Devra Davis, PhD, laments that the the National Toxicology Program has given up trying to placate progressives who think that cell phones cause cancer, when Davis insists it does. But she has no science basis for her supernatural belief, she only has suspect epidemiology and other EXPLORATORY claims using animal models that cater to the 'My child is allergic to Red Dye 40' crowd.
There is a reason no drug gets approved based on animal models. Rats are not little people.
Epidemiologists who embrace animal models like Sprague-Dawley rats that are almost guaranteed to get cancer if you just wait, as was done in a claim that GMOs cause...wait, oh you already guessed...cancer, love using mice to get mandates. Epidemiologists, like the ones who claim In Vitro Fertilization will mean you have fatter children.
Given decades of onslaught on common sense by epidemiologists like Davis it's little wonder that the public trusts science journalism down near politicians and barely half of the public trusts science at all.
Davis has been selling this anti-science scaremongering for decades but the community for this crackpot thinking is pretty small. Her group, Environmental Health Trust, splits lawyer expenses with chief anti-science ioon Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s, astroturf group Children's Health Defense when they are trying to get government to stop cell phone towers from going up.
She insists she has a reason she keeps being denied. Corporations in their corporation-y buildings.
"Team America" had the Film Actors Guild saying that stuff as a joke, but she seems to mean it.
It's epidemiology. If you believe cell phone and pickles cause cancer, you must Accept This Science.
Actually, she does invoke the nearly-as-unhinged International Agency for Research on Cancer, whose epidemiologists have brazenly signed expert witness contracts with trial lawyers wanting to sue companies before IARC 'results' - which are only meta-analyses of epidemiology papers, no science - are even published.
They do say pickles are "linked to" cancer with the same confidence they have that cell phones cause cancer; none. Meaning even they couldn't torture statistics enough to find a valid correlation.
She laments that NIH is no longer funding her political nonsense, and of course the subtext is government conspiracy, but the reality is that taxpayers should not be throwing good money after bad. There is nothing to find. It's settled.
Why would The Hill give her a platform? She is not even as well-known as fellow conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. The Hill lost its way some time ago but we can't really blame them for lurching to the left. Their former owner tried to create a centrist outlet and was out of business in 10 months. It is economically smarter to give a platform to crackpots using quasi-journalistic "teach the controversy" rationalization.
Unlike science journalism, which I was worrying would be out of existence even when Science 2.0 started, 'everything causes cancer' op-eds will never go out of style.
