 150 heat-related deaths occurred in 1999...
...Absent scientific rules of evidence, how does government decide what kind of association between a product and a harm justifies precautionary measures...
...The turning point may well have been the 1998 Wingspread conference, a gathering of 31 activists from five countries...
Vol. 34 • July 2001 • No. 6
